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The last chapter of the book looks at the religious and political developments in India after the arrival of the British colonialists. The chapter focuses primarily on the Hindu response to missionary and economic pressures and the changes introduced into Hindu theology as a result. Men such as Rammohun Roy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose receive the greatest attention in the discussion over religion, politics, and ethics. The chapter ends with the founding of India.

This chapter explains why Pennsylvania Friends' settled in northern Virginia after 1730: to obtain cheap land that they believed necessary to maintain their religious households and ensure the spiritual safety of their children. Friends in Virginia established their hierarchical system of religious meetings and began enforcing the behavioral rules (the “discipline”) and cultural practices that grew out of their spiritual beliefs. Virginia authorities welcomed these frontier settlers as a defense against Native Americans; but as dissenters from the established Anglican Church and the honor-based culture of Virginia, Friends remained a suspect group. These suspicions grew during the French and Indian War when Quakers refused to serve in the militia and Virginia authorities arrested and fined individual Friends for non-service. Quakers' war experience sparked their efforts to reform the Society and tighten its discipline-including injunctions against slavery-leading to the disownment (or removal) of many members.

This chapter examines how Friends' pacifism during the American Revolution, coupled with their decision to end slaveholding, led white Virginians to suspect Friends' patriotism. Following the example of Philadelphia Friends, Quakers in Virginia adhered closely to their pacifist beliefs, facing arrest and the distraint of property for refusing to serve in the Virginia militia. White Virginians' suspicions of Quaker disloyalty grew when local Friends offered support to the “Quaker exiles” (the Philadelphia Friends sent to Winchester for treason) and when Friends began emancipating their slaves contrary to state law in the midst of a war that imperilled slave property. Virginia Friends faced similar difficulties during the War of 1812, particularly when large numbers of African Americans ran to British lines during the invasion of Washington. Throughout both conflicts, the Society disowned those who failed to adhere to Quaker injunctions, believing that only by strict regulation of their own behavior could Friends act as the moral compass of the community.

Chapter 8 examines the experience of northern Virginia's Friends during the Civil War. Friends faced arrest, conscription, and imprisonment from hostile Confederate forces and confiscation of their property by both Union and Confederate armies, particularly after the region descended into guerrilla war. However, the biggest casualty of the war was Friends' peace testimony, which called on Quakers to be neutral in thought and deed. Only a small number of the region's Friends entered the military, but few Friends remained neutral. Seeing the Union as the source of their religious liberty and committed to ending slavery, nearly all the region's Friends embraced the northern cause, with Quaker women taking a leading role. The war transformed Friends' adherence to and interpretation of the peace testimony and their disciplinary standards, giving rise to a more permissive and individualist Quakerism.

This Chapter reflects on the alleged special association between religion in general and violence – an association rebutted by both authors under review, David Martin (in Religion and Power: No logos without mythos) and Karen Armstrong (in Fields of Blood: Religion and the history of violence). It was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 December 2014, under the heading “Poplars in the marsh”. These two very different authors also agree that violent resistance is an inevitable response to policies that oppress large populations. The Chapter goes on to consider briefly the exorbitant reworking of Wahhabism that underpins the so-called Islamic State (Isis), and finally the obstacles that beset all attempts to found non-violent movements.

Chapter ten examines Mahatma Gandhi and focuses on his lessons for modern and contemporary democracy. Together with many political thinkers, Gandhi saw the essence of democracy in popular self-rule or self-government. Under the influence of classic Indian texts as well as basic religious teachings, Gandhi associated this essence not with selfishness but with the cultivation of an ethical and just community. From this angle, self-rule does not mean autocratic rule over others, but rather the ability to tame selfish impulses in the direction of shared well-being. On a concrete political level, Gandhi’s aim was to rethink and transform the entire conception of self-government through non-violence and the pursuit of justice and truth. Chapter ten explores parallels between Gandhi’s thought and arguments advanced by recent political thinkers.

This chapter shows critique among non-intellectuals, as practised in an outstanding peace movement in history—the ḳhudāī ḳhidmatgār (servants of God), led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. It discusses the role of mosques, reference to the Qurʾān, and employment of ṣabr (perseverance) in the pursuit of nonviolent struggle against the British colonialism. The Pathans in the northwestern part of contemporary Pakistan, where ḳhudāī ḳhidmatgār was based, have been depicted as anything but intellectual and critical. The chapter concludes with everyday critique by delineating three proverbs. While the first two proverbs ridicule molvī and mullā— “theologians”—the third one introduces a “shifter” proverb to show how the subalternated view the rich. The alternative portrait it presents is of a hawker as critic. The chapter gainfully utilizes Didier Fassin’s differentiation between reality and truth as productive and tension-ridden at the same time.

This chapter by Peter Ling shows that SNCC ceased to be a primarily student-run organization after 1962, shed its philosophical commitment to nonviolence by 1966, and had always experienced tension between its coordination role and its cultural preference for field office independence. By examining attendance lists at major SNCC meetings from 1960 through 1964, it then traces a shifting organizational membership to argue that there were several SNCCs rather than one. In its assessment, SNCC's evolution reflected a process not of individuals changing through experience of movement activism but of different individuals exerting influence at different times. Challenging conventional understanding of the internal stresses resulting from the influx of student volunteers for the Freedom Summer project, it suggests that the newcomers only aggravated existing volatility and inchoateness.

The chapter is an in-depth analysis of the movements that catapulted Gandhi to the centre-stage of India’s freedom struggle against British colonialism. This is where I have shown the importance of grassroots political mobilization in the nationalist movement. That non-violent civil disobedience was an effective political instrument became evident in the movements that Gandhi had launched in India against a well-entrenched colonial power. Gandhi had launched three pan-Indian political movements against the British: the 1920-22 Non-Cooperation Movement was an act ‘omission’ which meant that the Indians were asked to withdraw from the government and other sources of institutionalized power to harm those in political authority; the 1930-32 Civil Disobedience was an act of commission in which Gandhi gave a call to challenge the government by undertaking the various kinds of protest movements both at the national and local levels; the 1942 Quit India Movement or the open rebellion was the last Gandhi-led pan-Indian movement in which Gandhi asked the British to quit India which deviated, on various occasions, from the well-established Gandhian path of non-violence.

This was study of the ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. showing the confluence of thought despite being located in two different hemispheres. By their involvement in non-violent civil disobedience, not only did they refine the non-violent strategy, they also established the importance of non-violence as an effective mobilizing technique even in most adverse circumstances. The Conclusion also reaffirms the argument that both Gandhi and King held identical ideological responses presumably because of their intellectual genealogy supporting non-violent civil resistance. In two significant ways, they were similar in their approach to political mobilization: on the one hand, they were opposed to discrimination, based on artificially-created racial hierarchy on the basis of their comprehension of the Enlightenment tradition which was distorted by the privileged for partisan goals. In their struggle for the exploited, they, on the other hand, drew on what they had derived from their colleagues and those unknown figures who also fought against discrimination and inequality at the grassroots.

This chapter considers the resurgence of debates regarding the legitimacy of torture in the context of British Romantic-era affirmations of the centrality of imagination and the arts to social policy legislation. It examines anarchist philosopher and novelist William Godwin’s engagement in Book 7 of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) with Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764), the book long credited with galvanizing the movement to abolish torture in Enlightenment Europe. It then reads radical poet and son-in-law Percy Shelley’s family tragedy The Cenci (1819), the best literary treatment of torture in the period and one of the darkest plays on record as an endorsement of imaginative sympathy understood in a Shelleyan light: as actively seeking difference or “before unapprehended” connections between things. It delineates how Shelley’s poet legislators affect a culture’s ability to imagine difference differently so that one does not have to envision torture victims as one’s family members in order to provoke taking action against torture.