Lauen Benton, Yale University, has published They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press):
Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.
In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces insured the easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order.
Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.
Two encomia:
“With characteristic lucidity, subtlety, and grace, Lauren Benton highlights how the boundary between private violence and public war was perpetually blurred and renegotiated across the imperial world. They Called It Peace demonstrates that small wars have had outsized consequences for world order both in the past and enduringly into the present.”—David Armitage, author of Civil Wars: A History in Ideas
“Our greatest historian of empire and law is at the height of her powers in this breathtaking reinterpretation of ‘small wars’ that did—and do—massive damage. Lauren Benton reads canonical writers against the backdrop of patterned and routine force across centuries and hears those often omitted from self-congratulatory stories of how the violent weaned themselves from their violence. The results decisively rebuke those exaggerating breakthroughs for humanity or peace in a world of contestation and domination—past and present.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
--Dan Ernst
