A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires
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 the 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 ensured an 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 the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order. Lauren Benton is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History at Yale University and recipient of the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history. Her books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 and (with Lisa Ford) Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850. "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
"Elegantly and grippingly written, They Called It Peace works brilliantly with its complex material, bringing out the great range of forms of imperial violence that have proliferated in the space between all-out war and all-out peace and using them to power deeply original historical arguments. Lauren Benton connects contemporary political theory and its categories with raids and treaty making in a way that is unusual, always illuminating and never forced. The topicality of this rigorous and exciting book is obvious: as Benton shows, we live in a world shaped by the legacy of 'small wars' and by their persistence in the present."-Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
"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
"An important global reinterpretation of the relationship between violence, empire, and law."-Heidi J. S. Tworek, author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 "A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year" "Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, McGill University" "a radical and important book."---Christopher Kissane, Irish Times "A nimble and provocative history."---Michael Ledger-Lomas, Jacobin "Benton...uses harrowing case studies from around the world, and contextualizes events wit
