Finding Global Order in Imperial Small Wars
Small wars were key to the composition of global legal order for at least half a millennium. Benton describes the role of small wars in European empires in shaping two global phenomena: a regime of plunder in which virtually all polities engaged in raiding, truce making, and captive taking; and a regime of armed peace in which Europeans claimed the right to regulate conduct in war and to intervene across political lines anywhere to protect subjects and imperial interests. Both regimes featured routines for limiting war, a goal that inspired extensive commentary by European jurists. Legalities of small wars also staged opportunities for extreme violence, from massacres to sharp campaigns of dispossession. Benton presents several cases to illustrate this hidden history of limited war and reflects on the continuities of its logic to the present.
Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. She writes on the history of European empires, global legal history, and the history of international law. Benton’s books include Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law (coauthored with Lisa Ford; Harvard UP, 2016); A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge UP, 2010); and Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge UP, 2002), which received the J. Willard Hurst Prize and the World History Association Bentley Book Prize. In 2019, Benton received the Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to global history.