Between War and Peace – On the Logic and Language of Imperial Violence. An Interview with Lauren Benton

The differentiation between war and peace is central to the historiography of international relations and international law. In her new book “They Called it Peace”, Lauren Benton shows how violence in European empires challenged this dichotomy. A conversation on “small wars”, “regimes of armed peace”, “legal politics” and navy captains acting as judges.

Dear Laurie, in your new book “The Called it Peace”, you engage with imperial violence in European empires between 1500 and 1900, with a particular focus on Pacific areas and Latin America. Before we take a closer look at these patterns of violence: how did you come up with the idea to write about it? 

This book began, as most do, with a few hunches. It seemed to me that accounts of the global history of violence had paid insufficient attention to the serial “small” violence that was so common across European empires. Global histories instead tend to move from one major conflict to another: from the Seven Years’ War (which historians describe as the first global war) to Atlantic Revolutions to the Napoleonic Wars and to the two World Wars of the twentieth century. I wondered what was missing from the history of law and war by our leaving out the interstitial violence. Were there noticeable legal patterns in imperial small wars? Did they fit in, or help to compose, the global regulatory order?

Another starting observation—more than a hunch because it was so obvious—was that in focusing on doctrinal developments in Europe, historians of the laws of war had sidelined the rest of the world, particularly in periods before the nineteenth century. I wanted to know how conflicts in empires stimulated legal commentary, by participants on the ground and by European observers.

Finally, in response to your question about why there is so much material from the Pacific and Latin America: Those regions tend to get left on the margins of global histories. Also, analysis of small wars in these regions helps break down artificial distinctions between law on land and sea. From one-dimensional interpretations of Hugo Grotius to uncritical readings of Carl Schmitt, scholars tend to repeat generalizations about legal divergence of land and sea. The Pacific and Latin American cases show more continuities than differences. They help to bring truly global trends into focus. 

At the center of your book are imperial “small wars”. The term naturally brings to mind the Prussian officer and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (p. 7). In Clausewitz’s work, the term is closely linked to the emergence of guerrilla warfare. You use the term differently, more broadly. How? What do small wars mean to you?

Rather early in the research, I realized that I was going to have to adopt a capacious definition of “small wars” – one that would differ from the descriptions of most military analysts. I include common kinds of violence that are typically not labeled as war. Raiding is a prime example. One reason this choice was important is that, starting with Clausewitz, writings on war and law have a narrow take on small wars. They are often portrayed as operating on the margins of law, and as asymmetric conflicts in which conventional armies oppose guerrilla fighters. In the imperial violence I study, participants on all sides were actively producing legal justifications for their actions and citing standards of conduct in war. And many of these conflicts were not asymmetric. Europeans fought more like guerrillas than conventional armies in many cases, launching raids or brief strikes without command centers or coordination.

By opening up the category of “small wars,” we can look for and find broad patterns of organizing and justifying violence. The regulation of violence then appears not as something imposed by states as arbiters of international law but as a self-generating order that emerged through strategic action and discourse. To answer your question about what small wars signify to me, then: they are part of a set of processes that make and remake global and international order.

You talk about a “global regime of plunder” that the European empires found. What do you mean by that?

Europeans were immersed in a world of raiding and counterraiding. Following traditional approaches to the laws of war, historians sometimes portray Europeans as applying legal doctrines based on ideas developing in Europe. I instead trace how Europeans organized violence in early empires in ways that were very familiar to societies across the globe. In the centuries covered in the first part of the book, from the fifteenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans were interacting with people who were already embedded in vast raiding complexes. That meant that there was a lot of mutual intelligibility—of routines of truce making, captive taking, and the seizure of property in raids. These practices composed a global regime of plunder structured by what I call “interpolity law” —a name for international law before international law.

One of my surprising findings is that households were central components of global regimes of violence. Early European empires actively sponsored the formation of households in imperial outposts. They did so partly so they could represent local raids as acts of self-defense and partly to enrich themselves and colonial communities by setting up households to serve as legal entities empowered to hold captives. The idea that enslaved people were war captives sometimes accurately reflected ongoing slaving practices, but it was also a useful fiction to uphold the lawfulness of many kinds of captive taking—including the massive expansion of slaving and plantation slavery in the Americas.

You observe that small wars often led to violent excesses. Why was that the case? And what does this tell us about “what they called peace”, to pick up on the Tacitus reference in your book’s title?

It turns out that European imperial agents and their sponsors were determined in many settings to find ways to keep violence small. Uncontained violence was bad for commerce and bad for the security of settlements. For political theologians, it also bordered on sin. But Europeans possessed few tools for describing peacetime violence or regulating violence between war and peace. They also found that that legal routines for limiting or pausing violence established clear pathways to extreme violence—in other words, to atrocities defined as within the law.

In the first part of the book, I explain how raiding and truce making set up the possibility for extreme violence against people accused of breaking the peace. And in the second half, I turn to the long nineteenth century, when the justification of supposedly limited interventions to protect imperial subjects transitioned easily into calls for unlimited violence against entire communities labeled as natural rebels or enemies. In both these modes, imperial agents portrayed themselves as agents of peace who were working to spread and protect order. And they characterized indigenous people as peace breakers who deserved extreme punishment—in brutal forms that ranged from massacre to the exile, dispossession, and extermination of whole communities.

What particularly fascinated me when reading your book qua my own research interests was that these small wars also had to be justified—and, contrary to what standard narratives in the History of International Law tell us, also outside the imperial centers and also before the 19th century. As you write, in local contexts, captains became judges (p. 155). What does this actually mean in terms of the relationship between law and politics? Was law a limitation or a legitimization of imperial violence? So, does the necessity that captains also had to justify their violence show that the law limited their violence to a certain extent? Or did the law legitimize their violence just particularly well?

Justifications for violence were indeed very important in shaping the legal framework for violence. The example you mention of captains acting as legal agents is a good illustration of the connections between repeating justifications for violence and broader regulatory regimes. British navy captains were authorized to act, in effect, as legal agents. They conducted investigations, decided on what measure of force to use against indigenous communities, and wrote up elaborate accounts after the fact, often using legal language, to justify their choices.

When we begin with these actions as a function and source of law rather than imagining imperial agents as applying or implementing preexisting norms or rules, the questions you raise about the relation between law and politics, or between the legitimation of violence and efforts to limit it, have to be reframed. Historical actors on all sides were engaging in what I call “legal politics”—that is, they were using and citing law strategically while enmeshed in multi-sided conflicts and relationships. In the process, they were creating and reinforcing regimes of limited violence with very specific openings to extreme violence. In the case of navy captains, their standing instructions to use limited force generated what I call a “regime of armed peace.” It wasn’t very peaceful, but it was a global regulatory order centered on the limited use of force that could, and sometimes did, spin into arbitrary acts of reprisal and very destructive conflicts.

In your book, you deal with patterns of justification for imperial violence, including “defense of households” and “protection emergencies”. To what extent have these justifications for violence changed over the period under observation from 1500 to 1900? Are there justifications for violence that were particularly characteristic of a particular time-space context?

There was change over time alongside some continuity. For example, the presence of households remained important in supporting self-defense arguments, but their role was especially salient in the early phases of overseas empires, when fortified outposts were being converted into colonies. Similarly, what I call “protection emergencies”—crises involving perceived or real threats to imperial subjects—occurred across centuries, but they were particularly important in the long nineteenth century, when European empires were building global military capacity and imperial subjects were moving in widening circuits and engaging more and more in commerce outside the bounds of imperial territories. What Lisa Ford and I have called “protection talk” became especially consequential in settler colonies, where the authorization to respond to frontier violence was sometimes transformed into blanket permission for vast campaigns of dispossession and extermination.

To conclude, let’s look at the present: what can we learn from your story for the current world of political violence and law? Is the legal tool we have at our disposal sufficient—or do we need a broader political scandalization of violence?

There’s a great deal of relevance of these findings for the present, I find. Imperial arguments surface again and again in contemporary conflicts, as when Putin justifies aggression against Ukraine as a measure of protection for ethnic Russians. More broadly, this history urges us to correct the tendency to view “small wars” in the contemporary world as aberrations—conflicts that have somehow slipped through the cracks of an international order that has banned the use of force.

Imperial small wars remain a formative part of the global regulatory order. Participants continue to make the global legal order through their actions and arguments, and not just through international agreements or institutions. Another lesson from the past is that we should expect openings to atrocity in what antagonists may claim will be limited wars. We should heap skepticism on any group launching a small war or brief attack claiming that they possess workable mechanisms for keeping small wars small.