Search results for ""author lauren benton""

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empiresImperial 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.

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International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.“Rage for Order is a book of exceptional range and insight. Its successes are numerous. At a time when questions of law and legalism are attracting more and more attention from historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire, but still tend to be considered within very specific contexts, its sweep and ambition are particularly welcome…Rage for Order is a book that deserves to have major implications both for international legal history, and for the history of modern imperialism.”—Alex Middleton, Reviews in History“Rage for Order offers a fresh account of nineteenth-century global order that takes us beyond worn liberal and post-colonial narratives into a new and more adventurous terrain.”—Jens Bartelson, Australian Historical Studies

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This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule. The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.

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The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy, long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.

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This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule. The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.

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