Lauren Benton
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3641086 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Lauren Benton |
| PRENOMES | Lauren |
| SOBRENOME | Benton |
| ASSINATURA | BENTON L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | New York University |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-6089-2274 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 541 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1984 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
On Capture
Drawing on the articles in this forum, the essay considers continuities in the relation of raiding to regional reordering and reflects on capture as a sociolegal phenomenon. It comments on three dimensions of capture: the moment of capture, the transformation of booty into property, and the wider legal and institutional context of capture, from protection arrangements to jurisdictional politics.
Piracy as Political Prism
This article places maritime violence at the center of the history of international ordering. It views the transformation of the nineteenth-century Atlantic from the deck of one ship, a Baltimore-built privateer called the Irresistible. The ship’s captain seized Spanish and Portuguese shipping under a privateering commission from the Oriental Republic. Sponsorship of privateers by the Oriental Republic and other new Latin American governments ref…
How Not to Possess an Island
s Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty . British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each a…
Rights and Empires
The jurisdictional complexity and layered sovereignty of empires converted struggles over rights – their definition, deployment, and distribution – into contests over authority. This chapter examines the close relationship between authority and rights, together with the emergence of variegated rights regimes, in the British, Spanish, and Russian empires. All three empires relied on long-standing routines for assigning different sets of rights to …
They Called It Peace
A Sea of Households
Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean-soldiers, sojourners, servants, and of…
L'art de ne pas posséder une île
Les historiens ont fait preuve d'une étonnante indifférence à l'égard des dimensions juridiques de l'' empire informel '. Cet article montre que les pratiques juridiques ont en réalité créé et soutenu une indétermination de souveraineté. Nous nous intéressons à Pitcairn, une petite île isolée du Pacifique, peuplée en 1789 par une poignée de Britanniques et de Tahitiens après la mutinerie du Bounty. Administrateurs britanniques, professionnels du …
Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics
Challenging the common assumption that legal misunderstanding was pervasive, this article analyzes jurisdictional politics as an element of “interpolity law”—a broad framework for legal interactions across polities and regions in the early modern world. It draws on recent research on jurisdictional politics to show how such an approach allows historians to avoid some of the familiar pitfalls associated with studies of legal pluralism. This approa…
Protection Shopping among Empires
The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands' settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands' condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling fam…
A World at Sea
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 a…
Empires and the Rule of Law
As composite polities, empires were plural legal orders. Conquest, settlement, and rule depended on elaborate arrangements to manage the relation of imperial law to local or indigenous law. Calls for impartial justice in empires emerged in the context of intricate legal conflicts over order and rights, with varied institutional trajectories as the result. The rule of law in empires must be approached as part of the history of legal politics in fl…
How to Write the History of the World
I one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories a royal mapmaker is asked to fashion increasingly accurate maps of the kingdom until, finally, he covers the kingdom with a map. This parable is a warning to all historians but especially to world historians, who may struggle more than others with pressures simply to “cover” time and territory. Reaching beyond mere coverage is crucial to the field’s development and to its status within the profession. Ho…
Beyond Anachronism
This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodologies in international law as supposedly focused on rooting out anachronism and separating history from the politics of the present. First, the article shows that this (mis)characterization of historical methods is based on a misreading of the work of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. Second, it argues that Orford errs in assuming that the Ca…
The people living with HIV stigma survey UK 2015
We aim to understand the difference in stigma and discrimination, in particular sexual rejection, experienced between gay and heterosexual men living with HIV in the UK. The People Living with HIV StigmaSurvey UK 2015 recruited a convenience sample of persons with HIV through over 120 cross sector community organisations and 46 HIV clinics to complete an online survey. 1162 men completed the survey, 969 (83%) gay men and 193 (17%) heterosexual me…
Experiences of stigma and discrimination in social and healthcare settings among trans people living with HIV in the UK
The People Living with HIV StigmaSurvey UK 2015 was a community led national survey investigating experiences of people living with HIV in the UK in the past 12 months. Participants aged 18 and over were recruited through over 120 cross-sector community organisations and 46 HIV clinics to complete an anonymous online survey. Trans is an umbrella term which refers to individuals whose current gender identity is different to the gender they were as…
Afterward
This essay identifies a shared problem in articles on space and intellectual history: the tension between representations of spaces of political community and spatial renderings of authority. A wide variety of imagined political communities feature in these studies: nation-states, empires, communes, confederations, regions, and disconnected global sites linked by political trajectories. The essay turns next to the problem of authority, including …
Made in Empire
A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at the center of the history of international law. This article surveys key insights resulting from this move and assesses remaining challenges. In explaining how the study of law in particular imperial locations can illuminate global legal transformations, the article identifies cross-cutting themes of articles in this special volume
Protection and Empire
Encounters Old and New in World History
This collection of essays asserts the specific value of world history research and teaching, showing how the field contributes to the larger historical profession and offering concrete suggestions to develop more interaction between the academy and the public. The twelve contributors, each with their own academic areas of interest, are experienced scholars and classroom teachers. Uniting them together in this volume is their professional relation…
Island Despotism
Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island…
Empires and protection
References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about …
Controlling Despotic Dominions
Rage for Order
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. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain's global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureauc…
The Space between Empires
The Space between Empires
In 1808, Thomas Maitland, the recently appointed British Governor of Ceylon, instructed his envoy to explain to the government in London that Ceylon was unlike other British colonies. The British controlled only a ring of territory, “a narrow stripe of land on the sea coast all round the island,” while the Kingdom of Kandy occupied the island’s center.1 With the colony’s “enemies” encircled, the British could afford to neglect the aging fortifica…
Law and Colonial Cultures
Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the…
Rage for Order
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. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain's global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureauc…
A Search for Sovereignty
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also…
Acquiring Empire by Law
What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French …
Colonial Law and Cultural Difference
The colonial legal order was by its very nature a plural legal order. Multiple legal authorities were created out of the imposition of colonial law and the persistence, protection, and invention of indigenous legal practices. Less obvious but critically important, too, was the plural nature of European legal systems themselves—a complexity that carried over into, and was sometimes exacerbated by, conditions of colonial rule. Broadly speaking, we …
Legal Spaces of Empire
In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. João de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a 'true and perfect geography.' The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the…
Beyond Anachronism
This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodologies in international law as supposedly focused on rooting out anachronism and separating history from the politics of the present. First, the article shows that this (mis)characterization of historical methods is based on a misreading of the work of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. Second, it argues that Orford errs in assuming that the Ca…
From International Law to Imperial Constitutions
The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and political traditions dating back to the early seventeenth century, in particular to early writings in international law and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. Recent scholarship has attacked this narrative from many angles. One approach has been to reexamine early modern European politics and discourse, in particular questioning whether, for examp…
Beyond Legal Pluralism
Industrial Development and Labor Absorption
Experts on national development agree that the ultimate justification for their work is the attainment of a better standard of living by the populations of impoverished countries. Although strategies to achieve this goal vary widely and although most current research focuses on aggregate economic measures such as gross national product growth, the basic expectation is that structural development processes will translate into significant improveme…
Empires and protection
References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about …
Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820
Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that…
Spatial Histories of Empire
There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements …
No Longer Odd Region Out
The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American–centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnati…
Making Order Out of Trouble
Jurisdictional fluidity was a central feature of early modem Iberian law, and jurisdictional tensions were exacerbated by overseas conquest and colonization. Contests over the legal status of conquered peoples featured both jurisdictional jockeying among colonial factions and widespread preoccupation with the symbols and rituals marking cultural and legal difference. This article examines the dynamics of jurisdictional politics in seventeenth-cen…
Made in Empire
A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at the center of the history of international law. This article surveys key insights resulting from this move and assesses remaining challenges. In explaining how the study of law in particular imperial locations can illuminate global legal transformations, the article identifies cross-cutting themes of articles in this special volume
Island Despotism
Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island…
The Laws of This Country”
State making in nineteenth-century colonial settings involved contests over the configuration of plural legal systems. Colonial powers limited the jurisdiction of colonial courts and adopted complex, shifting rules for the articulation of imposed and indigenous law. The politics of legal pluralism in such settings became tied to discourse about cultural difference as groups challenged or justified jurisdictional boundaries by reference to the cul…
Toward a New Legal History of Piracy
Constitutions and Empires
The answer to question, What comes after linguistic turn? appears to be, at least in part, the imperial turn. As scholars across a range of disciplines begin to agree that nation-state is a single distorted lens through which to view modern history, in all its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, commands new critical attention. Within sociolegal history, turn to empire is especially promising. Building both on a wellestablished preoccup…
Just Despots
This article explores the significance of widespread debates in empires about the exercise of arbitrary power. As particularly evident in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, colonial conflicts often centered on the nature and scope of the legal prerogatives of middling authorities. The focus on the proper relation of multiple authorities within composite polities was accompanied by claims about particular configurations of righ…
Colonizing Hawai'i and Colonizing Elsewhere
Made in Italy
Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and its Consequences. Michael L. Blim. New York:Praeger, 1990
Homework and industrial development
Not Just a Concept
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Industrial Development and Labor Absorption
Experts on national development agree that the ultimate justification for their work is the attainment of a better standard of living by the populations of impoverished countries. Although strategies to achieve this goal vary widely and although most current research focuses on aggregate economic measures such as gross national product growth, the basic expectation is that structural development processes will translate into significant improveme…
Reshaping The Urban Core
The problem of squatter settlements in Latin American cities has received far greater attention than any other theme in Latin American urban studies in the last fifteen years. The issues and debates at the heart of the field—the definition of the culture of poverty, the question of the marginality of the poor, and the concept of the urban informal sector—all have evolved out of and centered on discussing the plight of urban squatters. The sheer m…
Desarrollo industrial y absorción laboral
Una revista científica, con revisión por pares, que publica investigación empírica y contribuciones teóricas en sociología, antropología, sociodemografía, y disciplinas afines. Nuestra misión es presentar los resultados de la investigación de la más alta calidad, con énfasis en América Latina, pero con proyección y alcance global
Homework and industrial development
The Informal Economy
The Informal Economy
The Informal Economy
Made in Italy
Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and its Consequences. Michael L. Blim. New York:Praeger, 1990
Beyond Legal Pluralism
Social and Political Dynamics of the Informal Economy in African Cities
Colonial Law and Cultural Difference
The colonial legal order was by its very nature a plural legal order. Multiple legal authorities were created out of the imposition of colonial law and the persistence, protection, and invention of indigenous legal practices. Less obvious but critically important, too, was the plural nature of European legal systems themselves—a complexity that carried over into, and was sometimes exacerbated by, conditions of colonial rule. Broadly speaking, we …
On Cultural Hybridity
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History - Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2000
Law and Colonial Cultures
Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the…
Making Order Out of Trouble
Jurisdictional fluidity was a central feature of early modem Iberian law, and jurisdictional tensions were exacerbated by overseas conquest and colonization. Contests over the legal status of conquered peoples featured both jurisdictional jockeying among colonial factions and widespread preoccupation with the symbols and rituals marking cultural and legal difference. This article examines the dynamics of jurisdictional politics in seventeenth-cen…
The Laws of This Country”
State making in nineteenth-century colonial settings involved contests over the configuration of plural legal systems. Colonial powers limited the jurisdiction of colonial courts and adopted complex, shifting rules for the articulation of imposed and indigenous law. The politics of legal pluralism in such settings became tied to discourse about cultural difference as groups challenged or justified jurisdictional boundaries by reference to the cul…
How to Write the History of the World
March 2004 * Historically Speaking How t? Write the History of the World Lauren Benton In one ofJorge Luis Borges's short stories a royal mapmaker is asked to fashion increasingly accurate maps of the kingdom until, finally, he covers the kingdomwith a map. This parable is a warning to all historians but especially to world historians, who maystruggle more than otherswith pressures simply to "cover" time and territory. Reaching beyond mere covera…
Colonizing Hawai'i and Colonizing Elsewhere
No Longer Odd Region Out
The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American–centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnati…
Legal Spaces of Empire
In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. João de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a 'true and perfect geography.' The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the…
Constitutions and Empires
The answer to question, What comes after linguistic turn? appears to be, at least in part, the imperial turn. As scholars across a range of disciplines begin to agree that nation-state is a single distorted lens through which to view modern history, in all its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, commands new critical attention. Within sociolegal history, turn to empire is especially promising. Building both on a wellestablished preoccup…
Spatial Histories of Empire
There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements …
From International Law to Imperial Constitutions
The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and political traditions dating back to the early seventeenth century, in particular to early writings in international law and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. Recent scholarship has attacked this narrative from many angles. One approach has been to reexamine early modern European politics and discourse, in particular questioning whether, for examp…
The British Atlantic in Global Context
The simple and perhaps obvious fact that the Atlantic world has no boundaries has generated some anxious questioning about the scope of the field of Atlantic history. In writing the history of an age of interoceanic travel, should we separate the Atlantic from the Indian and Pacific Ocean worlds? Should Atlantic narratives stretch to encompass the history of the Andes, the Great Lakes region, the South African veldt, or other areas distant from t…
A Search for Sovereignty
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also…
Not Just a Concept
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (36 obras) · Law (32 obras) · History (27 obras) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (26 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Legal history (13 obras) · Colonialism (11 obras) · Economics (11 obras)