They Called It Peace

Lauren Benton's new book on the European overseas empires between 1400 and 1900 departs from the tendency among historians of international law to focus on major wars rather than smaller conflicts. Benton demonstrates how the violence resulting from “small wars” could have significant consequences, perhaps even more substantial than those wrought by major confrontations.Benton's focus on “minor” warfare presents an inherent methodological challenge, as this type of combat was only fragmentarily recorded in archival sources. Another challenge is achieving the same level of detail for the four empires analyzed by Benton (the Spanish, British, Portuguese, and French). Despite these potential pitfalls, the book is a very successful endeavor, offering an innovative perspective on everyday warfare and its role in shaping Western imperial formations.It is well known that European empires were founded on forced and enslaved labor. This fact required a somewhat permanent state of war. European forces almost always portrayed themselves as being on the side of the law and characterized resistance against them as the origin of chaos. Additionally, there was often an implied universalism in the European approach. Most narratives about the historical trajectory of the laws of war have therefore emphasized the role of Europe and the United States.Benton counters this narrative. Instead of writing a broad, systematic history of confrontations, she focuses on a series of notable conflicts in regions where European authorities had unstable or incomplete control and where multiple political entities were present. Furthermore, when analyzing the production of theories on law and war, she ambitiously broadens the range of actors considered. According to Benton, “People in very different positions inside and outside Europe were grappling with similar problems of how to justify and regulate violence” (p. 10). She thus distances herself from the idea that there was no communication between Europeans and the peoples with whom they interacted, especially concerning violence. Mutual intelligibility was far more prevalent than misunderstanding.The study's various examples show that communication produced what Benton calls “interpolity law” or “big law.” This law was far from a constraining legal force. Instead, it operated as a social field, or framework, and set flexible parameters for conflict. Furthermore, “it combined patterns of practice, which were lawlike because they shaped expectations about the regularity of behavior and its likely consequences, and trends in written or customary law that encompassed legislation, commands, and learned commentary as well as the pronouncements and strategies of a wide range of actors” (p. 13).The study's first part concerns the looting and plunder that developed in the Europeans’ overseas conquests and the fortifications at the vanguard of imperial power. This part addresses the early modern period, a moment when such empires, in many places, were “archipelagic spaces occupied by armies and navies, and pluripolitical regions” (p. 20). This tenuousness led to instability and violence. Benton highlights the importance of households and their role in both raids and the taking of captives. She shows that family units were instrumental in processing plunder, turning booty into property, and integrating captives into communities. She also recalls that appeals for the protection of households were systematically used to justify the violence exercised in private raids.The book's second part deals with the nineteenth century, a stage for another regime of violence more connected to the territorialization of empires. This period found Europeans intensifying their claims that they were uniquely capable of regulating conduct in the context of war. Benton observes that these claims, in large part, continued to be voiced by actors on the ground. They were expressed, for example, through “protection emergencies”—that is, operations aimed at protecting imperial subjects from aggression. Europeans systematically accused Indigenous peoples of leading them into war and depicted captivity as a form of punishment. As for Indigenous polities, some persisted in classifying imperial violence as interpolitical, while others sought to negotiate with colonial officials, presenting themselves as loyal subjects who needed the law's protection. Several eventually adopted the terms and arguments of the emerging international law.In both parts, Benton develops her own interpretation of emergent concepts surrounding the regulation of warfare. She argues that the “participants in imperial wars . . . were making precisely [the] kinds of interpretative assessments of the right to make war and about the conduct of war” made by thinkers such as Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and Emer de Vattel, among others (p. 144). These assessments were often carried out in remote places by imperial agents. For Benton, it is essential to “consider that European imperial agents and European legal writers were arriving, in different locales, at similar solutions to related problems” (p. 146).It bears noting that local populations did not remain silent when faced with European imperial formations and were not merely victims. As Benton shows, a wide range of actors, both European and non-European, participated in this process, and thus “European authority over the laws of war was a story that Europeans told themselves” (p. 100). The people in contact with Europeans across the world offered their own legal interpretations of violence by and against empires. In so doing, they also contributed to the formation of international law

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