Whose Peace? Warmongers, peacemakers, and the narratives of imperial order

Imperial 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.

Lauren Benton studied economics at Harvard University before obtaining a PhD in anthropology and history from Johns Hopkins University in 1987. Her early work, focusing on workers in the informal economy, resulted in a book on sweatshops in Spain and a seminal study on the destruction of Afro-Uruguayan neighbourhoods in Montevideo.

Since 2001, she has established herself as one of the leading specialists in global legal history. As the author or co-editor of seven books on European empires, she has worked in particular on issues of sovereignty, conquest, slavery and abolition, war and peace, as well as the history of the international order.

Winner of the 2019 Toynbee Prize, which recognises major contributions to world history, Lauren Benton has taught at MIT, New York University (NYU) and Vanderbilt University. She has also served as president of the American Society for Legal History. She is currently the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Law at Yale University.