THEY CALLED IT PEACE

The imperial past was on bright display recently when Vladimir Putin called the invasion of Ukraine by Russia a "special military operation" rather than a war. Since Ukraine had been an integral part of the Russian Empire, in his view, violence against Ukrainians was merely a form of imperial policing. This book traces this twisted logic to the history of imperial violence before the twentieth century.

Violence in European empires initially focused on plunder, a pattern that spanned world regions and several centuries. Increasing militarization in European empires gradually spawned a new regime of global armed peace in which Europeans claimed a right to intervene anywhere to protect European subjects and interests.

In those regimes, small wars were supposed to stay small. Yet they routinely led to episodes of extreme violence. Raiding produced atrocities as small, serial wars of conquest encompassed massacres. Wars of dispossession and extermination in settler colonies evolved out of more limited small wars against unwilling colonial subjects. Atrocities were not accidental byproducts of imperial rule; they were integral to its legal framework.

Despite their importance in global history, small wars in European empires have received little critical study. Military histories tend to dwell on battlefield strategies and highlight major, declared wars. Historians of the laws of war privilege the evolution of doctrines, codification, and treaties, and they devote relatively little attention to legal practices in empires or to debates about imperial violence beyond the application of just war theory. When small conflicts in European empires have received attention, it has been mainly by analysts concerned with the challenges such conflicts posed to conventional armies, nation-states, and international institutions. Some studies even double as manuals of counterinsurgency.

They Called It Peace takes a different approach. It shows that practices of imperial war and justifications by participants helped to shape truly global patterns of violence. It uses histories of imperial small wars to illuminate a European theory of limited war. And it argues that small wars staged atrocities that were defined as lawful and necessary. The book is global in scope. Examples are drawn from the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French empires in Africa, South Asia, North America, South America, the Pacific world, and the Caribbean. Revealing how the actions of a wide range of European interlocutors helped to shape meanings of violence, the analysis encompasses strategies of Indigenous political communities such as Aztecs, Pequots, Xhosas, Guaraní, and Marathas.

The book is organized around interconnected stories and has a narrative arc that moves from early centuries of raiding and captive-taking to practices of imperial intervention to recent small wars. It highlights continuities between imperial violence and practices in the "war on terror." The conclusion draws on the book's findings to suggest that only broad-scale opposition to violence presents a chance of altering tragic outcomes of small wars, and history's tendency to repeat them.

Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. Benton is a recent recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships. In 2019, she received the Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to global history. She received a Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Berlin Prize Fellowship for work on this book. Benton is immediate past president of the American Society for Legal History. Benton is well known for her previous publications on the history of law and empires, including Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 18001850, coauthored with Lisa Ford (Harvard University Press, 2016); A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 14001900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the prize- winning Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 14001900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).