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They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires
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 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 insured the 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 imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international 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 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 insured the 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 imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published February 13, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 22, 2025
Another book I will definitely read again on my own time when I don’t just have a week to read it.
Very insightful in terms of examples and a very interesting thesis that changed my perspective of the difference between war and peace or lack there of.
Very insightful in terms of examples and a very interesting thesis that changed my perspective of the difference between war and peace or lack there of.
October 22, 2025
Like a 3.5/4! The book shed light on wars that I have never come across and the true impact that small wars have on continued violence and global order.
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March 19, 2025This was very thorough and great listen, though I will admit I lost my focus a number of times (entirely my own fault) and it deserves a relisten at some point in the future.
March 3, 2024
Very important historical accounts of imperialist violence that should never be forgotten
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November 29, 2024Three books stand out for me this year; they are all in different ways about complexity. Lauren Benton’s They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press) explores the many kinds of violence that proliferated in the space between all-out war and all-out peace, refreshing and deepening our understanding of the history of empire.
Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Chris Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Chris Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
June 25, 2024
What an absolute slog to get trough. It's only 200 pages but felt like a 1000.
I'm sure there is an interesting point I there somewhere but I missed it. All I got was, violence begets violence. Peace is hard. People need justification to be able to terrible things, and other basic stuff.
Written in the most convoluted way possible.
I'm sure there is an interesting point I there somewhere but I missed it. All I got was, violence begets violence. Peace is hard. People need justification to be able to terrible things, and other basic stuff.
Written in the most convoluted way possible.
May 20, 2025
Magnificent, well crafted and strong book from Lauren Benton. I don’t think Lauren have ‘wasted’ a single page as insights kept coming.
A book that was well worth reading and that is strangely relevant even today.
A book that was well worth reading and that is strangely relevant even today.
March 29, 2025
9/10 as far as history books go! The only downside about listening to the audiobook is that I don’t get to see the footnotes. So that is why it’s 9/10, cuz I can’t judge if the sourcing is good.
November 3, 2025
It felt extremely long and dense and didn’t feel like it was written for someone to understand the thick of it.
March 24, 2024
How did European powers organise and legitimise violence against militarily weaker peoples? That question is at the heart of this book. It concerns eras of European conquest, buccaneering and imperial expansion, from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Yet this history could not be more relevant in the present moment. For it foreshadows what drives and supposedly constrains ‘small wars’ arising routinely in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Centuries back, when imperial British, Spanish and French forces directed fire at inhabitants of places they sought to plunder and conquer, their scribes and jurists were kept busy working up plausible explanations and legalisms to justify their wars and brutalities. Leaderships needed exculpatory rationales, especially where mass extermination was the strategy of choice. The author writes:
As imperial agents debated standards of battlefield conduct, they affirmed Europe’s power to regulate war and peace. In the process, they sharpened characterizations of Indigenous fighters as savage and increasingly labelled them as rebels.
In today’s “global order of armed peace” military chieftains, their lawyers and public relations shills show the same reflexes as they generate scaled-up versions of the same atrocities, often morphing into ‘forever wars’. Beginning in early 2022 we needed to look no further than the Ukraine and in 2023 in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of Palestine to see such reflexes, legalistic utterances that include “elastic definitions of self-defense”, and the terrible bloodletting that results.
The stories chronicled in this book can be dense. Following the minutiae of frontier violence in early 18th century Uruguay, for example, was a challenge for this reader. But by anchoring her arguments in such rich and nuanced detail, the author makes a convincing case. Among the book's foremost lessons: to portray faraway wars as limited episodes necessary for peace, and to see law as a way to constrain war and prevent atrocities, are to indulge in magical thinking.
[ posted 30 January 2024 ]
Centuries back, when imperial British, Spanish and French forces directed fire at inhabitants of places they sought to plunder and conquer, their scribes and jurists were kept busy working up plausible explanations and legalisms to justify their wars and brutalities. Leaderships needed exculpatory rationales, especially where mass extermination was the strategy of choice. The author writes:
As imperial agents debated standards of battlefield conduct, they affirmed Europe’s power to regulate war and peace. In the process, they sharpened characterizations of Indigenous fighters as savage and increasingly labelled them as rebels.
In today’s “global order of armed peace” military chieftains, their lawyers and public relations shills show the same reflexes as they generate scaled-up versions of the same atrocities, often morphing into ‘forever wars’. Beginning in early 2022 we needed to look no further than the Ukraine and in 2023 in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of Palestine to see such reflexes, legalistic utterances that include “elastic definitions of self-defense”, and the terrible bloodletting that results.
The stories chronicled in this book can be dense. Following the minutiae of frontier violence in early 18th century Uruguay, for example, was a challenge for this reader. But by anchoring her arguments in such rich and nuanced detail, the author makes a convincing case. Among the book's foremost lessons: to portray faraway wars as limited episodes necessary for peace, and to see law as a way to constrain war and prevent atrocities, are to indulge in magical thinking.
[ posted 30 January 2024 ]
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews