Rencontre | Whose Peace? Warmongers, peace fictions, and the narratives of imperial order – Avec Lauren Benton (Université Yale) et Eleanor Beardsley (National Public Radio)

Lauren Benton studied economics at Harvard University before earning a PhD in anthropology and history from Johns Hopkins University in 1987. Her early research on workers in the informal economy led to a book on sweatshop labor in Spain and a landmark study of the destruction of Afro-Uruguayan neighborhoods in Montevideo. Since 2001, Benton has been a leading contributor in the new field of global legal history. She has authored or coedited 7 books on European empires, writing about such subjects as sovereignty, conquest, slavery and abolition, war and peace, and the history of international order. In 2019, Benton received the Toynbee Prize, recognizing significant contributions to global history. She has held faculty appointments at MIT, NYU, and Vanderbilt University and has served as president of the American Society for Legal History. Benton is currently Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University.

Eleanor Beardsley holds a bachelor’s degree in European history and French, an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and a master’s degree in international business from the University of South Carolina. She is a correspondent in Paris for National Public Radio, where she covers various aspects of French society, politics, the economy, culture and gastronomy. Eleanor Beardsley has contributed to National Public Radio’s coverage of the events that have shaped the European continent over the last decade. From terrorist attacks to the migration crisis, she has notably covered the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Sweden and France.

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.

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Princeton University Press

This event is supported by the DÉCRIPT Programme. It has received government funding administered by the National Research Agency under the France 2030 initiative, reference number ANR-24-RSHS-0002.