Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 8: Prof. Lauren Benton, They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence

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Season 4, Episode 8: Prof. Lauren Benton, They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and I am absolutely thrilled that today we'll be speaking with Professor Lauren Benton, the Martin Briggs Professor of History and Law at Yale University.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: She's a remarkable historian and legal scholar with a vast, vast production of studies of modern state law and war, violence, and all of the interconnections.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're talking with Professor Benton about her new remarkable book.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: They called it Peace, Worlds of Imperial Violence.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The book resonated very deeply with me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a remarkable perspective.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Benton, thank you for joining Book Club.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to discuss this book with you.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much for having me.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: You call it a book about small wars.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's a book about many centuries of violence.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's rather stunning, and uh I felt shaken as I was uh reading it.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you call it a study of small wars?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is a distinctive perspective, and I want everybody that's listening from all over the world to understand that perspective.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, thanks for having me here, and and thanks for the good question.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I started this book because it seemed to me that the ways that we were narrating the large span of global history had some real problems when it came to violence.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And one was that we tend to view now any kind of war, really of almost any size that's not nuclear war, thank God, as small.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a sort of myth that these are conflicts that have somehow escaped through the cracks of the international legal order.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they shouldn't be there, they're exceptional, and they they shouldn't be happening.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I study the long history of empires, and I was seeing that there was just so much uh uh small violence, and I'll talk about the smallness of it in a minute, and how it's not always small, but a kind of constant drumbeat of violence, um, sometimes intermittent staccato kinds of violence uh that just didn't stop.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea that what we're seeing now are just these sort of small wars that happen to come along seemed entirely wrong to me.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the other thing is that in global history, we just tend to talk about the big conflicts.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have these stories that go from World War I to World War II, uh, the Civil War, uh, before that, the Napoleonic Wars.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we don't talk about the intermittent periods in which there is a great deal of human suffering from conflict.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just began with an open-ended question to see if I could find patterns in these kinds of recurring conflicts that we miss when we look uh at global history through the usual lens.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: It makes, by the way, so much sense.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as you were saying it, I was thinking of something that I uh hadn't thought about uh in reading it, which is I often say day by day that as a as an American born in the 1950s, I basically the U.S.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: has in one way or another been at war almost every year of my life.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But we tend to put it differently.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you've just said that there's World War II, there's the Korean War, uh, there's the Vietnam War, uh, there's the uh two wars with Iraq, and then there's some other stuff.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh actually my feeling is my God, there's always fighting going on someplace.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, I think, your theme, which is that in the age of empire, which actually goes way back, but the age of European empire, let's say, of trans-oceanic empire uh starting in the 16th century, it's basically violence so pervasive.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I felt reading the book, but I didn't realize that there was that undertow echo of our constant violence right now in the world as well.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and there is something also of an assumption among a lot of people who write about the laws of war that we should think about earlier violence as just lawless and chaotic.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in going to look at patterns of the way this kind of violence was performed and practiced and indeed regulated, I really wanted to put that to the test.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I found was actually quite a lot of orderliness in these recurring patterns of small violence.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a kind of long period that I call a regime of plunder, and this is a long and indeed global phenomenon in which raiding and captive taking were absolutely central to how politician were interacting.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that captive taking part of it is actually pretty significant because it was a very, very common practice, as I said, not just in European empires, although they did that too, and some might say perfected it, uh, but also in in other empires and other phases.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So then we get into what historians like to call the long 19th century, and that just means that's sort of the 19th century that spills into the late 18th century and continues into parts of the 20th century, and that I call a regime of armed peace, in which empires were really militarizing on a global scale, and they began to think of themselves as kind of policing global order.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to do that, they had to authorize their agents to perform small violence.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: They hoped they didn't start large wars, but they really wanted to give them, they gave them carte blanche to start small wars and small altercations.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is a kind of a different view of global history that really is organized around these conflicts.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: You emphasize, and I'm sure rightly, that this kind of imperial-related violence is not only a European phenomenon or a North Atlantic phenomenon in the 20th century as the United States joins in, but you could find it in ancient empires, uh in Asian empires, and so on.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: But your book focuses uh mainly on the European period.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: For me as an economist, that's extremely interesting.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: One of, I think, the most important quotes in the economics canon is by Adam Smith, who says that the two most significant events in the history of mankind are the voyages from Europe to the Americas and from Europe to Asia that connected the whole world.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of the Columbus uh voyages and Vasco da Gama's voyages, and your book starts in essence with the empires that that result from that.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: From an economist's point of view, yes, that was the transformation of the world.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And your book is uh basically saying from a political order, that is the transformation of uh our 500 years of modern history, and that it was a transformation of the order of violence uh and who could commit it, how it was committed, who was authorized to commit it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as you said, it's remarkable you talk about the privatization of violence in some ways, but under the imperial edict that officers were basically empowered to act with the violence that they saw fit.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Could you describe that, what that means?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we have is a the European empire is starting to spread among American populations, indigenous populations, and in Asia, of course, great settled civilizations in many cases, but using violence to assert control.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But these are far-flung empires, so there's a lot of privatization of the violence, and that's what you call the small wars.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I should say that one of the reasons why I think it's important to begin by at least acknowledging that these patterns of violence were happening outside Europe as well as across Europe, is that it's important to see that when Europeans arrived in their phase of oceanic exploration and expansion, they were not actually, they were actually counting on a kind of mutual intelligibility about violence.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And they could count on that.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say, these modalities of raiding and captive taking were modalities that were familiar to indigenous polities across the world.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so there were interactions between Europeans and indigenous people that we used to think of as kind of cultural misunderstandings, but in fact, they were contests of force, and there was real political strategy going on and legal strategy on both parts.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's less misunderstanding than one might think.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when you look at it that way, you can begin to see how what we think of as conquest and label as conquest and tend to kind of think about as something that is sort of programmed and planned, actually unfolded as a series of small conflicts, or to think about it actually differently in the way I describe it in the book, as a kind of perpetual war interrupted by unstable bouts of peace.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And in in an early uh chapter in the book, I focus on this truce making that happened in the course of conquest.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's fascinating, by the way.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Really fascinating.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we should probably talk about that a little bit more, but I wanted to get to your question about the privatization.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Even in these early parts of these far-flung imperial ventures, they didn't have organized armies and navies to the same degree that we think about them today.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: They absolutely relied on making quasi-public agents out of private actors.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So licensing privateerslash pirates and encouraging them to raid was one of these modalities.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: That seems, by the way, I always attribute that to uh kind of the British genius of uh privatization.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I don't know if Britain was the only one that did it, but making Francis Drake, who was a crook and a pirate uh and a gangster, into Sir Francis Drake and an agent of uh Queen Elizabeth was an example of that kind of privatization of violence.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I do think that the English, of course, we know that they did this a lot.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, I talk about their use of raiders in and around Jamaica in the 17th century, but also I purposely include other empires to show what a pervasive pattern this was.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually talk about the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean as having their hands into a vast raiding complex.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that they were so concerned about doing was managing the labor of their raiders, of the men who were doing this raiding for them and creating a kind of infrastructure for the raiders to hold their booty and their captives from their raiding, because that was how you attached individuals to your imperial enterprises if you made it possible for them to go on raids and hold their booty and their their property in captives, often in the form of household quote-unquote dependence.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this was bigger than the English, although, as you point out, the English did it in spades.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, is it right to say, and I think your statement that this is a kind of perpetual war is a very good description.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: As an economist, I see it that from 1500 onward, Europe increasingly got the upper hand, but it was by no means decisive for many centuries.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the the contact line, the uh fighting was uh nonstop for centuries.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't somehow just a conquest.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: There was resistance, there was war, there was uh plunder, raiding, and so forth.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: The contact line did move over time because uh Europe's military uh advantages uh became decisive later on, but for many centuries, and even when it was decisive as it sometimes is today, there is nonstop resistance.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: People do not want to be dominated by others.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they don't want to be expropriated by others, they don't want to be ethnically cleansed by others.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a perpetual war as soon as you have this kind of fundamental dynamic of expansion of one group relative to others.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: That that's an extremely good point.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And there are indeed lots of examples, some of which I discuss in some detail in the book, of vast slaving complexes in which indigenous groups were still controlling a lot of territory and in contact with imperial forces over long periods of time, much more independently than we typically think.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because as you've described, we tend to think of this kind of toggle towards imperial dominance as being pretty abrupt.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, as you point out, it wasn't.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one of the points I think it's important to make, because it really became a central finding in the book, is that I want to suggest that I'm just talking about this kind of bubbling along of small violence and you know, nothing extremely bad happens.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because one of the findings of the book is that, in fact, within these sequences of small wars, there are openings, very clear openings to very extreme violence.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think of these as openings to lawful extreme violence, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's how participants viewed them.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So in the context of early conflicts and these raiding complexes, and this is where the title sort of comes from, they called it peace, that if the other side just wasn't playing along and holding to truces and keeping the violence small enough as defined by the stronger party, then it was perfectly lawful to kill civilians even en masse.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the kind of typical example of that in the long early period is the violence after an unsuccessful siege, where you know, one side says, gee, that's a nice little village you have there.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: It would be uh shame if something happened to it.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you surrender?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the town says, We're not going to surrender.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that meant that uh to those aggressors that when the town was finally taken over, that all bets were off and any kind of violence was okay, including mass killings of civilians.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: We can read that back into the Bible.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in fact, it's uh it is in the the book of Joshua and Deuteronomy surrender and you are saved, but if you don't surrender, it's God's commandment to slay every man, woman, and child.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and this was formalized in a number of different ways by empires.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: The kind of famous example that I also discuss in the book is that of the uh in the Spanish Empire when they read out the statement called the requirement, which basically said, you know, if you give yourselves up and admit the uh to Spanish dominance, nothing will bad will happen to you.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't, we can enslave you and kill you.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And even though that statement was only read intermittently, it was part of a bigger complex of practices that essentially meant the same thing.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: It actually reflected a much wider practice, in which, as I said, Indigenous and European polities understood that this was a possibility.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you do get, in connection with these series of small conflicts, also intermittent outbreaks of extreme violence.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that happens in the later period I described as well, where, you know, these imperial forces they're out in very far from home.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Commanders and captains have been charged with the responsibility to decide when force is needed.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not supposed to start big wars or engage in major conflicts.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things they're charged with doing is protecting imperial subjects.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And when they perceive that imperial subjects or imperial property, as it turns out, was being threatened in a way that they themselves defined as dire, they could then attack with huge force and they could change the categorization of their opponents.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, instead of viewing them as people who should be punished for some kind of violence, uh small violence against Europeans, they could be re-categorized as natural enemies.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, all bets were off.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: They could be killed en masse, they could be sent into exile, they could be resettled, and so on.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's important to stress, I think, that these were not moments, you know, there is a tendency to kind of view these moments as exceptional or coming in moments of what uh Gamben would call uh, you know, a state of exception or emergency, a la Carl Schmidt.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I prefer to view them as part of the logic of this longer sequence of violence.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can't understand them without that context.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the whole book is this uh brilliant, if I may again say, because it really is a wonderful book, but this uh brilliant interplay between the physical violence on the ground of conquest and resistance, and then how it translates into the mindset and law.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: So philosophy and law shape all of this in an extraordinary way.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the basic dynamic, if I understand it correctly, is the imperial power intrudes, the local populations resist, and the imperial power recasts the resisting local population as illegal, outside of civilization, lawless, dangerous, an emergency, and therefore by law, not just by fact on the ground, but in a sense, by law and by justice, a target for any kind of extreme violence up to and including extermination, if necessary, because this is a threat to the order.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a resistance, it's a threat to the order.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: We are the order.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a fair crude summary?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is, but I just want to add one important point of nuance.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's important to me to say anyway, is that there's a kind of toggling back and forth between small violence as tolerated, normal, what happens on frontiers, the kind of condition we all live with, and then these outbreaks of extreme violence.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So there are long phases in which your opponents are indeed not actually being characterized as the unseen other that should be exterminated.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a rapprochement, but not a peaceful one.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where the small violence comes in, right?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's this kind of bubbling along of violence that makes it possible to make those turns toward extreme violence feel lawful and understandable.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there isn't just a blanket, like, let's go get them.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: They, in fact, because there's a lot of commerce going on, there's a lot of, you know, interaction going on.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's important to say, I think, that in many of these settings, there is a sincere desire for peace.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: People know that they do better when they're not in the middle of a major war, right?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: That they crave a certain kind of order and peace.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so on both sides of these long phases of violence, uh, there's a kind of search for peace in the context of perpetual war, right?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, very interesting.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Part of it is uh, I don't know whether it's the only thing, but part of it is the eruption of the mass exterminatory violence is we have to finally show who is in charge here.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: You must behave and fall into line.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's performative as much as uh Obviously military.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not military.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's we are going to crush this place to demonstrate we are in charge.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then we can go back to peace.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: But it has to be peace on our terms.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think if I had an aha moment at any point in working on this book, it was when I was reading about what historians used to call the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the conflicts there between uh Christian polities and Muslim polities, which by the way is an oversimplification of what was going on, but it was much more fractured than that.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: But as I was reading about it, I came across uh some wonderful work by Spanish historians that shows that there were just serial truces throughout this period.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the centrality of the truce, you know, I could see was a very important structuring element of these conflicts.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: So just to give an example, because we've been talking in abstract terms, so it might be helpful to listeners to have something more concrete.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: In the 150 years leading up to the conquest of Grenada by Catholic monarchs and their forces, which happened in that big year of 1492, such a big year.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um there were there were 74 truces.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of truces, and they were negotiations really, often explicit recognition of an imbalance of power.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they were not understood as truces between equal parties.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were already understood as between unequal forces.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there was tribute being paid from one side to the other.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: The thing about truces is they aren't really peace agreements, they are breaks from war.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's how they're defined by legal theorists, and that's how they're used in practice.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're breaks from war.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what that means is that either side can return to war without giving new justifications.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just the truce is off, we're back to war.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And either side, and this of course the stronger side did very often, can accuse the other of breaking the truce.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when that happened, when that happened, there was a tendency to ratchet up the violence, right?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because this was not only a return to war, but it was a return to war with payback for disrupting the truce.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes these accusations of truce breaking were trumped up.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I use a couple of examples, not from the Iberian Peninsula, but elsewhere, where they were just sort of structured.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Demands were made that indigenous communities were simply not going to agree to.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it was an implicit truce.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: You are truce breakers, you are peace breakers.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And to restore the peace, we are going to come in and level your villages.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that intensity of violence came with a kind of energy about accusations of betrayal that is built into this process of making and breaking truces or making and accusing the other side of breaking truces.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty chilling.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's so uh resonant of uh things we see in in the world uh until today.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it is very, very telling.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: You distinguish, uh, as we said uh at the outset between two periods in in this uh last 500 years, the world of plunder, which is, I would say, the beginning of the European imperial oceanic expansion, and the imbalance of power was there, but it was not decisive.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so the battle lines were everywhere, and it was uh more nonstop violence uh of a frontier sort.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then the world of armed peace of uh the 19th century, which I think one could say was the age of high European global imperialism.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the fascinating things for me is once we come to the world of armed peace, I want you to describe what changes, but one of the things that changes is uh the world of ideas.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, these the top philosophers are Bentham and Mill and others are defining this new world from a Eurocentric perspective, of course, but they're redefining war, peace, law, order to understand uh what is essentially uh a world of uh imperial violence.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: So could you describe what's the difference of the first phase and the second phase of the move from the world of plunder to the world of armed peace and what happens in the world of ideas because suddenly all the famous names that we read and our favorite philosophers are showing up in a rather sometimes peculiar way.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll start by saying, of course, plunder and raiding continue.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so this isn't just a sort of switch over to a new form of business, but uh it's much more gradual than that.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: But really, it's this kind of post-Napoleonic ascension of Britain as a global power, the shift towards a kind of inter-imperial regulatory order, which is how I like to think about it in regions across the world, and also as an after-effect of major conflicts, which I think it's important to say are not outside the narrative entirely, right?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: There is global militarization by these empire states.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the big problems, as you know, it's a problem for economists too, I believe, is how to describe this kind of push for influence and domination, hegemony by these imperial forces in a period where actually, in many parts of the world, they are not engaging in direct conquest, right?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're not taking over territories.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a kind of push against this for a long period of time.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so, what do we call that?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: We call it informal empire.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Usually we look at the expansion of commerce, uh global commerce and capitalism as an engine of that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I wanted to ask, you know, what's happening with violence, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: How does violence help to structure that kind of world?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the small violence that really matters now.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and as I said before, you get this kind of globalization of imperial military forces on the seas, but also on land.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And often they're treated differently.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I try very hard to put them uh together and treat them uh together in the book.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the the captains and commanders are just authorized to do violence, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're given very specific instructions.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: They should protect imperial subjects, and anytime they see imperial subjects in danger, they can do what they will, basically.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mow down the crowds, because now we're starting to get machine guns and uh and uh other industrial.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it really is kind of extraordinary that these captains and commanders are who are just out and about are charged with making these decisions.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: They can't telegraph back yet.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: They just are.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: They're authorized to do to do this.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that has always intrigued me is how this is talked about in the Metropole.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's a concerted discourse to talk about these what I call protection emergencies and the importance of protecting imperial subjects.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: But then people like Bentham and others find a way to use this discourse of protection, this idea about protecting subjects, and they just make it very elastic so that it comes to be a responsibility of these armed agents in empire, not just to protect subjects, but to protect imperial interests.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that move from imperial subject protection hood to imperial interest protection hood happens in the 19th century.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's actively kind of worked up in the halls of parliament in Britain and elsewhere in academic drawing rooms as well.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it underwrites this kind of shift to armed peace, to this world in which there are military forces out and about, and they can engage now not just to protect subjects who might be in danger, but to protect imperial interests, which is this vague term that encompasses all kinds of things.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you get small wars breaking out uh that are set off by uh attacks on imperial subjects, but also that are set off by confiscation of property, or that are about trading rights being denied to Europeans.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: And these turn into also protection emergencies.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the opium war is a pretty good example, right?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: It really starts out with one of these protection emergencies about the confiscation of uh property of people who are defined as British merchants.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's to protect British interests, imperial interests that are the first steps of that war.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really common pattern.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's fascinating.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: The law becomes, of course, structured legitimate violence, and the idea of peace, the 19th century becomes uh an age of peace movements, but peace movements led by empires.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So peace is on the terms as defined by the empire, which is also fascinating.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's not peace with justice or even self-reflection, but it is peace in this sense.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there's a kind of policing language that goes along with it.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Restoration of order, right?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: These are now conflicts that are being defined as acts of peacemaking because they are seen as ordering kinds of acts.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a legal language that was created at the time, refined, I should say, to describe the lawfulness of acts of defense that look pretty aggressive, but they're described as um acts of defense.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who writes that?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, international lawyers uh in the late 19th century come up with a language of violence, it's lawfulness of violence short of war.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it includes defensive acts, and you begin to see a turn away from reprisal, although the language of reprisal is very, very central to a lot of these engagements.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, really, what I would say is that in the history of international law, we tend to see this as a kind of a blip where people were talking about these ways of making violence short of war lawful.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then they stopped talking about that in the 20th century and start talking about just banning war altogether.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: But we know from where we sit in history that describing actions that look pretty aggressive and destructive as defensive actions is still very much a part of it's a part of international law, but more than that, it's a part of international practice.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's brilliant what you said and really key that the way the law transforms things is that what used to be called war becomes called policing.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Policing is defending the law.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so a military action that restores order as it's defined by one side isn't war.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's policing, it's legal.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's it, in fact, it's the utter defense of the rule of law.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the other piece of this change that I describe, because now a lot of these actions are being defined as actions that are happening inside imperial spheres of influence.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the language of policing is the language of kind of domestic law.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a long period in which empires really imperial law is really kind of standing in for international law, right?
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Imperial legalities are actually structuring this violence and the way people are talking and thinking about it across the globe.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: One of the interesting things, maybe it's related to this, is that while it's not literally true what I'm about to say, I think it is kind of true, which is that the wars by then, towards the end of the 19th century, outside of Europe were not wars between the empires, but wars of finalizing the dominance of each of the empires within societies that were resisting.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I always found completely remarkable the politess and diplomacy at the Congress of Berlin in 1885 when Europe politely divided up Africa.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't squabble among each other, they just divided the map.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: There were no Africans there, but Europe was very civilized.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so Europe wasn't going to go to war with itself over Africa, it was going to divide up Africa.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and in a way, it's a kind of international law.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe part of what is happening is, of course, there's fierce resistance everywhere to these empires, and that's the constant violence, but it's now defined as an internal violence, like you say, because it's internal to the empire.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really a policing function.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: States are supposed to have the monopoly of power within their state, and so this is about policing.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not called war anymore.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good way to say it.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that internalization of the logic of violence then also applies to this question about how much violence you can do, right?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you then see people who are resisting, you define them as unruly rebels who are being offered incorporation into a peaceful empire, but are resisting this.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just can't get it.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and of course, then come the concentration camps and the extermination in Southwest uh Africa by the Germans and the camps by Britain uh in South Africa and so forth.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: The violence can become awfully extreme in the name of creating political order.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I find sometimes uh when I write about these things that it's easier to communicate about these trends if you take an unfamiliar example.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the unfamiliar example, I think it's unfamiliar to most readers outside Australasia that I take in the book is of the war against Aborigines in Tasmania.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Small place.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Far away.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, far away off the southern part of Australia.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And there, in just a very small location, you see this whole process unfold.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have some settlement, and then there's violence around the edges, often perpetrated and started by the settlers themselves, with Aborigines uh defending themselves, a kind of raiding back and forth.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: And these are defined then as protection emergencies, and they lead to an authorization to decide on violence on the spot and to organize vigilanteism, so private violence again, against Aborigines.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And there is the potential for viewing them, and some quote-unquote peaceful Aborigines are reclassified as sub British subjects.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so there's a potential for viewing them as being incorporated, but then it makes it equally, equally easy to say that those who are continuing to be violent or who are refusing to move, simply to move, to make room for settlement, are natural enemies.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they are rebels who will never make peace.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that makes it possible to organize uh an extermination campaign and ultimately exile off the island all of those who are left from that.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just a little, you know, it's a micro history, but it shows a dynamic that then plays out in many other places.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned to you before we started that uh as I was reading the book, so much about Israel and Palestine came to mind.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Gaza, and as you're just talking, also the West Bank, where there are Israeli settlers uh that are in direct, I would say, vigilante mode vis-a-vis Palestinian populations on the West Bank and so on.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: So much of the rhetoric, the dynamics, the justifications, I felt you had opened up this window of how these conflicts are felt.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: From the Palestinian side, you're taking our land, you're invading us.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: From the Israeli side, you're violating order.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: We need to re-establish order.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then these paroxysms of extreme violence that we're witnessing before our eyes are absolutely shocking.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you could just reflect on that a little bit.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, historians, we usually uh pray for something that happened to give greater relevance to our books when they come out.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in this case, it's not your kind of book, I'm afraid.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, in this case, I I would be happy for a lot less relevance.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um as I was I was writing the book on my mind.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'll get to this in a minute, but as I was writing it on my mind was actually Ukraine.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I do talk about it a bit in the book, and and equally the war on terror and how it is narrated.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: That really is narrated the same way.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the because the war on terror, yes, it's a policing function, it's an ordering function, and the drone warfare actually involves these very same kinds, similar, familiar kinds of machinations about who gets to decide on the small violence and how far down or up the pecking order that decision is made.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I do discuss that briefly in the book.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: I discuss Ukraine, which is absolutely an imperial framework.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: It is an imperial language that Putin used in describing and justifying the invasion.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, now, unfortunately, in our current news cycle, the US is now using an imperial language.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I find it two empires clashing.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was on my mind as I was writing, but then violence in Gaza explodes.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh a couple of things really were on my mind as I was watching with horror as with the rest of the world what was going on there from the past, I should say.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: So one of these is the kind of perpetual conflict dimension of this.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: We know that this is not a war that just started, right?
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's part of a long, long series of smaller conflicts.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have to think about it that way, or we won't understand it at all.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I was already preparing in the early stages of the war, preparing myself for the moment when there would be a truce.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was clear early on that everyone was angling, everyone who wanted the fighting to be contained was angling for truce making.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a kind of what I describe as a kind of tragedy of the truce.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very weak instrument for peacemaking, but it's the only one we've got.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone reaches for the truce.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought to myself, as soon as there's a truce, and I hoped like everyone else that there would be much sooner than it occurred, but as I thought, as soon as there's a truce, there's going to be this kind of wariness and this discourse about the other side about to break that truce.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there might be very severe violence in the aftermath of that.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that is something that I am very concerned about at the moment, because we can see the truce coming to an end and the language already kind of ratcheting up about who made the negotiations for a longer peace impossible.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the other side then is accused of, in this case, I think the Palestinian side is being very volubly accused of being against turning the truce into a permanent peace.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm very concerned about the atrocities that might come in the wake of the truce, because that is something that one sees from the historical record.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it is so stunning, by the way, and I haven't thought about it this way, but as you describe the dozens of truces in the uh Reconquista, for example, these are truces that are made not with an ultimate political settlement.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: They really are just a cessation.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it has been stunning to me how the discussions of these truces, I shake them, settle the fundamental conflict, but they don't even touch it sometimes.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just stop the fighting, but you know that it's not going to the core of anything.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I just one further thought on that, because it it is so interesting to think about, uh, although distressing to think about, is that another insight that comes from foregrounding truces is that sometimes peace agreements, what we think about as peace agreements, as permanent peces, look a lot like truces.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say, they are structured in ways that make them unstable.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's that's another insight that comes from the history of truces.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing that obviously was very relevant to this conflict is the way that the rationale of defensive war was being used by the Israelis for very substantial deaths to uh of civilian populations.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that too has echoes from the imperial past that are hard to deny.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for this really remarkable book.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I know it builds on a whole remarkable corpus that you have developed over many, many years of wonderful writing.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: We've been speaking with the Professor Lauren Benton, the Barton Briggs Professor of History and Law at Yale, about an absolutely remarkable book that I want to recommend to readers all over the world.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: They called it Peace, Worlds of Imperial Violence.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is remarkable history, remarkable history of thought, and remarkably relevant hour by hour, day by day in our world today.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it is a must read.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Professor Benton, for being with me on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for a great conversation.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.