Lauren Benton | Yale University (original) (raw)
Books by Lauren Benton
Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (eds.) (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2020
Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, and Bain Attwood (eds.) (Cambridge University Press), 2017
For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between poli... more For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between polities. Protection underpinned sprawling tributary systems, permeated networks of long-distance trade, reinforced claims of royal authority in distant colonies and structured treaties. Empires made routine use of protection as they extended their influence, projecting authority over old and new subjects, forcing weaker parties to pay them for safe conduct and, sometimes, paying for it themselves. The result was a fluid politics that absorbed both the powerful and the weak while giving rise to institutions and jurisdictional arrangements with broad geographic scope and influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to trace the long history of protection across empires in Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe and the Americas. Employing a global lens, it offers an innovative way of understanding the formation and growth of empires and uncovers new dimensions of the relation of empires to regional and global order.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford (Harvard University Press), 2016
International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it ... more International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain’s global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureaucratic dispatches rather than legal treatises and case law. Tracing constitutional politics around the world, Rage for Order shows that attempts to refashion the British imperial constitution touched on all the controversial issues of the day, from slavery to revolution. Scandals in turbulent colonies targeted petty despots and augmented the power of the Crown to intervene in the administration of justice. Campaigns to police piracy and slave trading linked British interests to the stability of politically fragmented regions. Dull bureaucrats dominated legal reform, but they did not act in isolation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, convicts, merchants, and sailors all scrambled to play a part in reordering the empire and the world beyond it. Yet, through it all, legal reform focused on promoting order, not advancing human rights or charting liberalism.
Rage for Order maps a formative phase in world history when imperial, not international, law anchored visions of global order. This sweeping story changes the way we think about the legacy of the British Empire and the meaning of international law today.
Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (eds.) (NYU Press), 2013
This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. ... more This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule.
The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.
Cambridge University Press, 2010
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography ... more A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.
Cambridge University Press, 2002
Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and... more Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. In the early modern world, the special legal status of cultural and religious others itself became an element of continuity across culturally diverse empires. In the nineteenth century, the state's assertion of a singular legal authority responded to repetitive legal conflicts - not simply to the imposition of Western models of governance. Indigenous subjects across time and in all settings were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law - and, by extension, in shaping the international order.
SUNY Press, 1990
Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs ... more Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Benton examines the transformation of ideas about work and gender, the shifting lines of conflict between workers and employers, and growing tensions between national and regional interests. She shows that these elements of the workplace and national politics, rather than the logic of economic development, command the new industrial order.
Alejandro Portes, Manuell Castells, Lauren Benton (eds.) (Johns Hopkins University Press), 1989
A New York roofer requests payment in cash. A Bogota car mechanic sets up "shop" on a quiet side ... more A New York roofer requests payment in cash. A Bogota car mechanic sets up "shop" on a quiet side street. Four Mexican immigrants assemble semiconductors in a San Diego home. A Leningrad doctor sells needed medicine to a desperate patient. All are part of a growing worldwide phenomenon that is widely known but little understood. The informal or underground economy is thriving today, not only in the Third World countries where it was first reported and studied but also in Eastern Europe and the developed nations of the West.
The Informal Economy is the first book to bring together studies from all three of these settings and to integrate them into a coherent theoretical framework. Taking an international perspective, the authors dispel a number of misconceptions about the informal economy. They make clear, for instance, that it is not solely a province of the poor. Cutting across social strata, it reflects a political and economic realignment between employers and workers and a shift in the regulatory mission of the government. Throughout, the authors' theoretical observations serve not only to unify material from diverse sources but also to map out directions for further research.
Journal Articles by Lauren Benton
Past & Present , 2021
The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in... more The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers’ power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory’s history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order.
Journal of the History of International Law, 2019
This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodo... more This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodologies in international law as supposedly focused on rooting out anachronism and separating history from the politics of the present. First, the article shows that this (mis)characterization of historical methods is based on a misreading of the work of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. Second, it argues that Orford errs in assuming that the Cambridge School is representative of historical approaches. The article exposes this error by tracing key strands of socio-legal study of global legal history. That literature has generated new insights about such topics as vernacular discourses of international law and the influence of patterns of colonial politics on global ordering. This new global legal history takes ‘legal politics’ as its object of analysis while merging the study of praxis and theory in the history of international law.
Duke Journal of Comparative & International History, 2018
By definition, the term “conquest” implies the dominance of one political community over others. ... more By definition, the term “conquest” implies the dominance of one political community over others. By definition, too, “conquest” denotes war, and histories of conquest tend to feature episodes of extraordinary brutality, including the complete destruction of civilian settlements. This basic understanding of conquest as political dominance through warfare brings unity to narratives about historical settings as diverse as Inner Asia under Mongol assault, Muslim and Christian advances across the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish takeover of indigenous South America. The history of the early modern world has sometimes been styled as a history of invasion, occupation, and the sweeping cultural and institutional consequences of both. These basic assumptions about the nature of conquest deserve closer scrutiny. Rather than the stark opposition of conquering and conquered societies or the clear-cut dominance of victors over vanquished, early modern campaigns of conquest depended on, and also gave rise to, pluripolitical formations. Conquering and conquered societies boasted multiple corporate entities and jumbles of overlapping jurisdictions, and these plural structures guided the strategies and determined the pace and designs of conquest. Campaigns of conquest also produced new patterns of association in fragmented political fields, from experiments in confederation to the construction of fragile networks of alliances. The overwhelming power of conquerors and the catastrophic defeat of the conquered could coexist with the persistence of indigenous polities’ autonomy and often produced powerful constraints on the actions of imperial rulers. A closer look at conquest reveals, too, that peace pacts formed an integral part of the process. Whether labeled as imperial projects or not, conquests enlarged composite polities, and truces created allies and established tributary arrangements such that zones of relative, if unstable, calm sat adjacent to frontiers of open warfare. Parties to truces recognized
Leiden Journal of International Law , 2018
A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at t... more A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at the center of the history of international law. This article surveys key insights resulting from this move and assesses remaining challenges. In explaining how the study of law in particular imperial locations can illuminate global legal transformations, the article identifies cross-cutting themes of articles in this special volume.
Global Intellectual History, 2018
This essay identifies a shared problem in articles on space and intellectual history: the tension... more This essay identifies a shared problem in articles on space and intellectual history: the tension between representations of spaces of political community and spatial renderings of authority. A wide variety of imagined political communities feature in these studies: nation-states, empires, communes, confederations, regions, and disconnected global sites linked by political trajectories. The essay turns next to the problem of authority, including the challenges of analyzing disaggregated authority inside political communities, tracing the projection of authority beyond the boundaries of political communities, and reconciling movement with territorially based authority. Illustrations from the articles support the argument that the spatial relation of authority and political community will remain a key analytical lens for future research on space and political thought.
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2018
Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth ... more Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad’s troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.
Journal of Global History, 2017
References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of t... more References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.
Chicago-Kent Law Review , 2014
In laboring to uncover the legal origins of the American Revolution, historians of law in early A... more In laboring to uncover the legal origins of the American Revolution, historians of law in early America often separated the field from the comparative legal history of empires. William E. Nelson does not explicitly set out to place American colonial legal history in a global context in The Common Law in Colonial America. But in analyzing legal diversity and identifying elements of early legal convergence, Nelson does address key questions within the comparative history of empire and law. This article surveys Nelson’s contributions and places them alongside two other approaches to the study of colonial legal diversity and the constitution of empires. We argue that Nelson’s methodology of comparing colonial legal systems rather than contrasting them to poorly understood trends in English law represents an essential complement to two other novel approaches in the literature on law and empire: the study of processes spanning colonies and the analysis of metropolitan attempts to design an imperial legal order. Taken together, these methods promise to integrate fully the history of colonial American law within a global and comparative history of empire and law. The article thus describes Nelson’s The Common Law in Colonial America as an important contribution to this larger historiographic project.
Law, Culture, and the Humanities, 2013
This article explores the significance of widespread debates in empires about the exercise of arb... more This article explores the significance of widespread debates in empires about the exercise of arbitrary power. As particularly evident in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, colonial conflicts often centered on the nature and scope of the legal prerogatives of middling authorities. The focus on the proper relation of multiple authorities within composite polities was accompanied by claims about particular configurations of rights, by references to divisible sovereignty, and by legal strategies that appealed to the intervention of imperial sovereigns in the exercise of judicial power within private or subordinate jurisdictions. The result was an intimate connection between persistent references to petty despotism and an emerging framework for imperial constitutional politics.
Alabama Law Review, 2012
The case of Arthur Hodge unfolded at the boundaries of intra-imperial tensions and inter-imperi... more The case of Arthur Hodge unfolded at the boundaries of intra-imperial tensions and inter-imperial law. Its analysis uncovers direct ties between efforts to rein in slaveholders’ prerogatives and shifting inter-imperial legal relations. The immediate, local connection flowed through factional politics that linked the criminal case against Hodge to the operations of the vice-admiralty court overseeing disputed cases of maritime captures, or prize cases. At the center of the empire, the case merged with efforts to enhance imperial jurisdiction over both the conduct of prize courts and the operations of colonial criminal courts. The article also follows a central actor in the case, Governor–General Hugh Elliot, to consider the structural parallels of legal politics in the Leeward Islands and a major project of legal reform in Madras. The analysis thus moves outward from Tortola, first to consider another case of planter abuse of slaves on Nevis, then to the maritime Atlantic world, and finally to India, via London. Across these settings, imperial law evolved at the intersection of visions of local and global order and at the boundaries of municipal and international law.
The American Historical Review, 2012
El Mundo Atlántico y la Modernidad Iberoamericana, 1750-1850 , 2012
Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (eds.) (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2020
Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, and Bain Attwood (eds.) (Cambridge University Press), 2017
For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between poli... more For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between polities. Protection underpinned sprawling tributary systems, permeated networks of long-distance trade, reinforced claims of royal authority in distant colonies and structured treaties. Empires made routine use of protection as they extended their influence, projecting authority over old and new subjects, forcing weaker parties to pay them for safe conduct and, sometimes, paying for it themselves. The result was a fluid politics that absorbed both the powerful and the weak while giving rise to institutions and jurisdictional arrangements with broad geographic scope and influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to trace the long history of protection across empires in Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe and the Americas. Employing a global lens, it offers an innovative way of understanding the formation and growth of empires and uncovers new dimensions of the relation of empires to regional and global order.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford (Harvard University Press), 2016
International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it ... more International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain’s global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureaucratic dispatches rather than legal treatises and case law. Tracing constitutional politics around the world, Rage for Order shows that attempts to refashion the British imperial constitution touched on all the controversial issues of the day, from slavery to revolution. Scandals in turbulent colonies targeted petty despots and augmented the power of the Crown to intervene in the administration of justice. Campaigns to police piracy and slave trading linked British interests to the stability of politically fragmented regions. Dull bureaucrats dominated legal reform, but they did not act in isolation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, convicts, merchants, and sailors all scrambled to play a part in reordering the empire and the world beyond it. Yet, through it all, legal reform focused on promoting order, not advancing human rights or charting liberalism.
Rage for Order maps a formative phase in world history when imperial, not international, law anchored visions of global order. This sweeping story changes the way we think about the legacy of the British Empire and the meaning of international law today.
Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (eds.) (NYU Press), 2013
This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. ... more This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule.
The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.
Cambridge University Press, 2010
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography ... more A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.
Cambridge University Press, 2002
Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and... more Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. In the early modern world, the special legal status of cultural and religious others itself became an element of continuity across culturally diverse empires. In the nineteenth century, the state's assertion of a singular legal authority responded to repetitive legal conflicts - not simply to the imposition of Western models of governance. Indigenous subjects across time and in all settings were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law - and, by extension, in shaping the international order.
SUNY Press, 1990
Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs ... more Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Benton examines the transformation of ideas about work and gender, the shifting lines of conflict between workers and employers, and growing tensions between national and regional interests. She shows that these elements of the workplace and national politics, rather than the logic of economic development, command the new industrial order.
Alejandro Portes, Manuell Castells, Lauren Benton (eds.) (Johns Hopkins University Press), 1989
A New York roofer requests payment in cash. A Bogota car mechanic sets up "shop" on a quiet side ... more A New York roofer requests payment in cash. A Bogota car mechanic sets up "shop" on a quiet side street. Four Mexican immigrants assemble semiconductors in a San Diego home. A Leningrad doctor sells needed medicine to a desperate patient. All are part of a growing worldwide phenomenon that is widely known but little understood. The informal or underground economy is thriving today, not only in the Third World countries where it was first reported and studied but also in Eastern Europe and the developed nations of the West.
The Informal Economy is the first book to bring together studies from all three of these settings and to integrate them into a coherent theoretical framework. Taking an international perspective, the authors dispel a number of misconceptions about the informal economy. They make clear, for instance, that it is not solely a province of the poor. Cutting across social strata, it reflects a political and economic realignment between employers and workers and a shift in the regulatory mission of the government. Throughout, the authors' theoretical observations serve not only to unify material from diverse sources but also to map out directions for further research.
Past & Present , 2021
The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in... more The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers’ power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory’s history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order.
Journal of the History of International Law, 2019
This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodo... more This article presents a critique of recent writings, mainly by Anne Orford, of historical methodologies in international law as supposedly focused on rooting out anachronism and separating history from the politics of the present. First, the article shows that this (mis)characterization of historical methods is based on a misreading of the work of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. Second, it argues that Orford errs in assuming that the Cambridge School is representative of historical approaches. The article exposes this error by tracing key strands of socio-legal study of global legal history. That literature has generated new insights about such topics as vernacular discourses of international law and the influence of patterns of colonial politics on global ordering. This new global legal history takes ‘legal politics’ as its object of analysis while merging the study of praxis and theory in the history of international law.
Duke Journal of Comparative & International History, 2018
By definition, the term “conquest” implies the dominance of one political community over others. ... more By definition, the term “conquest” implies the dominance of one political community over others. By definition, too, “conquest” denotes war, and histories of conquest tend to feature episodes of extraordinary brutality, including the complete destruction of civilian settlements. This basic understanding of conquest as political dominance through warfare brings unity to narratives about historical settings as diverse as Inner Asia under Mongol assault, Muslim and Christian advances across the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish takeover of indigenous South America. The history of the early modern world has sometimes been styled as a history of invasion, occupation, and the sweeping cultural and institutional consequences of both. These basic assumptions about the nature of conquest deserve closer scrutiny. Rather than the stark opposition of conquering and conquered societies or the clear-cut dominance of victors over vanquished, early modern campaigns of conquest depended on, and also gave rise to, pluripolitical formations. Conquering and conquered societies boasted multiple corporate entities and jumbles of overlapping jurisdictions, and these plural structures guided the strategies and determined the pace and designs of conquest. Campaigns of conquest also produced new patterns of association in fragmented political fields, from experiments in confederation to the construction of fragile networks of alliances. The overwhelming power of conquerors and the catastrophic defeat of the conquered could coexist with the persistence of indigenous polities’ autonomy and often produced powerful constraints on the actions of imperial rulers. A closer look at conquest reveals, too, that peace pacts formed an integral part of the process. Whether labeled as imperial projects or not, conquests enlarged composite polities, and truces created allies and established tributary arrangements such that zones of relative, if unstable, calm sat adjacent to frontiers of open warfare. Parties to truces recognized
Leiden Journal of International Law , 2018
A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at t... more A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at the center of the history of international law. This article surveys key insights resulting from this move and assesses remaining challenges. In explaining how the study of law in particular imperial locations can illuminate global legal transformations, the article identifies cross-cutting themes of articles in this special volume.
Global Intellectual History, 2018
This essay identifies a shared problem in articles on space and intellectual history: the tension... more This essay identifies a shared problem in articles on space and intellectual history: the tension between representations of spaces of political community and spatial renderings of authority. A wide variety of imagined political communities feature in these studies: nation-states, empires, communes, confederations, regions, and disconnected global sites linked by political trajectories. The essay turns next to the problem of authority, including the challenges of analyzing disaggregated authority inside political communities, tracing the projection of authority beyond the boundaries of political communities, and reconciling movement with territorially based authority. Illustrations from the articles support the argument that the spatial relation of authority and political community will remain a key analytical lens for future research on space and political thought.
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2018
Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth ... more Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad’s troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.
Journal of Global History, 2017
References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of t... more References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.
Chicago-Kent Law Review , 2014
In laboring to uncover the legal origins of the American Revolution, historians of law in early A... more In laboring to uncover the legal origins of the American Revolution, historians of law in early America often separated the field from the comparative legal history of empires. William E. Nelson does not explicitly set out to place American colonial legal history in a global context in The Common Law in Colonial America. But in analyzing legal diversity and identifying elements of early legal convergence, Nelson does address key questions within the comparative history of empire and law. This article surveys Nelson’s contributions and places them alongside two other approaches to the study of colonial legal diversity and the constitution of empires. We argue that Nelson’s methodology of comparing colonial legal systems rather than contrasting them to poorly understood trends in English law represents an essential complement to two other novel approaches in the literature on law and empire: the study of processes spanning colonies and the analysis of metropolitan attempts to design an imperial legal order. Taken together, these methods promise to integrate fully the history of colonial American law within a global and comparative history of empire and law. The article thus describes Nelson’s The Common Law in Colonial America as an important contribution to this larger historiographic project.
Law, Culture, and the Humanities, 2013
This article explores the significance of widespread debates in empires about the exercise of arb... more This article explores the significance of widespread debates in empires about the exercise of arbitrary power. As particularly evident in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, colonial conflicts often centered on the nature and scope of the legal prerogatives of middling authorities. The focus on the proper relation of multiple authorities within composite polities was accompanied by claims about particular configurations of rights, by references to divisible sovereignty, and by legal strategies that appealed to the intervention of imperial sovereigns in the exercise of judicial power within private or subordinate jurisdictions. The result was an intimate connection between persistent references to petty despotism and an emerging framework for imperial constitutional politics.
Alabama Law Review, 2012
The case of Arthur Hodge unfolded at the boundaries of intra-imperial tensions and inter-imperi... more The case of Arthur Hodge unfolded at the boundaries of intra-imperial tensions and inter-imperial law. Its analysis uncovers direct ties between efforts to rein in slaveholders’ prerogatives and shifting inter-imperial legal relations. The immediate, local connection flowed through factional politics that linked the criminal case against Hodge to the operations of the vice-admiralty court overseeing disputed cases of maritime captures, or prize cases. At the center of the empire, the case merged with efforts to enhance imperial jurisdiction over both the conduct of prize courts and the operations of colonial criminal courts. The article also follows a central actor in the case, Governor–General Hugh Elliot, to consider the structural parallels of legal politics in the Leeward Islands and a major project of legal reform in Madras. The analysis thus moves outward from Tortola, first to consider another case of planter abuse of slaves on Nevis, then to the maritime Atlantic world, and finally to India, via London. Across these settings, imperial law evolved at the intersection of visions of local and global order and at the boundaries of municipal and international law.
The American Historical Review, 2012
El Mundo Atlántico y la Modernidad Iberoamericana, 1750-1850 , 2012
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2011
Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point ... more Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.
Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 2011
Historical research represents our richest vein of information about the workings of legal plural... more Historical research represents our richest vein of information about the workings of legal pluralism. Before the long nineteenth century, all legal orders featured jurisdictional tensions without strong claims of legal hegemony by states. In a world in which plural legal orders were the norm, multicentric jurisdictional orders created continuities across diverse regions and polities. What can we learn from the history of legal pluralism in considering its relation to economic development today? To begin, legal history can provide an analytic guide to grasping the complexities of current legal patterns and behavior. A particularly helpful rubric emerges out of studies of the legal history of empires. A second relevant fi nding confi rmed by historical studies of plural legal orders, including and especially empires, consists in the observation that legal actors — again, at all levels — tended to show a preference over time for adjudication in forums that seemed to provide a greater possibility of enforcement of rulings. This paper examines these phenomena in early modern societies in order to lay the groundwork for analyzing legal pluralism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By keeping in view the jurisdictional jockeying of imperial legal orders, we gain new perspective on the role of legal pluralism at major turning points in the development of international law. In particular, it becomes possible to understand nineteenth century prohibition regimes as forming through jurisdictional restructuring within and across global empires — a view that contrasts with traditional narratives of the rise of international law. Similarly, understanding the pervasiveness and persistence of strategies of appealing to imperial legal authority allows us to appreciate the effects on legal behavior of robust claims to the dominance of state law over subordinate jurisdictions in the twentieth century.
International Journal of Maritime History , 2011
Most lawyers and many historians represent piracy as the first broadly recognized crime against h... more Most lawyers and many historians represent piracy as the first broadly recognized crime against humanity. Efforts to control piracy are portrayed as the foundation for subsequent legal policies regarding violent non-state actors, including slave traders, anarchists and terrorists. The application in cases of piracy of universal jurisdiction – the right of any polity to apprehend, try, and punish offenders – emerges in such accounts as a long-settled element of global law. This perspective oversimplifies the complex legal history of piracy. Qualifications surrounding the application of universal jurisdiction in apprehending and punishing pirates crowd the historical record. The ambiguities extend across interconnected realms of theory and practice. Contrasting views on the law of piracy pervaded the writings of prominent jurists, and tensions within theory influenced, and in turn were shaped by, inconsistent and shifting state policies toward piracy over several centuries. Calls for universal jurisdiction for the punishment of pirates were always combined with more practical approaches defining piracy as a crime under municipal law (the law of particular polities). This article surveys the legal treatment of piracy from the sixteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the ways in which both theory and practice posed obstacles to the application of universal jurisdiction. The first section surveys the history of piracy and privateering in the early modern world, qualifying the dominant narrative of pirates as legal outsiders. The article then outlines nineteenth-century campaigns against slave trading as analogous to piracy and efforts to contain regional sea raiding as the products of imperial policy rather than results of a global consensus about international norms. The findings cast doubt on the view that universal jurisdiction served as a settled, guiding doctrine in the global legal history of piracy and points to imperial law as a fertile area for further research on piracy and its suppression.
Law and History Review, 2010
What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related conc... more What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French crowns to expansive Iberian claims supported by papal donations. Others have countered that allusions to terra nullius marked a temporary phase of imperial discourse and that claimants relied more often on other rationales for empire, rarely mentioning res nullius or terra nullius and often explicitly recognizing the ownership rights, and even the sovereignty, of local polities and indigenous peoples.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2008
Law and History Review, 2008
The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and... more The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and political traditions dating back to the early seventeenth century, in particular to early writings in international law and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. Recent scholarship has attacked this narrative from many angles. One approach has been to reexamine early modern European politics and discourse, in particular questioning whether, for example, the publication of Grotius's writings, or the Peace of Westphalia, functioned as a foundational moment in the history of the interstate order. A second, complementary approach has been to broaden the history of global order to encompass inter-imperial politics, including the legal relations of imperial powers and indigenous subjects. The two projects have been occasionally combined in efforts to trace the impact of imperial politics on trends in international law.
Quaderni di Relazioni Internazionali, 2007
Itinerario, 2006
There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expa... more There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.
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