They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.



In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the nature of war and...