The Outsize Influence of Small Wars
The small wars waged by European empires generated arguments for the legitimacy of state violence that remain in use today. Lauren Benton’s new book, They Called it Peace, finds that the era of gunboat policing anticipated the age of the predator drone.
A colorized engraving shows a Connecticut Colony militia attacking an encampment of Pequot people during the Mystic massacre of 1637. (Stock Montage / Getty Images)
What do we see if we watch the camera footage taken by the Israeli drone that vaporized four unarmed young men as they walked through the ruins of Khan Younis? One answer might be an incident in a “small war.” Lauren Benton’s They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence is a nimble and provocative history of such conflicts, which developed at the frontiers of European empires and “at the threshold of peace and war.”
Benton ranges around the globe and through the centuries to select a few of the many small wars that flared up from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. With formidable erudition, she traces their continued influence on how states both justify and downplay violence today. Small turns out to be a misnomer: before they stopped, often only to start up again, these campaigns provided ample opportunity for atrocities. They were also outsize in their influence, generating arguments and procedures that allowed states to take extreme measures against enemies who were easily depicted as barbaric enemies of civilization.
The Law of the Wolf
Benton, an eminent global historian, criticizes the Eurocentrism with which historians often recount the development of the laws of war. Their narratives often follow the mid-twentieth century jurist Carl Schmitt in arguing that binding rules of conflict developed in and were limited to the civilized West. Of course, Europeans were not exactly sticklers for the Geneva Conventions. Schmitt himself had been an enthusiastic Nazi. But it has often been thought that they placed their atrocities in supposed “states of exception,” during which governments suspended accepted restraints in response to emergencies. When imperial powers committed such crimes outside Europe, they inflicted them in places where no one had ever imagined that war could be humane.
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