Trevelyan Lectures 2022

Professor Lauren Benton (Yale University)

On Small Wars: Legalities of Violence in European Empires

Small wars flourished in European empires but have received little systematic study. How does their history alter narratives of the development of the laws of war? What were the global effects of patterns of imperial violence? These lectures analyze efforts by imperial agents and European jurists to define ubiquitous practices such as raiding, captive taking, short strikes, and massacres as lawful and necessary. Comparative case studies connect small wars to global legal regimes. From about 1400 and 1750, European empires multiplied vast regional complexes of raiding and captive taking. From about the middle of the eighteenth century through the end of the long nineteenth century, militarized empires advanced a vision of global armed peace centered on European claims to authority over the conduct of war and helped to establish a permanent right to intervention. Some legal continuities extend to the current era of small wars and the global war on terror.

Lecture 1. February 9^th 
A Plague of Small Wars: Legal Logics of Conquest

Explores conquest as a composite of raiding, truce making, and truce breaking. Examples highlight the role of truces in structuring violence in fifteenth-century Iberia, sixteenth-century New Spain and seventeenth-century New England.

Lecture 2. February 10^th
Pirate Households: Private Violence and Public War in Garrison Empires

Examines the relation of households and war in early European empires. Imperial projects of household formation in garrison empires of the Indian Ocean and Caribbean supported a local right to make war and paralleled scholastic views on private violence and public war.

Lecture 3. February 16^th

Civilized Violence: Systems of States and Imperial Small Wars

Traces European efforts to regulate small wars in small wars in eighteenth century empires in South America and South Asia. Imperial agents claimed an exclusive European right to regulate conduct in war, foreshadowing ideas about ensembles of states as foundational to the law of nations.

Lecture 4. February 17^th
Global Armed Peace: Saving Subjects and Finding Enemies

Uncovers legalities of violence in naval and military patrols in the early nineteenth century. Protection emergencies – crises surrounding the defense of subjects – framed campaigns of extermination against Indigenous groups and paralleled shifts in metropolitan discourse toward the defense of imperial interests.