Description:

The Grand Strategy Program welcomes Yale historian Lauren Benton for a discussion of her new book They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press). In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

Benton is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. A comparative and world historian, she writes about global legal history and the history of European empires, especially British and Iberian empires. Benton is a recipient of the Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to global history, as well as a Berlin Prize fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and membership in the Institute for Advanced Studies. In 2022, she delivered the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge. Benton will be in conversation with Michael Brenes, co-Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History.