"With characteristic lucidity, subtlety, and grace, Lauren Benton highlights how the boundary between private violence and public war was perpetually blurred and renegotiated across the imperial world. They Called It Peace demonstrates that small wars have had outsized consequences for world order both in the past and enduringly into the present." --David Armitage, author of Civil Wars: A History in Ideas "Elegantly and grippingly written, They Called It Peace works brilliantly with its complex material, bringing out the great range of forms of imperial violence that have proliferated in the space between all-out war and all-out peace and using them to power deeply original historical arguments. Lauren Benton connects contemporary political theory and its categories with raids and treaty making in a way that is unusual, always illuminating and never forced. The topicality of this rigorous and exciting book is obvious: as Benton shows, we live in a world shaped by the legacy of 'small wars' and by their persistence in the present." --Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 "Our greatest historian of empire and law is at the height of her powers in this breathtaking reinterpretation of 'small wars' that did--and do--massive damage. Lauren Benton reads canonical writers against the backdrop of patterned and routine force across centuries and hears those often omitted from self-congratulatory stories of how the violent weaned themselves from their violence. The results decisively rebuke those exaggerating breakthroughs for humanity or peace in a world of contestation and domination--past and present.

" --Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War "An important global reinterpretation of the relationship between violence, empire, and law." --Heidi J. S. Tworek, author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945.