Lauren A. Benton | |
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| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) Johns Hopkins University (PhD) |
| Occupation | Historian |
Lauren Benton (born 1956) is an American historian known for her works on the global history of empires, colonial and imperial law, and the history of international law. She is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. [1]
Lauren Benton grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended high school at the Park School of Baltimore in Brooklandville, Maryland. She graduated from Harvard University and received a Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from Johns Hopkins University in 1987. [2]
Benton was professor of history at New York University and professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University before joining the faculty at Yale. She served as Dean for Humanities and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University and as Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University.[ citation needed ]
In 2019, Benton received the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history.
Benton's book Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 mapped a novel perspective centered on the study of jurisdictional conflicts in colonial societies. Introducing the term “jurisdictional politics,” Benton analyzed the impact of colonial legal conflicts on global legal regimes, state formation, and the rise of the modern international order. [7] In 2003, Law and Colonial Cultures was awarded the World History Association's Jerry Bentley Book Prize [8] , the James Willard Hurst Book Prize. [9] , and the PEWS Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award from the American Sociological Association.
Benton's book A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 showed that empires did not seek to control vast overseas territories but instead used varied legal practices to claim and control a patchwork of enclaves and corridors. A Search for Sovereignty introduced the term “legal posturing” to describe attempts by imperial agents, including pirates, to show that they were serving the interests of sovereign sponsors. The book also traced the influence of legal conflicts in European empires on definitions of sovereignty and other elements of early international law. [10]
Rage for Order: The British Empire and the History of International Law, 1800-1850, coauthored with Lisa Ford, uncovers a vast project of global legal reform in the early nineteenth century. Benton and Ford introduce the terms "middle power" and "vernacular constitutionalism" in describing global ordering. The book argues that imperial law prefigured international law and the rise of the interstate order.
They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press) traces the way imperial small wars made global order. It argues that pervasive practices of plunder and of imperial intervention set the stage for atrocities.
Before becoming a scholar of imperial history, Benton wrote about culture and economic development. Her book Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial Development in Spain examined industrial restructuring and the “informal sector,” or underground economy, in Spain during the transition to democracy of the 1970s and early 1980s. [5] Benton also co-edited a volume with Alejandro Portes and Manuel Castells on the informal sector in comparative economic development. [6]
Benton continues to investigate historical processes of regional and global ordering. Her work connects the study of empires and the history of international law by studying what Benton calls "global legal politics." She coined the term "interpolity law" to refer to global patterns of legal interactions in eras before the rise and proliferation of nation-states.
An empire is a political unit made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire exercises political control over the peripheries. Within an empire, different populations have different sets of rights and are governed differently. Narrowly defined, an empire is a sovereign state whose head of state is an emperor or empress; but not all states with aggregate territory under the rule of supreme authorities are called empires or are ruled by an emperor; nor have all self-described empires been accepted as such by contemporaries and historians.
Imperialism is the practice, theory or attitude of maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power and soft power. Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire. While related to the concepts of colonialism, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.
Sovereignty can generally be defined as supreme authority. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change existing laws. In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity. In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to do so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the same organization.
World history or global history as a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active in the late 20th century.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1929 to 1956 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.
Pax Britannica was the period of relative peace between the great powers. During this time, the British Empire became the global hegemonic power, developed additional informal empire, and adopted the role of a "global policeman".
The Constitution of the Empire of Japan, known informally as the Meiji Constitution, was the constitution of the Empire of Japan which was proclaimed on February 11, 1889, and remained in force between November 29, 1890, and May 2, 1947. Enacted after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it provided for a form of mixed constitutional and absolute monarchy, based jointly on the German and British models. In theory, the Emperor of Japan was the supreme leader, and the Cabinet, whose Prime Minister would be elected by a Privy Council, were his followers; in practice, the Emperor was head of state but the Prime Minister was the actual head of government. Under the Meiji Constitution, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet were not necessarily chosen from the elected members of parliament.
Peter Chardon Brooks Adams was an American attorney, historian, political scientist and a critic of capitalism.
Kenneth Pomeranz, FBA is University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1980, where he was a Telluride Scholar, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988, where he was a student of Jonathan Spence. He then taught at the University of California, Irvine, for more than 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. In 2013–2014 he was the president of the American Historical Association.
The Westphalian system, also known as Westphalian sovereignty, is a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle developed in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, based on the state theory of Jean Bodin and the natural law teachings of Hugo Grotius. It underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that "nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state."
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.
Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, FBA, FRSL was a British historian specialising in British Imperial, Indian and global history. From 1992 to 2013, he was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.
Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was an English classical scholar, historian, and political scientist writing on international relations. A British policymaker during World War I and a prominent liberal thinker, Zimmern played an important role in drafting the blueprint for what would become the League of Nations.
The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States, the British Raj, and the African colonies. John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.
The term informal empire describes the spheres of influence which a polity may develop that translate into a degree of influence over a region or country, which is not a formal colony, protectorate, tributary or vassal state of empire, as a result of its commercial, strategic or military interests.
Christianity and colonialism are often closely associated with each other due to the service of Christianity, in its various sects, as the state religion of the historical European colonial powers, in which Christians likewise made up the majority. Through a variety of methods, Christian missionaries acted as the "religious arms" of the imperialist powers of Europe. According to Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of Providence College Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the later half of the 20th century, missionaries were viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them", colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi".
The World History Association Bentley Book Prize is an annual award given by the World History Association. It was first awarded in 1999 as the World History Association Book Prize; the name was changed in 2012 to honor Jerry H. Bentley. The prize is $500.
The Ottoman Empire was governed by different sets of laws during its existence. The Qanun, sultanic law, co-existed with religious law. Legal administration in the Ottoman Empire was part of a larger scheme of balancing central and local authority. Ottoman power revolved crucially around the administration of the rights to land, which gave a space for the local authority develop the needs of the local millet. The jurisdictional complexity of the Ottoman Empire was aimed to permit the integration of culturally and religiously different groups.
Michael Goebel is a German historian. Since 2021, he has been Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin.
Saheed Aderinto is a Nigerian American Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University and an award-winning author. He is the Founding President of the Lagos Studies Association. In February 2023, Aderinto received the $300,000 Dan David Prize–the largest financial reward for excellence in the historical discipline in the world. He has published eight books, thirty-six journal articles and book chapters, forty encyclopedia articles, and twenty book reviews.
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