Book Review: Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Priyasha Saksena |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918760886 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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LAUREN BENTON and LISA FORD, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of Interna-
tional Law, 1800-1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 288, ISBN
9780674737464, £31.95 (hbk).
In this insightful monograph, Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford trace the origins of what we
now call international law to the project of reordering the British Empire in the first half
of the 19th century. Specifically, they focus on legal change, arguing that ‘[l]aw was
everywhere’, (p. 2) and it acted as the medium of multiple projects of imperial reform.
These efforts to ‘remake the empire as a whole in the shadow of law’, (p. 3) they argue in
their vivid prose, ‘installed empire as the ghost in the machine of global governance’
(p. 1). This is a bold project with breath-taking scope, organized around a series of case
studies that hop from continent to continent across the empire over which the sun
never set.
The history of international law is an area of considerable scholarly interest. How-
ever, unlike other projects that search for the origins of principles of international law,
the authors choose to engage in the identification of ‘patterns of regional and global
law that derived from the British Empire’s partial and Pyrrhic efforts to order the world’
(p. 181). The crux of their argument is that ‘law talk’ used in intra-imperial legal
conflicts ‘extruded into global geopolitics and created frameworks for interpolity law’
(p. 4). Studying the patterns generated by imperial disputes and conflicts, therefore,
provides insights into international law itself, and more specifically, on two still-felt
effects on global legal frameworks. The first is the tortured relationship between munic-
ipal and international law; the authors argue that this draws back to debates about the
‘sharpening divide between legalities inside and outside the empire’ (pp. 187–188). The
second is the very language of international law; they argue that even today international
debates are often conducted using the ‘language and categories elaborated within the
British global order’ (p. 192)....
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