Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law by Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford (review)

"The life of the law is not logic, it is experience." Oliver Wendell Holmes didn't have international law or imperial structures in mind when he wrote this in 1881; but he could have been describing British efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century to make sense of their complex and dynamic global imperium, as Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford show. The British "rage for order" ran headlong into pirates, slave traders, mutineers, and the aspirations and exigencies of a variety of "men-on-the-spot." Many flavors of messiness resulted, defeating not only modernist dreams of a coherently-administered empire and well-organized international/inter-imperial global system, but also recent efforts to claim a solid historical foundation for contemporary international law.

In contrast to Benton's previous work (A Search for Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which took examples from multiple empires over 500 years, Rage for Order focuses on the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it ranges from Sydney to Ceylon to the Caribbean, and explores how issues of imperial administration, state formation, and relations between states, tribes, and empires affected each other. Benton and Ford stress that the disciplinary boundaries between the histories of empire, international law, and international relations have been drawn in much bolder strokes than the record justifies.

The authors' approach is episodic and their greatest strength is in extracting richly-told tales from unexplored corners of archives around the world. The trade-off for the depth of research, however, is the absence of a comprehensive overall characterization. Despite the title, "order" is only half the story. Benton and Ford show the tensions between metropolitan management and the complications of local circumstances and personalities. For example, the Crown's Law Officers in London regularly limited the powers of Mixed (British and Spanish or Portuguese or Brazilian) Commissions to impede the slave trade, reflecting domestic legal principles as well as diplomatic pressures. Indeed, it is precisely these tensions that undergird the authors' warning against looking for neat narratives about the role of law. In this context, however, again despite the title, "international law" is only half the story. There is more about the relationship of British municipal law and imperial law than about connections to the principles and rules along the familiar Grotius-Vattel-Wheaton-Lauterpacht line. There are no profound insights here; the engaging stories and nudges at new perspectives notwithstanding.

In their recasting of perspectives on the history of international law, however, Rage for Order makes two important points. First, that traditional views of the history of international law must be expanded 'horizontally' beyond an intellectual history perspective to encompass the actual practice of states and diplomats. Just as Martti Koskenniemi has deconstructed this intellectual history in The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Benton and Ford make the case for seeing what happened outside the select group of writers and lawyers who claimed to write the rules for the world. Second, they argue that historians should be getting out of the chanceries and conferences and into the day-to-day mix of explorers, administrators, naval officers, and others who resolved problems in the field. The idea of "history from below" has moved from revolution to cliché in most areas of history. Benton and Ford argue for a 'vertical' reconsideration; a sort of "history from the middle" in the areas of imperial and international law. Those in the "middle"—colonial administrators and commissioners—played an essential role in the creation of legal practices and the application of principles, but also in fleshing out the administration of the Empire. This cultural perspective on legal history, a Benton hallmark, has opened research opportunities in the legal side of imperial and international history.

The five substantive chapters of the book are organized thematically; each exploring a...