No War Is Too Small: How Localized Conflicts Sparked Imperial Violence

In a speech on the Vietnam War in September 1967, President Lyndon Johnson listed reasons the United States should stay the course in the increasingly unpopular war. Among them was the claim that limited violence would prevent catastrophic violence, perhaps even nuclear war. The administration promised measured escalation. But by the end of that year, half a million American troops were in Southeast Asia, and the scope of death and destruction had erased any notion that the war could be a vehicle for peace.

I came of age in the United States during the Vietnam War. Like so many others in my generation, I thought the war was an abomination—a deep tragedy, in fact. Yet at the time I was also painfully aware of how little I knew about Vietnam and its history, and how impoverished our knowledge was about U.S. and European imperialism. I had only vague ideas about how to critique the claim that distant wars might be contained—or bent to some higher purpose.

By the time, years later, I began to study the history of European empires, I was working alongside many other historians striving to deepen our understanding of the imperial past. As I write these lines, I am surrounded by piles of recent books with “empire” in their titles. They analyze the halting origins of European global power and the troubled workings of imperial rule. They characterize the United States as an empire-state in the mold of European empires. They map a world of repression, while also documenting rebellion, persisting Indigenous sovereignty, and pluralism. Still, some of the puzzles of my youth endure. Small wars continue to multiply around the world, many echoing the logic and language of imperial violence. Governments still assert that waging limited war is both possible and necessary. And justifications for violence not classed as war remain both opaque and consequential.

This book places imperial small wars at the center of a new history of global order. It shows, first, how societies across the world embraced raiding and captive taking. Beginning in the fifteenth century, European empires mobilized these ancient practices on a novel scale. Conflicts in and on the edges of empires composed a global regime of plunder. Growing inequalities of power gave rise to new frameworks for violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Europeans asserted the right to set the laws of war and intervene anywhere to protect imperial subjects and interests, they assembled a sprawling regime of armed peace dominated by a handful of world powers.

As I traced these patterns, I was shocked by the frequency with which serial minor conflicts opened pathways to extreme violence. Wars that were billed as small and manageable exposed civilian populations to ferocious attacks by fighters suddenly released, it seemed, from any obligation to refrain from cruelty. Strategies that had appeared to enhance security just as often produced catastrophe. Like players in a game in which routine moves drop pieces to positions on the board where all is lost, participants in small wars were aware that utter devastation was a real possibility, but they could not prevent it. Empires and their agents, meanwhile, deftly combined pledges to check the ravages of war with authorization of spectacular violence.

In writing about this history, I had to reach for new ways of studying “small wars.” Military analysts have tended to describe small wars as manifestations of insurgency and counterinsurgency. The bias has driven them to focus on questions about how and why global powers so often failed in the face of unconventional enemies. Typical of this tendency is the minor industry in the United States that aimed at assessing why American officials made so many wrong moves in Vietnam. But schooling sponsors of war to learn lessons from the past so they might do a better job next time is an odd, even chilling, objective. It also answers the wrong questions. Our aim should not be to help humanity master the art of war but to understand the arc of war—the logic and practices that move antagonists with exquisite precision from conflict to conflict, and from exercises in containment right up to the edge of atrocity.

If I couldn’t rely on military analysts as guides, I also needed to cultivate a healthy skepticism of some common approaches to law and war. Followers of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who began to ponder war when he was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party, have focused on the relation of imperial violence to states of emergency or exception. The approach has opened new ways of mapping the dynamics of imperial violence, but it also misses a great deal. Although empires frequently deployed emergency measures like martial law to sanction and systematize violent repression, their baseline condition was low-level violence organized in routine sequences. This ongoing violence and its many forms gave emergencies their logic and rhythm—not the other way around. The phenomenon also naturalized extreme violence. The slaughter and enslavement of civilians, starvation of whole towns, and campaigns of dispossession—these and other brutal projects were integral parts of the global imperial order.

The age of empires is in many ways still with us. In the twentieth century, international treaties and institutions sought to ban war, and it is tempting either to portray the proliferation of small wars as a sign of international law’s failures or to regard parts of the world as descending into the unruly warfare of the premodern past. Instead, this book suggests many continuities in the mechanisms, justifications, and rhythms of war across global and international orders. When twentieth-century empire-states packaged their violence, for example, as an inside job—a work of policing, not war—they were drawing on an imperial repertoire. It is worth exposing such continuities rather than highlighting the novelty of contemporary puzzles about how to regulate and limit war.

Today’s warmongers resemble agents of empires when they claim that “small” violence is necessary to keep and produce order. They deploy imperial languages of protection and peacekeeping to justify undeclared wars in far places. And they echo imperial sponsors when they assert that it is possible to limit the suffering unleashed by war. To be able to follow the underlying logic of small wars in the present, we need to understand the rhythms and rationales of imperial violence in the half millennium before the twentieth century.

It is fair to ask whether linking imperial violence to global order might shift attention away from the undisputed role of empires as engines of inequality and racism. The opposite is true. Imperial small wars deserve attention precisely because their histories help to illuminate the politics of difference and hierarchy, from racial exclusion to class and religious conflict. The analysis calls for care. The term “small wars” cannot be used or taken to reproduce the terms of European power by making Indigenous suffering seem like a minor phenomenon. The goal is emphatically not to support nostalgic champions of the greatness and civilizational gifts of past empires. The label “small wars” instead conveys something real and important about how imperial violence was organized—its staccato rhythm and its ad hoc justifications. The term reflects the insight that empires specialized in violence at the threshold of war and peace.

The suffering inflicted in imperial small wars was, of course, never truly small. Death in a skirmish or a desperate run to safety from a sharp, brief war was no less tragic for victims than losses in the context of major wars. It was also no great consolation to people caught up in wars to know about efforts to contain conflict. Yet writing the history of small-scale violence in all its forms recognizes the widespread preoccupation in the early modern world with defining violence between war and peace. The search occupied famous jurists and theologians, as well as obscure authors of diaries, logbooks, petitions, and reports. Unlettered warriors and captives also had their say. We would be hiding vital parts of history if we ignored the experiences of participants in small wars in empires and the swirling commentary, at all levels of society, about them.

Connections between the world of powerful European empires and the global order of the twenty-first century were very present as I was writing this book. Evidence of the imperial past swirled in news from global hot spots, and at home. In December 2021, the release of a cache of secret U.S. government documents about tactics in the “war on terror” revealed shockingly routine civilian killings in a program of so-called targeted strikes. On everyone’s mind in reading those reports was the awful footage of the previous summer, when a drone had rained death on a Kabul driveway packed with children. Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin drew on an imperial script to defend the invasion. He insisted for nearly a year on calling the war a “special military operation,” as if its purpose was to discipline a recalcitrant region of greater Russia rather than to absorb another nation-state. News from Ukraine, meanwhile, pushed reports about another deadly conflict, the Tigray War in Ethiopia, out of the news cycle. By the time a truce was signed in November 2022, nearly half a million people had died in the fighting there, yet the war was coded as small and faded quickly from public view outside the region. War was everywhere, and it was everywhere echoing imperial themes and testing the contours—and the very idea—of global order.

Other conflicts will grab headlines and test our capacity to define violence between war and peace. Histories of imperial violence help to explain a persistent preoccupation with limited war and the strangeness of perpetrators of war crimes claiming the mantle of peacemakers. Writing this book has helped me, more than I imagined it would, to think critically about war in my own time. It has returned me, too, to the problems I pondered in my youth: what accounts for persistent magical thinking about supposedly limited war as a rough equivalent to peace and what explains the ease with which we minimize faraway wars and their effects by making them appear small.

The history that I tell here shows that we have long possessed a high tolerance for violence between war and peace. Perhaps something more radical is needed, like a genuine movement to banish violence in all its forms. The question is not just whether such pacifism is politically possible but whether it would render us helpless in the face of bloodthirsty regimes and overt acts of aggression. This is an old and familiar tension. It reminds us that history might not serve as any sort of useful guide for action. We can hope, at least, that the politics of the past can teach us by analogy about the politics of the present. At the very least, a global history of imperial violence warns us to temper our expectations about humanity’s capacity to keep small wars small. It might also allow us to see the trapdoors to atrocity before we fall.

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Excerpted from They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence by Lauren Benton. Copyright © 2024 by Lauren Benton. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.