International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires-especially in the British Empire's sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.

"Rage for Order is a book of exceptional range and insight. Its successes are numerous. At a time when questions of law and legalism are attracting more and more attention from historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire, but still tend to be considered within very specific contexts, its sweep and ambition are particularly welcome...Rage for Order is a book that deserves to have major implications both for international legal history, and for the history of modern imperialism."
-Alex Middleton, Reviews in History

"Rage for Order offers a fresh account of nineteenth-century global order that takes us beyond worn liberal and post-colonial narratives into a new and more adventurous terrain."
-Jens Bartelson, Australian Historical Studies

About the Author
Lauren Benton is Nelson O. Tyrone, Jr. Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Lisa Ford is the author of the prizewinning Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 and coauthor of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850. She is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales.

Reviews
This book is a major achievement. Benton and Ford provide a powerful new way of understanding the global reach and effects of modern British imperialism. By connecting projects of colonial governance with new visions of global legal ordering, they offer a bold rethinking of the imperial context for the emergence of modern international law. -- Robert Travers, Cornell University
The authors go deep into the archives to reveal the crucial interactions of countless colonial governors, crusading ship captains, misguided magistrates, inquisitive imperial commissioners, and frustrated Westminster bureaucrats whose words and deeds collectively constituted a nascent global legal order. By telling the often marvelous stories of law's minions rather than its mandarins, Benton and Ford have done nothing less than help us understand the shambling character of our own international legal order as it arose out of empire two centuries ago. -- Paul D. Halliday, University of Virginia
Benton and Ford marshal a vast array of archival evidence to shed new light on the development of law within and at the edges of the British Empire. They show that political and military activities were saturated with legal claims and that many and often competing actors-merchants and missionaries, sailors and convicts, middling officials and local elites-contributed to a 'new vernacular imperial constitutionalism,' with profound and unexpected consequences for international law. -- Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago
[Benton and Ford] present a substantially researched history of British administrative control in the nation's empire. -- S. R. Silverburg * Choice *
Rage for Order is a book of exceptional range and insight. Its successes are numerous. At a time when questions of law and legalism are attracting more and more attention from historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire, but still tend to be considered within very specific contexts, its sweep and ambition are particularly welcome...Rage for Order is a book that deserves to have major implications both for international legal history, and for the history of modern imperialism. It succeeds in positioning law at the very center of British imperial government and imperial political thinking in a way that future work will, or at least should, find impossible to ignore. -- Alex Middleton * Reviews in History *
Benton and Ford present a picture of law that was multi-centered and polyphonic but that nonetheless undergirded the expansion of British global power...This is a book which will receive a deservedly enthusiastic reception among scholars of law and empire, and which may well cause a stir with its more subversive trespasses into the field of international relations. -- Julia Stephens * British Studies *
Truly remarkable. Rage for Order is a stunning example of what can be achieved through a combination of erudition, conceptual innovation, and diligent work in the archives. This book describes in detail how the transformation of the global order that took place in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars was driven by legal reform in the British Empire...Rage for Order offers a fresh account of nineteenth-century global order that takes us beyond worn liberal and post- colonial narratives into a new and more adventurous terrain, and adds significant detail and nuance to those intellectual histories that have already done much to complicate received views. -- Jens Bartelson * Australian Historical Studies *


Awards
Nominated for James Willard Hurst Prize 2017 and Jerry Bentley Book Prize 2016 and Peter Gonville Stein Book Award 2017 and Jerry Bentley Prize 2017 and Leo Gershoy Award 2017.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674986855
Author Lauren Benton
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press