2025 Sylvia Thrupp Lecture (Presented by Comparative Studies in Society and History)

Lauren Benton’s 2005 CSSH article mapped piracy’s imperial role and challenged the romanticized view of pirates as legal outcasts in the early modern world. Two decades later, controversies about whether pirates were agents of empires or enemies of all persist. Benton moves beyond these debates here to gauge maritime raiding’s wider political valence. A single “piratical” cruise reveals the nineteenth-century Atlantic’s vast political spectrum, encompassing city-states, federations, and empires. In cases sparked by the voyage, the U.S. Supreme Court sought to narrow the definition of states and war. The voyage meanwhile connected to open-ended constitutional projects in Latin America featuring nation-states as one of many political possibilities. A micro-history of one voyage brings into focus the process by which the international order emerged through political fragmentation. The lessons remain relevant to understandings of global order and non-state violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. Benton’s most recent book, “They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence,” was published in 2024 and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize. Previous books include “Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850” (coauthored with Lisa Ford); “A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900”; and “Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900,” which received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize and the James Willard Hurst Book Prize. In 2019, Benton was awarded the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history.

Respondents:
Jatin Dua, University of Michigan
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California
Judith Scheele, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS)