The violence of empires: 500 years of punitive expeditions, control patrols and campaigns of spoliation | Babelia

The great battles of the past inevitably capture our attention for their drama, both for the glory of the victors and the tragedy of the defeated. After victory comes peace, and it seems that it is in those moments in which history resolves the crossroads opened by the war, that events dictate their course and certain alternatives are excluded. Historian Lauren Benton claims this They called it peace that this isn’t necessarily the best way to understand the violence in the story.

Between absolute peace and total war there exists a series of forms of aggression that allow violence and atrocities. The last 500 years are marked by a constant succession of raids, punitive expeditions, border operations, control patrols, “self-defense” actions, deterrent violence, retributive justice and expropriation campaigns. From the soldiers who carried it out to the great treatise writers, empires developed a language to argue that this violence was not war, but rather was intended to avoid it. Today’s concepts such as “preventive attack”, “right to defend oneself”, “special military operation” or “strategic objectives” are presented to us as limited but necessary aggressions to maintain peace. According to Benton, these contemporary nomenclatures connect to a long imperial genealogy that ultimately seeks to justify extreme violence outside the rules of war.

Benton’s capacity for synthesis allows him, in just over 300 pages, to explore minor conflicts in places and times as diverse as Oriola in 1306, Jamaica in 1660, India in 1748 or Río de la Plata in 1831. Not even the Spanish conquest of America escapes his analysis. After the promulgation of the Laws of Burgos of 1512, which regulated warfare against American Indians, legal stratagems and subterfuges to protect selective and brutal violence proliferated among the Spanish conquistadors. Hernán Cortés took care to inform the Spanish monarch that he “did not want war”; His actions, he said, were in self-defense and retribution. After an informal truce with the city of Cholula, Cortés gathered its inhabitants in the central courtyard to accuse them of preparing an attack and of having negotiated a false truce. The “royal laws,” Cortés argued, dictated the punishment “and that for their crime they must die.” The massacre of unarmed Cholultecas that followed was presented as self-defense and a punishable violation of the truce. It was violence in the name of peace. It is no coincidence that, at the height of the Spanish conquest of America, the term “pacification” entered the Spanish lexicon to designate actions against indigenous populations: conquest through peace.

By the 19th century, the scope became global and the violence was administered with an increasingly sophisticated legal framework. The British Empire presented itself as a propagator of law that guaranteed a fair legal framework for all those involved in a conflict. However, the protection of British subjects anywhere in the world transformed, through a methodical legal sequence, into violent campaigns on behalf of British interests. When the British government intervened on the island of Tasmania in 1823 to end violence between settlers and Aboriginal people, it warned the former that they could only act in self-defense. Soon the definition of self-defense became seriously distorted. Faced with settler expansion into new lands, the British government gave orders that Aboriginal people “be encouraged to withdraw” to unsettled areas. In this way, Aboriginal people who did not move away from white settlement lands were automatically redefined as enemies who had provoked the attack by not retreating. The frenzy of land distribution was thus accompanied by “hunting” expeditions by settlers protected by the British right of self-defense. This pattern, which brought the Tasmanian Aborigines to the brink of extermination, was repeated during the 19th and 20th centuries at all latitudes of the planet.

After reading Benton, it is difficult to see imperial violence as an accidental or anarchic phenomenon, a product of the chaos that accompanies colonization. Law and administration were at the center of its exercise, protecting it and justifying it with new names. The implications for the present are difficult to ignore, both for those who relativize the violence of the imperial past and for those who argue that violence is an effective remedy for peace. That violence leads to peace, Benton concludes, is a myth, and the last 500 years attest to it.