Lauren Benton (historian)

Lauren A. Benton
Born	1956 Baltimore
Nationality	American
Academic background
Alma mater	Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University
Academic work
Discipline	History
Institutions	Vanderbilt University

Lauren Benton (born 1956) is an American historian known for her works on the history of empires, colonial and imperial law, and the history of international law. She is dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, where she holds the Nelson O. Tyrone, Jr. Chair in History and is a professor of history.

Biography

Lauren Benton was born in 1956 in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended high school at the Park School of Baltimore in Brooklandville, Maryland. She graduated from Harvard University in 1978, with a concentration in economics. Benton received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from Johns Hopkins University in 1987.

Benton’s early scholarship focused on culture and economic development. Her book Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial Development in Spain examined industrial restructuring and the “informal sector,” or underground economy, in Spain during the transition to democracy of the 1970s and early 1980s. Benton also co-edited a volume with Alejandro Portes and Manuel Castells on the informal sector in comparative economic development.

Benton radically changed the focus of her research with Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900, which mapped a novel perspective centered on the study of jurisdictional conflicts in colonial societies. Introducing the term “jurisdictional politics,” Benton analyzed the impact of jurisdictional tensions on global legal regimes, colonial state formation, and the rise of the modern international order. In 2003, Law and Colonial Cultures was awarded the World History Association Book Award and the James Willard Hurst Book Prize.

Benton continues to write on law and global change and has authored other books and several dozen articles analyzing such topics as imperial sovereignty, maritime law and piracy, the legal history of abolition, and the history of international law. Her book A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 showed that empires did not seek to control vast overseas territories but instead used various legal practices to claim and rule a patchwork of enclaves and corridors.

A Search for Sovereignty introduced the term “legal posturing” to describe attempts by imperial agents, including pirates, to show that they were serving the interests of sovereign sponsors. The book also traced the influence of legal conflicts in European empires on definitions of sovereignty and other elements of early international law.

Published works

Books

• Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

Selected Articles

• Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, "Empires and Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World," in Benton and Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850. New York University Press (2013).
• Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, "Magistrates in Empire: Convicts, Slaves, and the Remaking of Legal Pluralism in the British Empire," in Benton and Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850. New York University Press (2013).
• "Crime and Empire," in Philippa Levin and John Marriott, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories. Ashgate Press (2012): 393-406.
• “This Melancholy Labyrinth: The Trial of Arthur Hodge and the Boundaries of Imperial Law,” Alabama Law Review (2012): 100-1222.
• "Introduction: Forum on Law and Empire in Global Perspective," The American Historical Review 117(4) (2012): 1092-1100.
• "Una soberanía extraña: La Provincia Oriental enel mundo atlántico," 20/10: El Mundo Atlántico y la Modernidad Iberoamericana 1750-1850 1: 89-107 (2012).
• "Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law," in Saliha Bellmessous, ed., Indigenous versus European Land Claims, 1500-1914, Oxford University Press (2011):19-40.
• “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1780-1820,” Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, Vol. 39:3, (2011): 355-374.
• "Atlantic Law: Transformations of a Transoceanic Legal Regime," in Philip Morgan and Nicholas Canny, eds., Oxford Handbook on the Atlantic World, c 1450-1820, Oxford University Press (2011): 40-416.
• "Toward a New Legal History of Piracy: Maritime Legalities and the Myth of Universal Jurisdiction," International Journal of Maritime History XXIII, No. 1 (2011): 1-15.
• "Legal Problems of Empire in Gentili's Hispanica Advocatio," in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations, Oxford University Press (2010):269-282.
• Lauren Benton and Benjamin Straumann, “Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice,” Law and History Review 28:1 (2010): 1-38.

Awards

2003 World History Association Book Award
2003 James Willard Hurst Prize

External links

• Humanity Journal - Of Pirates, Empire, and Terror: An Interview With Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein
• Harvard International Law Journal - Book Review: Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900