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.
Finely argued…untangles the corrupted and corrupting logic of
colonial peacekeeping…Outstanding in virtually every respect.
*Wall Street Journal*
Richly researched and perceptively argued…provides a very
convincing and much needed corrective to liberal narratives that
have emphasized the acquisition of both personal liberty and
colonial self-government in this era.
*American Historical Review*
Delivers on its claim to demonstrate a rising autocracy across the
empire. This top-down story provides the perspective of British
authorities. Ford is a compelling writer and each of the chapters
draws on a wide range of archival and published sources…Any book
that raises this many questions is certainly a valuable addition to
undergraduate and graduate syllabi and is sure to generate
productive historiographical conversations.
*H-Net Reviews*
Ford’s arguments are innovative, straightforward, and clear-cut,
and her methodology comprehensive…Highly recommended for scholars
and students interested in the history of British Empire, and more
broadly, the functioning of the complicated system of
colonialism.
*Journal of British Studies*
[The King’s Peace] has the potential to contribute to aspects of
the increasingly fractious debates on the rights and wrongs of
colonialism…[and] offers an opportunity to interrogate, through a
look backwards, certain arguments on the perennial difficulties all
governments face when balancing, on the one hand, the needs of
security and public order, and, on the other, the personal liberty
of those subject to their jurisdiction.
*Round Table*
The King’s Peace traces the British Empire’s increasingly
authoritarian law and order from Boston before the American
Revolution to Canada, Jamaica, India, and Australia during the
first half of the nineteenth century. If making war was how Britain
acquired its empire, keeping the peace, as Ford reminds us in this
elegant and important book, was how the British justified their
imperial persistence and rule.
*Eliga H. Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The
American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire*
Examining the heart of law—the king’s peace—Ford reveals its many
moods during a period when Britain’s empire covered ever more
peoples in ever more fraught circumstances. By telling us wonderful
stories filled with fascinating characters, she has given us a
major new global legal history of an era of rapid constitutional
change.
*Paul D. Halliday, author of Habeas Corpus: From England to
Empire*
In a wonderfully wide-ranging book, Ford argues that controversies
over order and disorder not only preoccupied British officials,
they also propelled reassertions of crown power, shifts to
autocratic rule, legal divergences between center and periphery,
and coercive peacekeeping across the empire. Powerfully argued and
masterfully written, this book compels readers to grapple with the
constitutional compromises made in the name of peace and good
order.
*Hannah Weiss Muller, author of Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of
Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire*
A persuasive and elegant study of law and governance in the British
Empire from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. Ford
examines the legal slippages which occurred as imperial officials
across the empire wrestled with the challenges of suppressing crime
and disorder and maintaining the social order. This book will
appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the British Empire,
‘war capitalism,’ and the nature of violence in imperial
expansion.
*Aaron Graham, author of Corruption, Party, and Government in
Britain, 1702–1713*
With global reach and local depth, this remarkable book
fundamentally revises how we should understand the British Empire’s
critical eighteenth-century transformations. In so doing, Ford
makes a powerful argument for locating the violence that underpins
modern state sovereignty not merely in its exceptions but its
rule.
*Philip J. Stern, author of The Company-State: Corporate
Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire
in India*
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