Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford's new book, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850, takes inspiration from an unlikely source. The book's title and epigraph come from the American poet Wallace Stevens's “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934). The poem was published almost a century outside the book's chronological focus, but its theme nonetheless proves spot on. Benton and Ford trace how, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain fostered a new global legal culture through its efforts to police the internal and external politics of its expanding empire.

At the heart of their account lies a paradox: the fundamentally disorderly quality of this ordering. From slavery to sovereignty, the process of imperial legal ordering was a haphazard, messy process. Yet despite its disorderly origins—or perhaps because of them—the results proved of enduring significance. Concepts from protectionism to imperial constitutionalism knit together diverse legal geographies into a loosely unified, hierarchical system. Buried within the book's conclusion, a second excerpt of Stevens's poetry cinches the argument: “A. A violent order is disorder; and / B. A great disorder is an order. These / Two things are one” (181).

A focus on this paradox leads Benton and Ford to approach the topic of international law through unexpected sources and methods. Much of the existing scholarship on the origins of international law focuses on the intellectual history of major theorists and leading precedents. Benton and Ford instead turn to the dusty minutia of committees of inquiry, colonial petitions, and internal memoranda. They argue that decades before international law emerged as a distinct field in the latter half of the nineteenth century, mid-level colonial bureaucrats were forging new patterns of global lawmaking in response to the everyday challenges of imperial governance. Colonial subjects—from unruly petitioners to demoted regional sovereigns—also left their mark on this project. Returning to a theme from their earlier works, Benton and Ford present a picture of law that was multi-centered and polyphonic but that nonetheless undergirded the expansion of British global power.

In the first substantive chapter of the book, Benton and Ford consider how colonial scandals over corrupt provincial officials and tyrannical slave owners contributed to imperial constitutionalism. Reflecting the lingering, but largely tamed, specter of eighteenth-century revolutionary fervor, fears of petty despotism fueled efforts to guarantee a minimal level of procedural justice through strengthening crown authority over colonial jurisdictions.

In the next, and arguably most innovative, chapter of the book, the authors turn to the seemingly dry terrain of imperial law commissions. Regional studies of colonial rule routinely cite specific law commission reports on topics from the civil status of former convicts in New South Wales to legal codification in India. Benton and Ford, however, take a novel approach to these familiar documents. They show how they operated as a pan-imperial genre that linked local crises of governance to empire-wide debates about sovereignty and law. Law commissions forged new principles of imperial constitutionalism out of issues as seemingly petty as the complaints made by Sydney elites who were forced to sit next to former convicts at the governor's dinner parties. Collating petitions and input from local informants, law commissions effectively “crowd-sourced” (60) imperial constitutional theory. As a result, the reports affirmed the fundamentally plural nature of law in the British Empire. At the same time, the conventions of the genre, and the key role of a handful of metropolitan officials in authoring multiple reports, disciplined legal diversity into shared structures. This chapter, which is a must-read for any scholar of imperialism, British or otherwise, provides a brilliant snapshot of how governance worked across local, regional, and empire-wide scales.

In the next chapter Benton and Ford turn to themes of protectionism, bringing together jurisdictional struggles involving the independent kingdom of Kandy in British Ceylon with debates about whether Ionian subjects enjoyed British extraterritorial exceptions in Ottoman territories. They underline continuities between imperial and international law by showing how interstate and intra-imperial relations continually bled into each other. Benton and Ford continue this theme through the last two chapters of the book, which cover British policing of piracy and slave trading, and the evolution of regional state systems. Both chapters look at how British imperial power was forged out of piecemeal collaborations with local jurisdictions and with other empires. Together, these chapters show how Britain built a global system of law, less by hegemonic fiat than by assembling a series of “regionally specific jigsaw puzzles of law” (121).

Rage for Order is unquestionably ambitious in its geographical scope. Its chronological parameters in contrast can seem oddly truncated. Benton and Ford's starting point for the book grafts onto a clear sea change in global politics, following closely on the close of the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions and the rise of British global dominance after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In contrast, the book's mid-century cutoff seems more arbitrary. It is perhaps unreasonable to ask the authors to tackle a full century, given their vast geographical ambitions. Nonetheless the reader is left wondering how the legal order described deepened, and eventually faltered, in the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The natural end point for the subject seems less the mid-century and more the rise of nationalism at its end, which also ushered in a more explicit field of international relations. Similarly, the reader is left wondering how Benton and Ford's most recent work fits with their earlier scholarship, which emphasized the growing territorialization of law during the nineteenth century. It would have been nice to have the authors’ perspective on whether their new findings disrupt, or simply deepen, their earlier conclusions.

These minor points aside, 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.