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The Oxford Handbook of
HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
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THE
OXFOR D
H A NDBOOK S
OF
INTERNATIONAL
REL ATIONS
General Editors
Christian Reus-​Smit of the University of Queensland and
Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford
The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-​volume set of reference books
offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-​
fields of
International Relations.
The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-​Smit and
Duncan Snidal, with each volume edited by a distinguished team of specialists in their respective fields.
The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and
reshapes it, pushing each sub-​field in challenging new directions. Following the example
of the original Reus-​Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each
volume is organized around a strong central thematic by editors scholars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-​field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in
challenging new directions.
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The Oxford Handbook of
HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
Edited by
M L A DA BU KOVA N SK Y
E DWA R D K E E N E
C H R I ST IA N R E U S -​SM I T
M AJA SPA N U
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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First Edition published in 2023
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950148
ISBN 978–​0–​19–​887345–​7
DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198873457.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
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Contents
xi
List of Contributors
PA RT I I N T RODU C T ION
1.Modernity and Granularity in History and International Relations
Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
3
PA RT I I R E A DI N G S
2.Origins, Histories, and the Modern International
R. B. J. Walker
21
3.Historical Realism
Michael C. Williams
35
4.Liberal Progressivism and International History
Lucian M. Ashworth
49
5.Historical Sociology in International Relations
Maïa Pal
63
6.Global History and International Relations
George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich
79
7.International Relations and Intellectual History
Duncan Bell
94
8.Gender, History, and International Relations
Laura Sjoberg
111
9.Postcolonial Histories of International Relations
Zeynep Gulsah Capan
125
10.International Relations Theory and the Practice of
International History
Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay
137
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viii Contents
11.Global Sources of International Thought
Chen Yudan
155
PA RT I I I P R AC T IC E S
12.State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty
Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger
173
13.Diplomacy
Linda Frey and Marsha Frey
188
14.Empire
Martin J. Bayly
202
15.Barbarism and Civilization
Yongjin Zhang
218
16.Race and Racism
Nivi manchanda
233
17.Religion, History, and International Relations
Cecelia Lynch
249
18.Human Rights
Andrea Paras
262
19.The Diplomacy of Genocide
A. Dirk Moses
277
20.War and History in World Politics
Tarak Barkawi
292
21.Nationalism
James Mayall
306
22.Interpolity Law
Lauren Benton
320
23.Regulating Commerce
Eric Helleiner
334
24.Development
Corinna R. Unger
348
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Contents ix
25.Governing Finance
Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young
363
26.Revolution
Eric Selbin
379
PA RT I V L O C A L E S ( SPAC IA L ,
T E M P OR A L , C U LT U R A L )
27.The ‘Premodern’ World
Julia Costa Lopez
395
28.Modernity and Modernities in International Relations
Ayşe Zarakol
410
29.The ‘West’ in International Relations
Jacinta O’hagan
424
30.The Eighteenth Century
Daniel Gordon
439
31.The Long Nineteenth Century
Quentin Bruneau
454
32.The Pre-​Colonial African State System
John Anthony Pella, Jr
469
33.The ‘Americas’ in the History of International Relations
Michel Gobat
483
34.‘Asia’ in the History of International Relations
David C. Kang
499
35.The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in International History
Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka
513
PA RT V M OM E N T S
36.The Fall of Constantinople
Jonathan Harris
531
37.The Peace of Westphalia
Andrew Phillips
544
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x Contents
38.The Seven Years’ War
Karl Schweizer
560
39.The Haitian Revolution
Musab Younis
573
40.The Congress of Vienna
Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg
587
41.The Revolutions of 1848
Daniel M. Green
602
42.The Indian Uprising of 1857
Alexander E. Davis
617
43.The Berlin and Hague Conferences
Claire Vergerio
631
44.The First World War and Versailles
Duncan Kelly
646
45.Sykes–​Picot
Megan Donaldson
660
46.World War Two and San Francisco
Daniel Gorman
675
47.The Bandung Conference
Christopher J. Lee
690
48.Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas
705
PA RT V I C ON C LU SION
49.History and the International: Time, Space, Agency, and Language
Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-​Smit
723
Index
741
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List of Contributors
Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science
at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Tarak Barkawi is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
and Political Science.
Martin J. Bayly is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory in the International
Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University
of Cambridge.
Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale
University.
Jordan Branch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Quentin Bruneau is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research.
Mlada Bukovansky is Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts.
Zeynep Gulsah Capan is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Erfurt.
Chen Yudan is Associate Professor in International Politics in the School of International
Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University.
Julia Costa Lopez is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of International Relations at
the University of Groningen.
Alexander E. Davis is Lecturer in Political Science (International Relations) at the University
of Western Australia School of Social Sciences.
Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of Public International Law at University College
London.
Linda Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Montana.
Marsha Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at Kansas State University.
Michel Gobat is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Daniel Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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xii List of Contributors
Daniel Gorman is Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member
at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
Daniel M. Green is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Delaware.
Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of
London.
Eric Helleiner is Professor and University Research Chair in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Waterloo.
Talbot Imlay is Professor of History at the Université Laval in Quebec.
Peter Jackson holds the Chair in Global Security (History) in the School of Humanities at
the University of Glasgow.
David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of
Southern California.
Edward Keene is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford
and Official Student of Politics at Christ Church.
Duncan Kelly is Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History in the Department
of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College.
George Lawson is Professor of International Relations in the Coral Bell School at the
Australian National University.
Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory in the War Studies Department
of King’s College London and Bye-​Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Christopher J. Lee is Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at
The Africa Institute, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California.
Nivi Manchanda is Senior Lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University of
London.
James Mayall is Emeritus Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at the
University of Cambridge and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College.
Jennifer Mitzen is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University.
A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair of International Relations at the City
College of New York.
Jeppe Mulich is Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of International Politics at
City, University of London.
Jacinta O’Hagan is Associate Professor in International Relations in the School of Political
Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University.
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List of Contributors xiii
Andrea Paras is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Guelph.
John Anthony Pella, Jr is a Research Fellow in the School of International Affairs at Fudan
University.
Benoît Pelopidas is Associate Professor of International Relations at Sciences Po (CERI).
Andrew Phillips is Associate Professor of International Relations and Strategy in the School
of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Signe Predmore is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Women, Gender & Sexuality
Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Christian Reus-​Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland
and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Jeff Rogg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The
Citadel.
Or Rosenboim is Director of the Centre for Modern History and Senior Lecturer at the
Department of International Politics at City, University of London.
Karl Schweizer is Professor in the Federated Department of History at NJIT/​Rutgers
University.
Eric Selbin is Professor and Chair of Political Science & Holder of the Lucy King Brown
Chair at Southwestern University.
Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations
and Director of the Gender Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Maja Spanu is Affiliated Lecturer at University of Cambridge and Head of Research and
International Affairs, Fondation de France.
Jan Stockbruegger is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at
Copenhagen University.
Chika Tonooka is a Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of
Cambridge.
Corinna R. Unger is Professor of Global and Colonial History (19th and 20th centuries) at
the Department of History, European University Institute.
Claire Vergerio is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University’s
Institute of Political Science.
R. B. J. Walker is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Victoria and Professor
Colaborador do IRI, PUC-​Rio de Janeiro.
Michael C. Williams is University Research Professor of International Politics in the
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
Kevin L. Young is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
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xiv List of Contributors
Musab Younis is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University
of London.
Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a
Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College.
Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics and
International Studies at the University of Bristol.
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PA RT I
I N T RODU C T ION
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Chapter 1
Modernit y a nd
Gr anu l arit y i n H i story
and Internat i ona l
Rel ations
Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
The idea for this Handbook on History and International Relations originated from two
propositions. One is that we cannot make sense of how international relations work
without understanding the history of how different forms of global political orders have
developed; the other is that the history of the world as a whole cannot be written without
taking account of the existence of an international system (or systems) on a global scale. To
capture the various dimensions of this interdependence between the academic disciplines
of International Relations (IR) and History, the Handbook is organized around ‘Readings’,
‘Practices’, ‘Locales’, and ‘Moments’. The first section, ‘Readings’, examines the contexts
within which the encounter between historians and IR scholars takes place, with writers
from both fields reflecting on different ways in which their inquiries intersect. Thereafter we
look outward to see how current research is re-​shaping our understanding of how the world
we live in today developed. Rather than work towards a single grand overarching narrative
here—​the story of historical IR—​our goal is to show how different perspectives inform our
sense of the international and global dimensions of historical becoming in a rich variety
of ways.
To establish coherence and points of comparison across this diversity, we have asked all
our authors to focus on two key themes that give them a number of ‘hooks’ on which they
can pin their analyses. We will explain these in more detail next, but it may be helpful to give
a brief summary of these fundamental elements of our project here at the very beginning
of this introductory chapter, to explain how they inform the arrangement of the Handbook
across its various sections, so that readers can approach the many chapters presented here
with a clearer understanding of how the volume is organized, and why we have chosen to
arrange it that way.
The first set of questions we posed for our authors is about the chronological development of different ways of ordering the international, and how to navigate between structural
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4 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
change and continuity. To do this, we chose to adopt a focus on modernity as an organizing
concept, or possibly critical foil. We recognize that there are potential dangers in putting this
idea at the centre of our reflections on history and IR, and that some would see a fixation
with modernity as a significant source of problems within mainstream IR scholarship. For
example, the chapter by Ayse Zarakol on ‘Modernity and Modernities in IR’ (Chapter 28)
offers the most direct engagement with this theme, and illustrates the reflective and critical
manner in which we hope to handle the concept throughout the Handbook. Zarakol mounts
a forceful argument that the academic discipline of IR has been powerfully influenced by a
specific version of modernization theory that generates a number of dubious propositions,
provocatively labelled as three distinct ‘Wrong Answers’ to the questions of what modernity is, who made it, and how it interacted with other ways of organizing social, economic
and political life as it spread around the world. Zarakol contends that all of these ‘Wrong
Answers’ spring from an over-​commitment to ‘the idea that “modernity” is a unique set of
developments that was experienced first or only by the West’ and radically underestimates
the agency of non-​Western actors.
One important consequence of this is a tendency for IR theory to coalesce around
a particular conception of state sovereignty, and it is clear that this risks importing a specific Western perspective into any treatment of historical IR and international history.
We have therefore actively encouraged authors to imagine multiple modernities, alternative meta-​narratives, and different pathways of change that, in Zarakol’s words, will reveal ‘a more open-​minded survey of global history’. To take another example of the kind
of work that this involves, consider the account of global legal history offered by Lauren
Benton (Chapter 22), which rejects the narrow focus on Western sovereignty contained in
Zarakol’s ‘Wrong Answers’, and highlights instead the importance of ‘interpolity zones, or
regions marked by interpenetrating power and weak or uneven claims to territorial sovereignty’. We believe that thinking about the relationship between IR and History requires us
to understand both traditional state-​centric answers to the question of how the distinctively
modern international system came into being and developed, and the critical responses
from scholars such as Benton (2010) that contest these formulations today and embrace a
much wider range of forms of global political ordering. By establishing ‘modernity’ as one
of the organizing themes for the Handbook, we hope both to acknowledge its central significance in the development of historical IR, and to expose it to radical scrutiny as a limiting
factor on our ability to comprehend the complexity of how the international has developed
within a global context.
The second theme tries to unlock the potential for generating fresh insights by adopting
different framings in geographical space, historical time, and levels of both agency and structure, which we articulate through the idea of granularity. The sections on ‘Practices’, ‘Locales’,
and ‘Moments’ are all intended to offer opportunities either to step back to contemplate the
very broadest kind of analysis, or to zoom in on the personal and micro-​political aspects of
the day-​to-​day. An example of the former is Linda and Marsha Frey’s chapter on the practice
of diplomacy (Chapter 13), which gives a sweeping survey that runs from the earliest periods
of recorded history up to the twentieth century in what one might call the ‘grand manner’
of diplomatic history; whereas for the latter, one could look at Christopher Lee’s analysis of
the Bandung Conference (Chapter 47) which homes in on the specific details of a particular
moment, and uses them as a way to think about the wider significance of this precise event,
and the persistent myths that flowed from it. These two chapters offer almost polar opposites
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Modernity and Granularity in History 5
of the different scale on which the encounter between IR and History might be envisaged. In
between, our authors adopt a host of different perspectives. Several chapters—​Eric Selbin’s
on ‘Revolution’ (Chapter 26), for example—​aim to show how understandings of specific
phenomena can shuttle back and forth between micro-​and macro-​perspectives.
It is fair to say that ‘Practices’ invites the longue durée, whereas the examination of
‘Moments’ inevitably brings one up close to the personal and the immediate. However,
several of our authors break up this expectation. To take just one example, Musab Younis’s
fascinating study of the Haitian Revolution (Chapter 39) not only dives into the details of
what this moment represents as a specific event within the historical development of the
international politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also uses it
as a stimulus to expose ‘the limitations of the very categories we use to measure significance
and meaning when we study the international’, and concludes by suggesting how an intellectual history of the Haitian revolutionaries’ own self-​understandings could be the basis for
an alternative perspective on the international grounded in ‘anticolonial and postcolonial
cultural nationalism.’ At the same time, somewhat more cautiously, Megan Donaldson’s
analysis of the Sykes–​Picot agreement of 1916 (Chapter 45) warns about how the question
of scale opened up by this granularity theme raises the possibility that something may be
lost as we move from one perspective to another, how we can see very different things from
different vantage points, and how indeed some of these may be illusory.
The section on ‘Locales’ stands, as it were, in between the opposite ends of the spectrum of
granularity, and each chapter here gives its author an opportunity to examine the categories
that we frequently, and often unthinkingly, use to organize discrete subject areas for thinking
about historical IR. We think two of these are particularly significant: periodization and regionalization. Historians and IR scholars tend to break their subject matter up either into
delimited chunks of time (e.g. the ‘early modern’ period, the ‘long nineteenth century’), or
into distinct geographical spaces (e.g. the idea of regional international systems in Asia or
Africa). There is a sense in which these categorizations would not exist, or be so popular, if
they did not capture something important and valuable, and so our purpose is not simply to
criticize or dismiss these as organizing devices for scholarship. Many of the chapters here,
such as Quentin Bruneau’s study of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (Chapter 31), broadly
work within this periodization, presenting current scholarship on how it is conceived in
History and IR, and sometimes (as in Bruneau’s case) offering novel interpretive insights
into how we should understand it and its place within the wider set of stories of historical
IR. Nevertheless, several chapters, such as Zarakol’s chapter on modernity discussed above,
or Julia Costa Lopez’s account of the ‘pre-​modern’ world (Chapter 27), seek to unsettle
these conventional ways of carving up the huge expanse of historical time and geographic
space that we are operating within. As Costa Lopez warns, for example, ‘approaching the
premodern with periodization-​derived preconceptions about its significance prevents us
from doing anything but confirming our own prejudices—​whatever those may be’.
Our choice of specific ‘Locales’, ‘Practices’, and ‘Moments’ to include in the volume has
been guided by our desire both to inform the reader of conventional wisdoms about historical IR, and to challenge these or open up new vistas. For example, among our ‘Locales’
we have a chapter not on the geographical space of Europe as such but on the imaginary
of the ‘West’, which (as Jacinta O’Hagan shows in Chapter 29) is the subject of multiple
narratives that depict it as variously ‘civilizational’, ‘liberal’, and ‘fragmenting’. This highlights
the way that we do not simply take regional classifications as starting points for analysis,
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6 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
but as socially constructed entities whose meaning needs to be interrogated. As O’Hagan
remarks, the ‘West’ is not so much a geographically designated part of the world, but rather it constitutes ‘an imagined community that has acted as a strategic and normative reference point for the constitution of agency and identities in international relations’. This clearly
connects with and amplifies Zarakol’s point discussed previously, where the understanding
of ‘modernity’ in much IR and historical scholarship has traditionally been a vehicle for
privileging one view of the ‘Western’ experience of global political ordering at the expense of
alternative perspectives.
In a similarly critical vein, while our list of ‘Moments’ acknowledges some that would feature prominently in any textbook, such as the Peace of Westphalia (even if, as Andrew Phillips
explains in Chapter 37, much of the significance of this moment may be misconceived), we
have deliberately tried not to make this just a collection of canonically recognized turning
points. Instead, within the obvious limitations in terms of the number of ‘Moments’ we can
possibly cover, we have tried to include some where we think that there is a disappointing
absence of scholarly connections between historians and IR scholars, such as Dan Green’s
examination of the European revolutions of 1848 (Chapter 41). Moreover, mindful of the
importance of non-​Western agency, we especially want to take the reader to places around
the world that might have been missed by the Eurocentric gaze of traditional narratives: we
start this section with Jonathan Harris’s study of arguably one of the most globally momentous moments in the shaping of the modern world, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
(Chapter 36), and carry this forward in chapters such as Younis’s examination of the Haitian
Revolution mentioned previously. Of course, we cannot expect these editorial choices alone
to redress the balance of what has, or has not, traditionally been included in the scope of historical IR, but we hope that they will offer a provocation that opens possibilities for new research on times, places, and phenomena that have not received the attention or interpretive
weight that they deserve.
The Encounter between History and
International Relations
Before we examine some further, deeper aspects of these two themes of modernity and
granularity that run throughout the Handbook, we should acknowledge that, in pursuing
them, we are building on well-​established traditions of scholarship in both the academic
disciplines of IR and History. The two have long been intertwined. From its own side, IR has
always been, and continues to be, profoundly influenced by History. One could argue that
many, perhaps even most, of the earliest people who are now recalled as ‘IR theorists’ were
historians by training or inclination: for instance, several of the key figures in the formative
period of the IR discipline—​such as Raymond Aron, E. H. Carr, and Arnold Toynbee—​had
close links to History in terms of their academic activities. This interest in the history of
the international system has been carried forward through the development of the field in
the later-​twentieth century by groups such as the ‘English School of International Relations
Theory’ (Navari and Green 2014; and see Wight 1977; Bull and Watson 1984; Watson 1992),
and a great deal of more recent work across a wide range of IR theory draws inspiration
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Modernity and Granularity in History 7
from historiographical innovations: for example, Duncan Bell shows in Chapter 7 how
the field of international intellectual history has evolved under the influence of methodological developments such as contextualist approaches to the history of thought; while Chen
Yudan applies a similar perspective to the way in which global history impacts on our understanding of the historical sources of international political thought (Chapter 11).
Admittedly, within the last four or five decades many scholars working within what is often
described as the mainstream of IR have come to conceive of the field as an ‘American Social
Science’ (Hoffmann 1977; see also Crawford and Jarvis 2001), understanding it as an inquiry
that is primarily concerned with identifying and explaining timeless recurring patterns of
interaction between sovereign states (Waltz 1979). This view of how scholarship should proceed is often expressed rather combatively, not only as an alternative to, but as a rejection of
more historical or normative approaches (for the origins of such controversies, see Singer
1969 and Bull 1969). Nevertheless, even scholars working within this positivist and scientific self-​understanding cannot avoid intrinsically historical questions about when and how
modern states came into being, the extent to which their interactions really do display strong
continuities over time, and the timing and character of major changes in the institutions
and structure of the international system: history is, at the very least, a source of data, and
often plays a much larger role than that (Elman and Elman 2001 is a good survey). An historical consciousness informs many fundamental works in IR theory (for example, Waltz 1959;
Levy 1983; Gilpin 1984; Ruggie 1998; Wagner 2007), and is evident even in some supposedly
‘ahistorical’ theories of neorealism (e.g., Fischer 1992, although criticised for its interpretation of history by Hall and Kratochwil 1993). As Maïa Pal shows in Chapter 5, for those
focusing more on economic structures and processes, the history of modern capitalism and
its relationship to socialism inevitably looms large from both a historical materialist standpoint and in historical sociology more generally; while Martin Bayly’s chapter on ‘Empire’
(Chapter 14) shows how this remains a relevant unit of analysis despite the Eurocentric insistence on the primacy of sovereignty, and even after the waves of decolonization of the
1950s and 60s. Scholars today very often combine original historical research with new theoretical trends in the study of IR (for example, Teschke 2003; Bell 2007; Fazal 2007; Nexon
2009; Zarakol 2011; MacDonald 2014; Phillips and Sharman 2015; Shilliam 2015; Acharya and
Buzan 2019; Owens and Rietzler 2021). The ‘International History’ section is a growing element of the field’s major professional body, the International Studies Association.
The relationship between History and IR is not a one-​way street where the latter feeds off
the former. Although less frequently or explicitly acknowledged, the discipline of History
has been influenced by trends in the social sciences, including theoretical innovations by
IR scholars. Compare, for example, two seminal works in the prestigious Oxford History of
Modern Europe series by A. J. P. Taylor (1954) and Paul Schroeder (1994). The two books may
cover contiguous historical periods, but they are a distance apart in terms of the theoretical perspectives and assumptions that underpin them. Taylor’s work is very much a creature of the 1950s, anchored in a straightforward, even trite, version of realism, whereas the
intervening 40 years have given Schroeder a wealth of alternative insights into the dynamics
of relations between states, many of which are derived from more recent, and arguably
more sophisticated variants of realist thought, but extending to entirely different theoretical
perspectives such as more social constructionist readings of IR as well.
Beyond these intramural developments characteristic of the ongoing dialogue between
History and IR, significant critical challengers are pushing for major reorientation of both
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8 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
disciplines. As George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich show in their analysis of ‘Global History
and IR’ (Chapter 6), over the last few decades there have been repeated surges of interest
in the writing of ‘world’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global histories’ that deliberately attempt to
break free from the strait-​jackets imposed by nationalist historiography, and offer intriguing
suggestions of links to the study of IR, but often also problematizing the state-​centrism
that colors much work in this area (for example, Bayly 2004; Clavin 2005; Mazlish 2006;
Burbank and Cooper 2011; Osterhammel 2014; Conrad 2016). Nivi Manchanda’s study of
‘Race and Racism’ (Chapter 16), or Laura Sjoberg on ‘Gender, History and IR’ (Chapter 8),
show how such historical studies are often part of efforts to reorient not just units of analysis
but entire conceptual vocabularies to account for previously excluded, subaltern voices (e.g.
Fischer 2004; Getachew 2019; Pham and Shilliam 2016). Theoretical orientations such as
historical materialism, historical institutionalism, post-​structuralism, and postcolonialism
have shaped and reshaped how history is studied, and whose history ought to be studied: as
well as Pal’s chapter on historical sociology here, one could also point to Zeynep Gulsah
Capan’s study of postcolonial histories and their place in IR (Chapter 9). Critical assessments
regarding what constitutes a ‘source’ and an ‘archive’, such as the powerful challenge posed
by the scholar (in an anthropology department no less) Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (1995) and
taken up by those seeking to uncover and challenge the persistence of white supremacy
in academia, have begun to transform the way in which History is practiced. This in turn
destabilizes how scholars view the workings of the ‘international system’, and indeed how
they understand the very meaning and signification of that term and associated ideas within
the IR field (see, for instance, Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015; Spruyt 2020).
Such critiques reveal that interdisciplinary entanglements may just as easily reify and replicate persistent patterns of exclusion and omission as move either or both disciplines forward. For example, while the members of the ‘English school’ are often cast as defenders
of an historical approach to IR, the growing challenges to their historiography regarding
the so-​called ‘expansion of international society’ (Bull and Watson 1984) as a narrative of
progressive evolution of the international system suggest that any narrative framing of historical evidence for theoretical purposes, or generation of theoretical insights from historical narrations, may become fodder for deep critiques of the omissions and silences thus
facilitated (Keene 2014; Howland 2016; Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017). Moreover, during a
time of political upheaval in what had long been considered the relatively stable ‘West’, the
study of History itself has become intensely politicized and subject to backlash, with historical monuments sometimes being literally pushed off their pedestals even as people band
together to offer new defenses of old myths, all in a climate of intense pressure on existing
democratic and semi-​democratic institutions. The space that brings IR and History together
is thus not simply a place for collaborative mutual learning, but can be a battlefield where bitterly opposed intellectual commitments confront one another.
What remains clear in all this turmoil is that it is inadequate to reify History and IR as
independent fields of enquiry, each of which has its own proprietary terrain, with a set of
questions, issues, and methods that belong to it exclusively. These are not closed guilds,
much as they may at times seem that way to scholars struggling to articulate new ideas in
a climate where secure academic positions are few and the weight of expectations often
induces conformity with established practice, and where professional opportunities can
be jealously guarded for students with a degree in the ‘right’ subject. It is thus with a certain humility and awareness of the contentiousness of our analytical categories, as well as of
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Modernity and Granularity in History 9
the power dynamics involved in articulating both historical and theoretical agendas, that
this volume has sought to bring together writers from both History and IR. This awareness
also informs our editorial decision to ask them to orient their contributions according to
the two very broad organizing themes or concepts that we outlined at the beginning of this
Introduction: modernity and granularity. We want to conclude these introductory remarks
by explaining in more detail why we think these offer fertile sources of questions shared
across the disciplines, and give the chance to integrate them in productive ways without, we
hope, either ignoring what long traditions of scholarship can provide, or closing off the potential for radical critique.
Modernity
‘Modernity’ is an almost inescapable category for imagining historical time, especially with
its rich variety of adjectival modifiers, ‘pre’, ‘early’, ‘high’, ‘late’, ‘post’, and so on. One might
think of the similar role that ‘democracy with adjectives’ plays in organizing contemporary
political science (Collier and Levitsky 1997), and it is not coincidental that the concept of
‘capitalism’ can be adapted in much the same ways. Yet, perhaps in part because of its ubiquity, modernity will always be a moving target, and a contested one. The use of the term in
ordinary language often serves to distinguish what is distinctively new in the ‘present’ in relation to what was the ‘past’. But precisely because of this—​because human beings draw such
distinctions with respect to everything from fashion to architecture to ideology to modes of
political and economic organization—​the question of modernity constitutes a productive
forum for historians and IR scholars, among others (and there is much to be said for broader
cross-​fertilization than just History and IR; many contributions in this volume are more
interdisciplinary than that if one begins to look closely at sources).
As we noted at the beginning of the Introduction, and in our brief discussion of Ayse
Zarakol’s contribution to this volume on this specific topic (Chapter 28), we do not intend modernity to imply a single linear narrative that is to be imposed on a given topic. We
do not insist that modernity is the fiscal-​military or bureaucratic state, the market, property, or some such form of social or political organization, and that the question of modernity requires us simply to track the emergence of one or a few of these at different times
in different parts of the world. On the contrary, while acknowledging that these are significant themes, we see modernity as presenting a series of puzzles and provocations that can be
taken as an invitation to open-​ended intellectual inquiry, and even playfulness. How have
different people conceptualized what it means to be ‘modern’? Against what do we distinguish it, what lies outside of the modern: the ancient? The medieval? The primitive? The
traditional? The contemporary? The non-​Western? How do we time the modern; and where
and in what configuration of forces do we locate the builders of modernity? Whose modernity are we analysing, and are those who resist or are different merely peripheral, or left
out of modernity altogether? What does it take to opt out of modernity, if that is even possible? To the extent that intellectual historians have identified modernity with something
like the ‘Enlightenment’, what is the relationship between the development of ideas and culture on the one hand, and the development and maturation of social, political, and economic
structures and practices on the other? What is at stake in the question of whether we should
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10 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
consider modernity as a single overall phenomenon or set of structures, or whether in the
postcolonial moment we need to consider ‘multiple modernities’?
The question of what modernity is and what it does to our understanding of the international thus strikes us as an interesting way to integrate intellectual and political histories,
and to highlight common preoccupations as well as salient differences between the
disciplines of IR and History. Although some IR scholars may set History aside in their preoccupation with what they take to be the timeless condition of anarchy, and in some cases
those who model the subject in terms of rational actors with given sets of interests opt to
bracket questions about the historical development of such interests, we are hardly alone
in arguing that a productive way to comprehend IR is in terms of the historical development of the forms of actors, institutions, modes of production, and both strategic and normative principles and practices with which we live today (for example, Rosenberg 1994).
Such a focus does not neglect but indeed raises interesting questions about the continuity of
social forms through time, considering whether a history should look like an evolutionary
narrative or something more akin to genealogies of contemporary phenomena, such as
nation-​states or security dilemmas. But clearly a focus on the historical development of, say,
modern statehood, also raises questions about change, in the sense of the identification of
moments of profound discontinuity or transformation. How did the international order that
we live in come to be, and what is distinctive about it in comparison with ways of conducting
‘international relations’ outside the scope of what is identified as modernity?
Timing modernity involves not only looking at continuities and distinctions between
‘past’ and ‘present’, and hence the identification of the ‘pre-​modern’, as in Costa Lopez’s
chapter mentioned previously; articulations of ‘the modern’ entail visions of a future as well.
Visions of a fully modernized or even post-​modern future extrapolate from readings of how
certain pasts generated a given present, and how such trends bode for future configurations
of world politics. For example, a prominent theme in Lucien Ashworth’s chapter on ‘Liberal
Progressivism and International History’ (Chapter 4), and in Or Rosenboim and Chika
Tonooka’s study of how the specific terms of the ‘international’ and ‘the global’ were re-​
imagined in the twentieth century (Chapter 35), is how a liberal reading of international
history envisions a future populated by liberal democratic states linked together by shared
legal constraints on the use of force as well as by more or less freely circulating commercial and financial flows. And, as demonstrated in key works focusing on imperialism and
postcolonial world politics, historical inquiry serves to shape not only how we narrate the
past; a particular narration of the past may constitute a critical intervention in present-​day
politics, as well as articulating a specific vision of the future (for example, Scott 2004; Wilder
2015; Getachew 2019; Spruyt 2020). Such interventions remind students of international politics that visions of the future constitute fodder for critical reinterpretation as the kinds of
questions we ask about contemporary world politics change. Far from being only about ‘the
past’, therefore, readings of history speak to the present and also shape visions of the future.
As they are played out in the contemporary discipline, questions about timing modernity
in IR often focus on how to pin-​point the most significant discontinuities that shaped the
‘modern’ international system in the form of what Barry Buzan and George Lawson have
called ‘benchmark dates’ (Buzan and Lawson 2014). In the past these debates were often
quite open, with scholars looking back to events such as the Council of Constance or the
French intervention in the Italian wars in 1494 (which supposedly spread ideas about raison
d’etat and balance of power around Europe). However, R. B. J. Walker’s analysis of ‘origin
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Modernity and Granularity in History 11
myths’ in the IR discipline (Chapter 2) shows how in more recent years the IR field has
coalesced around a (still-​controversial) origin story pivoted on the Peace of Westphalia of
1648. While we think it is worthwhile to look in detail at this specific moment, as Andrew
Phillips does in Chapter 37, neither we nor Phillips want to subscribe to an over-​simplified,
and frankly somewhat dubious, story about the ‘Westphalian moment’ as the key turning-​
point when a principle of territorial sovereignty was first established as the basis of the
modern form of world order (see Keene 2002; Teschke 2003; Beaulac 2004). Our selection of
‘Moments’ in Part 4 of the Handbook is not an attempt to present a list of possible candidate
benchmark dates, but is intended in part to allow opportunities to reflect on different key
instances of discontinuity that might feature in such a story, and so to explore alternatives to
the Westphalian starting point.
Putting the historical discontinuities of modernity, rather than the supposedly timeless
logic of anarchy, at the heart of our enquiry also raises the question of where the international
system originated. Interwoven with chronological questions about periodization are geographical questions about social networks and connections that have traditionally been—​
but are no longer—​pushed aside by an often silent assumption of Eurocentrism (the locus
classicus for these discussions is Wight 1977, c­ hapters 4 and 5; see also Bentley 1996). Where
there once may have been a general consensus about modernity originating in Europe
with the European states-​system, research in recent decades has shaken this consensus and
brought some of its assumptions and omissions under scrutiny. At the very least, the idea
of a European system as somehow self-​contained demonstrates an inexcusable neglect of
the central role of imperial expansion and colonization projects as contributors to Europe’s
development.
There may be no consensus on when the ‘modern’ international system began, nor how
far it has spread, nor indeed whether some regions have already passed through to the
‘post-​modern,’ or followed some different path altogether. Modernity therefore has the advantage of offering a common frame of reference without closing off debates about its geographic or temporal boundaries, nor indeed about what forms of political order ought to be
associated with it. We can thus engage questions about the shift from the medieval to the
modern international system; or, as David Kang does in the chapter on ‘ “Asia” in the History
of IR’ (Chapter 34), about the question of ‘modernization’ in Asia, for example, without
presupposing that we already know the answers. We can inquire as to the origin, transmission, and circulation of modernity’s core concepts and practices without assuming that
modernity belongs to a particular place (Europe) or even time (for example Hobson 2004).
While modernity must have some boundaries to render it a coherent organizational concept, we do not presume a priori agreement on where those boundaries are located, either
in space or time. The contributions to this volume offer a diversity of ways by which modernity may be timed and placed, and especially in Part 3 on ‘Locales’ we have encouraged
our authors to think about the concept from the perspective of different regions or parts of
the world, and historical periods (themselves, we acknowledge, often socially constructed
artifacts of modernity).
Authority to determine and claim modernity can itself be contested, as can the contours
of what may be termed modern and what ‘backward’. As Yongjin Zhang shows, one of the
main ways in which modern forms of empire rationalized their exception to the principle
of the recognition of territorial sovereignty was precisely in terms of a heavily loaded distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ (Chapter 15). Another key example of such
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12 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
contestation is found in the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and its allies on
the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other (in Chapters 46–​48 by Daniel
Gorman, Christopher Lee, and Benoit Pelopidas and Ned Lebow, respectively). Both
superpowers competed in modernizing their postwar industrial societies, and to attract
allies via the power of their example as well as the more direct promise of arms and aid.
This is an example of overtly contested modernity, describable within a familiar narrative of
competing ideologies of communism and capitalism.
More recently, the growth of China and India into great powers with hegemonic
aspirations and extensive commercial and patronage networks destabilizes older categories
used to classify economic and political systems, so that ideas of democracy and socialism
once associated with the ‘West’ or with the Soviet bloc are no longer the only models available for leaders seeking to revolutionize or ‘develop’ their societies. Indeed as Corinna Unger
makes clear in Chapter 24, the very meaning of development is one site of significant contestation within existing international institutions, and it has in fact been so contested for far
longer than normally acknowledged. To focus on modernity is to import these contestations
and political struggles into the heart of our analytical framework. These struggles have
different agents and indeed scales of agency, as well as different scopes, which brings us to
our second organizing theme for the volume.
Granularity
If asking the question of modernity evokes both spatial and temporal explanatory questions
and debates, the second theme orienting this volume zeroes in on questions of scope, scale,
and closeness of association when classifying or bundling phenomena together in posited
relationships. We have already implicitly made a number of assumptions along these lines by
repeatedly referring to the concept of an ‘international system’, as if that was an easy thing to
pluck out from the messy complexity of global interactions between people and institutions
(see, for instance, Butcher and Griffiths 2015, and 2017). What we might call the granularity
problematique arises from the tension between the richness, specificity, and individuality of
a social phenomenon within its immediate chronological and geographical context on the
one hand, and the desire to tease out general patterns and shifts across the longue durée and
the global on the other. Nor does this issue arise only at the very generalized level of the
system as a whole. How are ‘units of analysis’ determined in IR theorizing? What are the
consequences of choosing to focus on sovereign states rather than, say, economic classes or
individuals? Do cycles of the rise and fall of hegemonic powers constitute a pattern such
that when bundled together and compared, knowledge of such cycles advances our understanding of the past and expectations about similar patterns being repeated in the future?
The very delimitation of what constitutes a ‘case’ is a granular choice.
With fewer discursive associations than modernity (at least within the social sciences and
humanities), granularity as we envision the term evokes a bundle of issues clustered around
problems of scope and scale, and closeness of association when classifying phenomena.
From an amateur’s point of view the way the concept of granularity works in quantum
mechanics has to do with how energy ‘clumps’ rather than smoothly traveling or dissipating,
and we find it useful to stretch for something like this analogy when asking our authors to
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Modernity and Granularity in History 13
reflect on how they are arranging their facts or data; how they are ‘casing’ their subjects and
objects of study (Rovelli 2021; Wendt 2015). How we articulate the objects and subjects, the
boundaries we draw around them, the classifications delimiting what they are not—​these
analytical choices generate the granularity of a given study.
The question of granularity is clearly about issues of scope and method, but is not simply
about a clash between the interests or methods of the historian and those of the social scientist: some of the latter concern themselves with fairly localized, ‘puzzle-​driven’ or at
best ‘mid-​range’ theorizing, while some historians operate at the grandest levels of ‘global
histories’ that stretch across centuries. Whatever their disciplinary labels, scholars always have to choose where to operate on a spectrum that runs from the millennium to the
moment, and from the global to the local. Asking historians and IR scholars to consider
how they approach the question of granularity opens up fault-​lines within both fields, and
sometimes unites certain IR theorists and historians against alternative cross-​disciplinary
coalitions. For example, Dirk Moses’s chapter on the ‘Diplomacy of Genocide’ in the
‘Practices’ section (Chapter 19) offers a fascinating insight into the political aspects of this
in terms of its implications for how specific genocides and specific interventions have been
handled, and informs controversies around these questions to the present.
Considered in terms of methodological debates within IR narrowly conceived, granularity may recall the so-​called ‘levels of analysis’ problem in terms of whether explanatory
theories base themselves on the systemic, state or individual level in terms of locating key
causal phenomena (Singer 1961). However, we prefer the term granularity because it offers
the possibility of a broader array of perspectives than just three or four ‘levels.’ Whereas the
term ‘level’ implies a plane, and levels of analysis categorizes explanatory schemas based on
which ‘plane’ they locate an independent variable, the notion of granularity is more topographically diverse, and implies that observing a phenomenon may entail an array of focal
points revealing either finer or coarser aspects of multi-​dimensional systems and constituent
parts. For example, as noted previously, Eric Selbin’s chapter plays with the granularity
issue to interrogate multiple possible focal points for studying revolutions, while Megan
Donaldson’s also examines the trade-​offs involved. As such, granularity has the potential
to encompass the standard methodological questions about choice of independent and
dependent variables, but goes beyond this to embrace approaches which eschew causal analysis altogether in favour of other methods such as thick description, analytical narratives,
or constructivist studies of constitution of social phenomena. It can also encompass the type
of distinctions made in economics between micro-​and macro-​level phenomena, without
limiting the choice to a binary.
We think of granularity as encompassing questions of texture, of focus, and of scale. As
with many methodological choices, choice of focus and of scale is seldom a matter of right
or wrong, but rather fitness to the question at hand. The focus one adopts, whether coarser
or finer-​grained, allows one to see different aspects of a phenomenon, and thus offers quite
different kinds of knowledge and insight. A work may draw our attention to the significance
of a particular century for shaping international order, as Buzan and Lawson have recently
done, or it may argue for a closer look at the geographical location of the origins of practices
of humanitarian intervention, as embodied in Davide Rodongo’s study of the Ottoman
Empire (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Rodongo 2012). Within the choice of time and place are
nested further choices about which institutions, actors and practices are worthy of analysis; as we noted above in Megan Donaldson’s chapter on the Sykes–​Picot Agreement, it is
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14 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
also a question of perspective, and especially whose perspective we are taking up at any one
moment. States or foreign policy bureaucracies or particular foreign ministers; trade unions
or their individual organizers or the ideas which animate them; transport routes or supply
chains or the microbes transmitted along these: the range of possible scales and foci is vast.
The theme of granularity thus raises a broad set of questions regarding methodologies
and degrees of detail required to generate productive explanations and/​or narratives.
For example, structural realism offers an entirely different granularity in terms of how it
conceives of structure than does classical realism (the latter tending to include actual human
personalities), the English School, historical materialism, or historical institutionalism. And
granularity is not just a question of size and scope, it is also a question of specification of the
appropriate unit of analysis, be it state, nation, class, network, individual, or genome. Just as
realists are found deploying a range of granularities from systemic to individual, so too can
rational choice scholars and game theorists vary in their specification of the units of analysis
and the relevant field of ‘play’. A game in which the players are individual policy makers will
have a different granularity than one in which the players are bureaucratic agencies within
states, states themselves, corporations, or financial networks.
The granularity problem also intersects with the modernity problem in interesting ways.
For example, for scholars engaging the debate on change in the international system, and
which sorts of developments count as changes ‘of ’ system rather than changes ‘within’ the
system, the issue of granularity will loom quite large, as it involves asking scholars to specify
their ontological focus and commitment: are they studying states, systems of states, production and communication networks, epistemic communities, supply chains, inter-​personal
connections among elites or activists, or cultural networks? Broadly framing these issues
in terms of granularity (rather than levels of analysis) may allow for a more ecumenical
approach as to what constitutes an object of study. For example, networks and flows may
be included along with systems, states, classes, individuals or empires, and these at different
‘granularities’—​from circulation of ideas among individuals to historical changes in broad
institutional structures. As with modernity, the granularity problematique is something
that should engage both IR scholars and historians, and so has the potential for fruitful
collaboration.
Another aspect of the intersection between modernity and granularity, then, is that
different conceptions of change rest on different perceptions of the locus and scale of the
phenomena which trigger significant global change: working beyond the classic butterfly
wings rendition of this problem, one can think of arguments identifying climactic or other
types of ecosystem sources of change, familiar international systemic or geopolitical phenomena such as balance of power dynamics and hegemonic cycles, domestic political
sources of international change such as revolutions, ideological sources of change such as the
Enlightenment or postcolonialism, individual human, even genetic, neurological, microbiological, and quantum phenomena have been evoked as sources of either continuity or transformation in the study of IR (Wendt 2015). So the granularity question serves as a productive
way to cut into the question of the scale and scope of continuities and transformations in
international politics, just as modernity serves as a way to delimit the character of those
continuities and transformations.
These choices recur throughout the book, but there are some places where they come particularly clearly into focus. In Part 2 on ‘Practices’, for example, we have deliberately invoked
the notion of a ‘practice turn’ in social theory and IR (Schatzki 1996; Adler and Pouliot 2011).
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Modernity and Granularity in History 15
On the one hand, reflection on concepts and practices shows how the discursive frames we
bring to bear on international relations are themselves historically constructed and variable. On the other, studying the history of key concepts and practices illustrates how ways of
conducting international relations—​such as making war and peace, regulating commerce,
or participating in international organizations—​have changed over time as practitioners
adopt new understandings of what it means to perform their roles competently. Both kinds of
reflections invite further exploration of appropriate granularities as applied to a specific concept
or practice. What level of structural detail is required to characterize whether an entity counts
as sovereign? Are the practices of diplomacy best understood by zeroing in on the activities of a
Talleyrand, or should one rather study diplomacy as an institution? We do not expect definitive
answers to such questions, but rather use them to invite the chapter authors to communicate the
rationales behind their methodological criteria and their chosen focal points.
Bringing History and International
Relations Together
As we have already noted, the academic fields of History and IR have long been intertwined
with one another. Despite tendencies (on both sides) to try to separate them by stressing
their different epistemological and methodological orientations as belonging to the
Humanities and Social Sciences respectively, they continue to enjoy a close relationship.
We believe that the scholars whose work is collected in this volume—​some of whom would
probably self-​identify as historians, some as IR scholars—​offer strong evidence that this engagement remains fruitful.
One of the principal purposes of this volume is to introduce readers to this rich, and still
unfolding, field of enquiry, especially students who are perhaps encountering historical IR
for the first time. We have also endeavoured, however, to set out some of the key questions
and challenges that thinking about both history and IR together poses for the student or
the researcher. In part, we want to inform the reader by providing examples of cutting-​edge
work across a wide range of different subject areas, but at the same time we aim to stimulate
fresh enquiry by pointing to the issues that remain open to new investigations in what is essentially an unending intellectual task. The questions of periodization, discontinuity, and
pathways of change opened up by the theme of modernity, and of scope, scale, and perspective posed by the granularity theme, not only provide a device with which to establish some
coherence across the volume, but are also, we hope, bridges across which people studying
History and IR can connect these two fields and strengthen their mutual entanglement.
There remains much to be discovered here, and we hope that the Handbook will demonstrate how scholars currently engaged in this kind of enquiry are staking out new terrain for
both academic fields. Much of this effort in contemporary historical IR is devoted to looking
beyond the traditional narrative centred on the specific Western experience of global political
ordering in terms of a system of territorially defined sovereign states, gradually working out
and universalizing a modus vivendi among themselves based on norms and institutions such as
sovereign equality, balance of power, non-​intervention, consent-​based positive international
law, or permanent residential diplomacy. In the first place, this Handbook shows very clearly
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16 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
that this is only part of a much larger set of stories that we can tell about change and continuity
in global political order; that many of these do not refer back to a core norm of territorial state
sovereignty; and that this is not even an adequate version of what international relations looked
like in the ‘West’, let alone the varieties that exist beyond that ‘imagined community’. The new
research presented here shows how scholars are taking on the exciting opportunities offered by
these new fields of enquiry. Furthermore, although our focus on historical IR inevitably draws
us back towards the past, the Handbook urges the reader to use this perspective to re-​interpret
the present. In many commentaries on current affairs, there is a persistent tendency to suppose
that phenomena such as globalization, or the decentring of Western states such as the US as the
dominant actors in global politics, are unprecedented novelties. Very often, this assumption is
merely the result of a too-​narrow historical understanding of modern international order in
terms of territorial state sovereignty. As many of the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate,
to reflect on the history of specific aspects of international relations, and the different ways in
which international relations have shaped global history, is not to trap oneself in the past; it
liberates us to ask new questions and achieve new understandings of the world we live in today,
and so envision new possibilities for action within it.
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