6 - Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

Summary

This chapter draws lessons from the historical account offered in Part I of Before the West for contemporary debates in International Relations, especially those having to do with the crisis of the modern international order. It argues that broadening our temporal and geographical horizon helps us think about how ‘world orders’ come about and how they are replaced. IR has focused too much on the decline of ‘great powers’ and, until recently, barely thought about the decline of ‘world orders’. The story of Eastern world orders show us that orders often decline not because of what great powers do but because of larger, more structural crises. Furthermore, we should pay more attention to the health of the social fabric that holds our order together: 'the East' did not decline materially until much later but lost its social cohesion. This chapter shows that the 'decline of the East' has been misconstrued as being material. The chapter also offers a defense of using macro-historical narratives in service of IR theory and some guidance for how to approach such comparisons (e.g. in thinking about the transhistoricity of fundamental concepts).