This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by ‘civilizational isolationism’ and ‘metrocentric diffusion’. These analytic operations serve to minimise the agency and contributions of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial actors to the global civilizing process. The occlusion of such agency and contributions, however, are not specific to this work, but reflect broader limitations in historical sociology writ large.