This chapter examines the English East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise to dominance in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The EIC followed Asian precedents by forging its empire through reliance on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule. Company officials first curated indigenous identities to mobilize a uniquely competitive multicultural conquest coalition. They then stabilized their rule through a diversity regime of ecumenical incorporation, which reified religious difference as the primary cleavage on which colonial divide and rule logics would rest. The chapter proceeds in six sections. The first charts the onset of competitive state-building in South Asia following the Mughal Empire’s decline. The second section recounts the EIC’s expansion, before critiquing existing explanations for this. The third to fifth sections advance my substantive explanation for the rise of the ‘Company Raj’. The discussion conforms to the template of emergence, institutionalization, legitimization and consolidation established earlier to explain the rise of the Mughals and the Manchus. The sixth section sums up the chapter’s findings and teases out its broader implications.

This chapter examines the rise of the Mughal and Qing empires, which together forged a template for rule that would define Asian and Western approaches to empire in the Old World down to the twentieth century. Mughal and Manchu conquest elites succeeded in establishing and maintaining rule over vastly more prosperous, populous and culturally sophisticated subject populations during the early modern era. They did so through strategies of define and conquer and define and rule, entailing the extensive customization and repurposing of indigenous normative and institutional resources for imperial ends. Imperial elites creatively remixed these resources, both to create local constituencies in favour of ‘barbarian’ rule, and also to generate the coercive reserves of hard power needed to defend their empires from internal and external hard challenges. Finally, rulers in both empires then stabilized their power through the establishment of distinct diversity regimes, which institutionalized existing practices of define and rule, while blocking the potential rise of anti-imperial coalitions.

The liberal international order of states has engendered a global order of transnational and supranational agents, institutions, and practices, generating a nascent global polity. This polity is animated by social purposes, including peace and security, economic growth, global health, and the rights and well-being of individuals. It also champions a distinctive diversity regime, centred on the moral primacy of the individual. Focusing on six components of the emerging global polity, the chapter describes both the institutional lineaments and the cultural core of the global polity-in-formation, including its distinctive diversity regime. Ethnic, religious, and other forms of cultural difference are legitimated, but only so long as they do not compromise the fundamental equality and autonomy of the persons who stand as global citizens. The global polity is also in fundamental tension with the liberal order, ultimately challenging basic principles of the nation state: sovereignty, citizenship rights, and national boundaries.

Discriminating between alternative cultural forms, when for example, determining the conditions under which international legal subjectivity is recognized to some human groupings – states – but not to others – indigenous peoples – international law structures cultural diversity. Structuring cultural diversity in the international order, international law, however, does not operate in a cultural vacuum. Its own social institutions discipline diversity in international legal thought and practice, structuring international legal culture. This chapter explores the use of ideas and images about universality and about Western particularity in international legal argumentation to show the multiplicity of conflicting and heterogeneous meanings and practices that constitute international legal culture.

UNESCO’s world heritage regime was founded in 1972 to identify and protect cultural and natural sites of 'outstanding universal value,' which constitute humanity’s common heritage. The identification and proper valuation of these sites, it was hoped, would interpellate a common humanity and foster identification with this humanity, thereby contributing to peaceful global relations. This chapter argues that the world heritage regime is a diversity regime that curates the world’s cultural diversity as part of world order-making. In turn, the changes in the world order since the regime’s establishment have resulted in challenges to the regime’s governance of culture based on a universal value and through scientific-technical evaluation by international experts. These challenges have resulted in increased resistance to international experts, the demand for the inclusion of local experts, and in two (competing) conceptions of credibility as scientific-technical adjudication and as representativity.

Barnett uses the 'Jewish Problem' to compare how different kinds of nationalism have offered different ways of dealing with minorities and, in turn, the strategies available to minorities who want to both retain their community and maintain their physical survival. Nineteenth-century Europe developed two different kinds of nationalism that had different responses to the minorities in their midst. Western ‘civic’ conceptions of the nation offered minorities the ability to integrate if they accepted that they were part of the civic nation. Eastern 'ethnic' nationalism could not imagine minorities such as the Jews as being a candidate for membership in the nation. In response to the opportunities offered by countries with civic nationalism, Jews 'reformed' Judaism and their Jewish identities so that it could fit into a broader Christian, liberal society. For Eastern Jews, there was no possibility of integration, forcing then to flee, turn to broader transnational movements such as socialism, or develop their own brand of Jewish nationalism, best known as Zionism.

This chapter compares the diversity regimes of the Qing Empire and twentieth-century Chinese republics to argue that evocations of 'traditional' Chinese diversity regime and interpolity relations frequent in the literature are based on a mistaken model of the Chinese past, one involving the 'tributary system' and 'Confucian peace' or tianxia concepts, largely derived from John King Fairbank’s descriptions of the 'traditional Chinese world order.'After critiquing the Fairbankian model, the chapter introduces the findings of more recent scholarship on the Qing period which reveal the flexible Qing approach to domestic diversity and interpolity relations, here called 'imperial pluralism.' The formal diversity regime of the People’s Republic of China towards its 56 minzu (nationalities, ethnicities) echoes Qing imperial pluralism as well as the nationalities system of the Soviet Union. Since the 2010s, however, the PRC has shifted from centralized pluralism towards a Han assimilationist approach. The author cautiously suggests that aspects of Chinese centralized pluralism – and not a vain quest for a homogeneous national population – would provide a more successful model, while remaining true to Chinese traditions.

This chapter examines China’s diversity regime which buried its political and cultural diversity in history. For most international relations scholars, China appears as an exception to this volume’s argument on cultural diversity. What is unique about China is not its unity but its precocious capacities for direct rule and military-fiscal extraction which began under the first two unified dynasties: the Qin and the Han. China’s seeming unity is the product of the mutually reinforcing processes of coercive political unification and cultural homogenization. Political unity achieved by military victories produced and reproduced cultural homogeneity. Successful unifiers equated cultural diversity with political troubles and thus sought to level their subjects. A flattened cultural landscape, in turn, legitimated unifiers’ claim to rule ‘all under heaven’. This chapter first outlines China’s cultural plurality in its formative era. It then examines how unified dynasties forged a singular Han culture with an extreme homogenization regime that included mass killings and migrations, standardization of weights and measures, erasure of intellectual diversity, and monopolization of history writing.