This Introduction begins by outlining what is meant by international relations. It then tells the story of how and why the academic study of international relations emerged in the early twentieth century before considering the need to ‘globalise’ the study of international relations – to make it an academic discipline more open to non-Western perspectives. It sketches the changing agenda of international relations, a shift that some scholars describe as a transition from international relations to world politics or from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘new’ agenda. Although there is little doubt that, as political reality has changed, new theoretical tools have become necessary to grasp it, we should not assume that the myriad changes in our world have rendered the ‘traditional’ agenda obsolete. As we shall see, the ‘new’ agenda supplements, but does not supplant, the ‘traditional’ agenda. It is now more important than ever to consider the relationships between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ agendas, and to globalise IR.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

In the last thirty years, the historiography of Spanish-American independence has emphasized the paradoxical centrality of the Spanish revolutionary process, with the key role of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the general economy of emancipation. It also emphasized the role of Saint-Domingue/Haiti as a factor of regional destabilization. As a consequence of these revisions, the French Revolution is no longer considered as the intellectual and political source of these movements. Nevertheless, they allow us to rethink the Franco-Hispanic relationship, and beyond that, the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, by reformulating two classic issues. The first is the re-evaluation of the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions in Spanish America. The second is concerned with the forms of their appropriation by the actors of independence.

Chapter 2 describes how Roman and medieval of notions of imperium were re-appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe the sovereignty claims of nascent states as well as to legitimize their territorial aggrandizement in Europe and beyond. Since early modern conceptions of sovereignty came with few restrictions on the scope of rule in terms of peoples or places that could be legitimately subjected to its authority, early modern authors made no categorical distinction between empires and states. But even if these authors had no clear conception of a distinctive international realm, they nevertheless developed a rich vocabulary for describing relations between different polities in and out of Europe. Many of those who resisted imperial aggrandizement during this period maintained that the quest for universal sovereignty violated the natural liberty of both individuals and states and proposed that upholding the balance of power between European empires cum states was crucial to the preservation of natural liberty. From this Enlightenment historians and lawyers concluded that European powers constituted a system of sovereign and formally equal states held together by public law and balance of power in equal measures.

This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.

The chapter looks at the long-term structural importance associated with Napoleon’s win in Austerlitz and the ensuing formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. It defines modes of transformation but rather as evolutionary dynamics that pave the way for historical trajectories in which new social forms – such as European global empires or even the notion of global empire – borrow from previous forms, such as the way of organizing political authority in the Holy Roman Empire. In doing so, it identifies two pertinent modes of historicity, namely the presence of several temporal layers in social and political phenomena (‘complex temporalities’), as well as an evolutionary account of non-linear change. In this sense, the chapter is not only about the presence of a specific past in the contemporary structures of the system of world politics, but also to provide a methodological input into contemporary debates about global historical sociology.

Some scholars may have little difficulty in seeing the present as a shatterspace of empires and a palimpsest of past ones. For others, seeing the world through the filter of colonialism and imperialism requires a kind of Gestalt switch. Empire seems to be as invisible in the US as in Europe and even its former colonies. The copious evidence that empires existed in the hearts and minds of European populations even after 1945 has been vigorously denied. Conversely, a cloud of colonial amnesia descended in the former metropoles almost immediately after colonial independence. In the end, only those on the receiving end of imperial violence seem to readily frame the world in terms of empire. The social sciences remain doggedly focused on ‘domestic’ questions framed by theories devoid of any reference to time and place. This chapter examines the afterlives of colonialism.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Chapter 4 examines the political contexts of early cities. It analyzes different types of polity, and types of governance (autocratic versus collective), and then reviews the political dimensions of early urban planning.

This chapter reviews the evidence from the Greek world for tribute and taxation. It begins with some comparative considerations about tributary regimes and the impact of Achaemenid imperialism on the fiscal development of the Greek city-states, including the Delian League and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The transition from tribute to taxation is cast as a significant indicator of state formation. A fundamental theme in ancient Greek taxation is the relationship between coercion and consent, especially how political institutions facilitate the sharing of communal burdens by the rich. Extraordinary levies on property and persons were a common feature of city-states, which Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms also adopted. Finally, the chapter treats indirect taxes, which are thought to provide a much larger and more regular portion of state revenue in the Greek world.

Chapter 9 provides the most comprehensive appraisal yet not just of the unparalleled range of pressing problems but also of the underlying structural and systemic challenges that the principal peacemakers confronted in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular, it throws into relief that by the end of 1918 not only eastern Europe had to be fundamentally reorganised after the collapse of the eastern empires and, crucially, the cardinal German question had to be settled in a new way but also, and above all, the need had arisen to create, for the first time, a functioning Atlantic order that included both the old and new European states and the newly pivotal American power. At the same time, it argues that the war had radically changed the international, national and transnational conditions in which a peace settlement had to be negotiated and cardinal decisions about the shape of the postwar order had to be made. And it shows that the unprecedented catastrophe had given rise to unprecedentedly far-reaching – and conflicting – expectations on all sides of a “peace to end all wars” that was to be forged and compensate the different societies and populations for the unprecedented sacrifices they had made.

Chapter 6 seeks to capture the tectonic changes the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great War engendered. It analyses both the catalytic and the transformative impact the war had on Europe, the United States and the wider world in every relevant sphere – international, domestic and transnational politics, economic order, finance as well as the realms of culture and worldviews. It then concentrates on mapping out how, at the core, the war fundamentally recast the transatlantic constellation, precipitating both the destruction of the pre-war European states-system and casting the United States in the role of the power that not only ultimately decided the outcome of the conflict but also seemed poised to dominate efforts to reorder Europe and the world in its aftermath.

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of the modern world system: a system ordered by states rather than nations. The normative acceptance of the unit and design of the state internal to this, the interstate system, proscribes that people should live sedentarized lives within clearly demarcated state borders, governed by statebearing nations ruling over them. Sesame Street’s adaptation of the interstate system, in turn, meant that Israeli citizens (Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) were bound to their street-state, Rechov Sumsum, and later, Sippuray Sumsum, and Palestinian citizens (Palestinians citizens of the non-state institution of the Palestinian Authority), to Shara’a Simsim, and later, Hikayat Simsim. If citizens crossed one-street-state into the other, the assumption was that they would necessarily return “home” to their own bordered street-state.

A basic framework for classifying institutions and thinking about their role in economic development is illustrated with the colonial experience of the British and Spanish empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Japan in the nineteenth century. Institutions are the ‘rules of the game’. Primary rules are rules that apply directly to individuals and their relationships. Secondary rules are the ‘rules for making the rules’. The secondary rules governing the Spanish Empire located the procedures for making new rules and changing existing rules in negotiations with the king. Secondary rules in the British Empire located many of the processes for making new rules in the colonies themselves. Faced with independence and the end of monarchical rule in the late eighteenth and early ninteenth century, the institutions in the former Spanish colonies had to be reinvented from whole cloth, as the basic structure of secondary rules was no longer viable. In the British North American colonies, secondary rules allocating authority to colonial legislatures remained in place and were gradually transformed after independence. Japan, in contrast, wrestled with how to structure secondary rules in the events leading up to and following the Meiji Restoration.