The chapter draws together the main conclusions from the study. It highlights the implications of this study for how history is analysed and periodised, and how the approach taken in this book offers opportunities to create common ground amongst those interested in ’big picture’ approaches to the study of humankind in Intnernational Relations, Global Historical Sociology, and Global/World History. The chapter also looks at the implications for the English School of extending its analytical scheme in this way.

The chapter sets out the ’big picture’ approach of the book; its concepts, terms and definitions, and the aims and structure of the book.

The so-called ‘civil police’ which originated in London and then spread to the US and the rest of the world has been a crucial institution for maintaining the international order. This is because the civil police, unlike the army, is a coercive regime meant for ‘citizens’ rather than ‘foreigners’ or ‘subjects’. The civil police regulates ‘domestic’ space, while the military is oriented to ‘foreign’ or ‘international’ space. This essay examines the origins of this important institution in the United Kingdom and the United States and reveals its colonial genealogy. The first civil police, the London Metropolitan Police, founded in the nineteenth century, was modelled after a colonial counter-insurgency force, the Irish Constabulary. In the United States, the civil police was initially modelled after the London police but later, in the early twentieth century, appropriated a series of techniques and tactics from America’s colonial regime in the Philippines. The strategic operation of both civil police institutions has been to draw upon the colonial site while covering up its colonial counter-insurgency and militaristic origins.

Chapter 1 introduces the key conceptual themes/problems that underpin this book. It begins by arguing that current accounts of globalization and the global economy are Eurocentric in that they view these phenomena as the sole product of Western power and agency. It then feeds into the analysis of Benjamin Cohen's call for the return to ‘big picture’ visions and accounts of IPE given my belief that British- and US-School IPE have produced ahistorical/presentist and narrow conceptions of the global economy. To counter this I advance a global historical sociological approach that reveals the origins of both the global economy and capitalism in the last half-millennium. In problematising the dominant, naturalised Western conception I seek to replace it with an alternative non-Eurocentric approach that foregrounds the interconnections between Western and non-Western agency. I then sketch a picture of what ‘Eurocentrism I’ comprises before providing a critique of ‘Eurocentrism II’ that is advanced by fundamentalist critical postcolonialism, with the latter reproducing Western-centrism (i.e., ‘Eurofetishism’). Finally, having provided a sympathetic critique of the California School of global history on the grounds of its fetishization of non-Western agency I conclude by defining capitalism and providing a sketch-map of the journey ahead.