This chapter defines international societies as a set of polities that share foundational collective beliefs—a collective imagination regarding the nature and purposes of political and social organization. It discusses two challenges to ahistorical, positivist social science and international relations scholarship. Constructivist theory has convincingly demonstrated how international systems are social systems and that ideas and interests are inextricably linked. Similarly, the English School has championed the need for historical analyses and contextual nuance. This chapter acknowledges the affinity as well as differences between these approaches and my analysis. Furthermore, it articulates a methodology to conduct contextual, interpretative, and empirical analysis. Such an analysis demonstrates that political communities and international order do not depend solely or even primarily on material capabilities. In order to understand how political communities and order are constituted, one must acknowledge the importance of the ceremonial and the symbolic.

Chapter 4 discusses the logic of order of the Chinese tributary system. It demonstrates that a shared set of collective beliefs, revolving around Confucian principles, and other norms, played an integral role in this political system. Understood as a complex of shared understanding and meaning, tributary relations acted as a lingua franca by creating a shared script, a common knowledge, that facilitated mutual understanding, which could entail benign or less benign relations but overall provided actors with a common frame of reference. The tributary system is an analytical framework for the historical study of Asian international relations, a concept that should be understood as a script that allowed for multiple and diverse interpretations by the participants themselves. The chapter further demonstrates how the Sinocentric system could accommodate great heterogeneity and multiple ethnicities and religions.