Reconstructing International Relations Through World History: Oriental Globalization and the Global–Dialogic Conception of Inter-Civilizational Relations

Abstract

In this article, I seek to move the agenda for historical sociology of international relations (HSIR) onto the next stage of research by considering how both international relations (IR) and HSIR can benefit from entering into a dialogue with World History and, more specifically, with what I call the ‘new global history’. This is necessary because much of IR — and ironically, the vast majority of HSIR — suffers from ahistorical Eurocentrism. In this article, I begin the process of reconstructing IR by drawing on a range of non-Eurocentric arguments that are furnished in the new global history. My overarching framework explores how ‘Eastern agency’ and ‘Oriental globalization’ have informed many of the developments in world politics that are conventionally assumed to have Western origins. More specifically, I show how various global–dialogic relationships conducted between Eastern and Western agents have shaped the modern world, in particular capitalist modernity and the rise and spread of the sovereign state. In the final part of the article, I argue that great power politics under Oriental globalization differed fundamentally from Western hegemony/imperialism, thereby debunking the myth that great power politics can be universalized through time and place. In the conclusion, I suggest various areas of future research that could propel both IR and HSIR out of their ahistorical Eurocentric impasse.