Stability and Hierarchy in East Asian International Relations, 1300–1900 CE

Abstract

For too long, international relations scholars have derived theoretical propositions from the European experience and then treated them as deductive and universal. This book builds on an important new line of research (e.g., Kaufman, 1997; Wilkinson, 1999; Buzan and Little, 2000; Hui, 2004b) that corrects this scientifically indefensible parochialism. However, even this research has paid little attention to a major historical epoch — the Asian international system from 1300-1900. As a result, scholars may still underestimate the challenges a truly unbiased assessment of non-European international history presents to the conventional scholarly wisdom. For, whereas in many of the other international systems analyzed in this book balance-of-power processes occurred but were overwhelmed by other causal forces, in the Asian international system such processes barely registered in historical evidence. If balance-of-power theory is misleading in the other cases, in this case it is profoundly and fundamentally wrong.