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The Oxford Handbook of
HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
THE
OXFOR D
H A NDBOOK S
OF
INTERNATIONAL
REL ATIONS
General Editors
Christian Reus-Smit of the University of Queensland and
Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford
The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-volume set of reference books

offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub- fields of
International Relations.
The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smit and
Duncan Snidal, with each volume edited by a distinguished team of specialists in their re-
spective fields.
The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and
reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example
of the original Reus-Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each
volume is organized around a strong central thematic by editors scholars drawn from alter-
native perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in
challenging new directions.
The Oxford Handbook of
HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
Edited by
M L A DA BU KOVA N SK Y
E DWA R D K E E N E
C H R I ST IA N R E U S -SM I T
M AJA SPA N U
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Oxford University Press 2023
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950148
ISBN 978–0–19–887345–7
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198873457.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
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Acknowledgements
This project has taken us on a long and winding road, and along the way we have incurred
many debts. The most fundamental is to the wonderful community of historians and
International Relations (IR) scholars who have grappled with the history of the inter-
national. Rather than see this as a community riven by an unbreachable disciplinary divide,
we have experienced it as a field of rich and challenging engagement. This engagement has
shaped our individual scholarship in profound ways, and it ultimately led us to this project.
Indeed, the project itself has become a site of such engagement, which we very much hoped it
would be. Our thanks go, therefore, to everyone who populates this wonderful field of schol-
arship, and more specifically, to the historians and IR scholars who contributed so much
to this finished volume. We also thank Dominic Byatt, Christian Reus-Smit, and Duncan
Snidal for commissioning a volume that seeks to disrupt the well-worn, highly ritualized
debates that have long divided historians and IR scholars. The final product would not have
been possible without the extraordinary efforts of Melinda Rankin and Jack Shield who did
the proofreading and copyediting needed to prepare the manuscript for submission. Many,
many thanks! Our last word goes to the generation of young scholars whose pioneering work
is now reshaping so fundamentally how we think about the relation between history and
international relations. This book is dedicated to you.
Mlada Bukovansky
Edward Keene
Christian Reus-Smit
Maja Spanu
Contents
List of Contributors xi
PA RT I I N T RODU C T ION
1. Modernity and Granularity in History and International Relations 3
Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
PA RT I I R E A DI N G S
2. Origins, Histories, and the Modern International 21
R. B. J. Walker
3. Historical Realism 35
Michael C. Williams
4. Liberal Progressivism and International History 49
Lucian M. Ashworth
5. Historical Sociology in International Relations 63
Maïa Pal
6. Global History and International Relations 79
George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich
7. International Relations and Intellectual History 94
Duncan Bell
8. Gender, History, and International Relations 111
Laura Sjoberg
9. Postcolonial Histories of International Relations 125
Zeynep Gulsah Capan
10. International Relations Theory and the Practice of
International History 137
Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay
viii Contents
11. Global Sources of International Thought 155

Chen Yudan
PA RT I I I P R AC T IC E S
12. State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty 173
Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger
13. Diplomacy 188
Linda Frey and Marsha Frey
14. Empire 202
Martin J. Bayly
15. Barbarism and Civilization 218
Yongjin Zhang
16. Race and Racism 233
Nivi manchanda
17. Religion, History, and International Relations 249
Cecelia Lynch
18. Human Rights 262
Andrea Paras
19. The Diplomacy of Genocide 277
A. Dirk Moses
20. War and History in World Politics 292
Tarak Barkawi
21. Nationalism 306
James Mayall
22. Interpolity Law 320
Lauren Benton
23. Regulating Commerce 334
Eric Helleiner
24. Development 348
Corinna R. Unger
Contents ix
25. Governing Finance 363

Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young
26. Revolution 379
Eric Selbin
PA RT I V L O C A L E S ( SPAC IA L ,
T E M P OR A L , C U LT U R A L )
27. The ‘Premodern’ World 395
Julia Costa Lopez
28. Modernity and Modernities in International Relations 410
Ayşe Zarakol
29. The ‘West’ in International Relations 424
Jacinta O’hagan
30. The Eighteenth Century 439
Daniel Gordon
31. The Long Nineteenth Century 454
Quentin Bruneau
32. The Pre-Colonial African State System 469
John Anthony Pella, Jr
33. The ‘Americas’ in the History of International Relations 483
Michel Gobat
34. ‘Asia’ in the History of International Relations 499
David C. Kang
35. The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in International History 513
Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka
PA RT V M OM E N T S
36. The Fall of Constantinople 531
Jonathan Harris
37. The Peace of Westphalia 544
Andrew Phillips
x Contents
38. The Seven Years’ War 560

Karl Schweizer
39. The Haitian Revolution 573
Musab Younis
40. The Congress of Vienna 587
Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg
41. The Revolutions of 1848 602
Daniel M. Green
42. The Indian Uprising of 1857 617
Alexander E. Davis
43. The Berlin and Hague Conferences 631
Claire Vergerio
44. The First World War and Versailles 646
Duncan Kelly
45. Sykes–Picot 660
Megan Donaldson
46. World War Two and San Francisco 675
Daniel Gorman
47. The Bandung Conference 690
Christopher J. Lee
48. Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis 705
Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas
PA RT V I C ON C LU SION
49. History and the International: Time, Space, Agency, and Language 723
Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit
Index 741
List of Contributors
Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science

at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Tarak Barkawi is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
and Political Science.
Martin J. Bayly is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory in the International
Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University
of Cambridge.
Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale
University.
Jordan Branch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Quentin Bruneau is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research.
Mlada Bukovansky is Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts.
Zeynep Gulsah Capan is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Erfurt.
Chen Yudan is Associate Professor in International Politics in the School of International
Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University.
Julia Costa Lopez is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of International Relations at
the University of Groningen.
Alexander E. Davis is Lecturer in Political Science (International Relations) at the University
of Western Australia School of Social Sciences.
Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of Public International Law at University College
London.
Linda Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Montana.
Marsha Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at Kansas State University.
Michel Gobat is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Daniel Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
xii List of Contributors
Daniel Gorman is Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member
at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
Daniel M. Green is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Delaware.
Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of
London.
Eric Helleiner is Professor and University Research Chair in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Waterloo.
Talbot Imlay is Professor of History at the Université Laval in Quebec.
Peter Jackson holds the Chair in Global Security (History) in the School of Humanities at
the University of Glasgow.
David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of
Southern California.
Edward Keene is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford
and Official Student of Politics at Christ Church.
Duncan Kelly is Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History in the Department
of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College.
George Lawson is Professor of International Relations in the Coral Bell School at the
Australian National University.
Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory in the War Studies Department
of King’s College London and Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Christopher J. Lee is Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at
The Africa Institute, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California.
Nivi Manchanda is Senior Lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University of
London.
James Mayall is Emeritus Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at the
University of Cambridge and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College.
Jennifer Mitzen is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University.
A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair of International Relations at the City
College of New York.
Jeppe Mulich is Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of International Politics at
City, University of London.
Jacinta O’Hagan is Associate Professor in International Relations in the School of Political
Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University.
List of Contributors xiii
Andrea Paras is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Guelph.
John Anthony Pella, Jr is a Research Fellow in the School of International Affairs at Fudan
University.
Benoît Pelopidas is Associate Professor of International Relations at Sciences Po (CERI).
Andrew Phillips is Associate Professor of International Relations and Strategy in the School
of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Signe Predmore is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Women, Gender & Sexuality
Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Christian Reus-Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland
and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Jeff Rogg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The
Citadel.
Or Rosenboim is Director of the Centre for Modern History and Senior Lecturer at the
Department of International Politics at City, University of London.
Karl Schweizer is Professor in the Federated Department of History at NJIT/Rutgers
University.
Eric Selbin is Professor and Chair of Political Science & Holder of the Lucy King Brown
Chair at Southwestern University.
Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations
and Director of the Gender Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Maja Spanu is Affiliated Lecturer at University of Cambridge and Head of Research and
International Affairs, Fondation de France.
Jan Stockbruegger is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at
Copenhagen University.
Chika Tonooka is a Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of
Cambridge.
Corinna R. Unger is Professor of Global and Colonial History (19th and 20th centuries) at
the Department of History, European University Institute.
Claire Vergerio is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University’s
Institute of Political Science.
R. B. J. Walker is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Victoria and Professor
Colaborador do IRI, PUC-Rio de Janeiro.
Michael C. Williams is University Research Professor of International Politics in the
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
Kevin L. Young is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
xiv List of Contributors
Musab Younis is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University
of London.
Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a
Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College.
Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics and
International Studies at the University of Bristol.
PA RT I
I N T RODU C T ION
Chapter 1
Modernit y a nd
Gr anul arit y i n H i story
and Internat i ona l
Rel ati ons
Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
The idea for this Handbook on History and International Relations originated from two
propositions. One is that we cannot make sense of how international relations work
without understanding the history of how different forms of global political orders have
developed; the other is that the history of the world as a whole cannot be written without
taking account of the existence of an international system (or systems) on a global scale. To
capture the various dimensions of this interdependence between the academic disciplines
of International Relations (IR) and History, the Handbook is organized around ‘Readings’,
‘Practices’, ‘Locales’, and ‘Moments’. The first section, ‘Readings’, examines the contexts
within which the encounter between historians and IR scholars takes place, with writers
from both fields reflecting on different ways in which their inquiries intersect. Thereafter we
look outward to see how current research is re-shaping our understanding of how the world
we live in today developed. Rather than work towards a single grand overarching narrative
here—the story of historical IR—our goal is to show how different perspectives inform our
sense of the international and global dimensions of historical becoming in a rich variety
of ways.
To establish coherence and points of comparison across this diversity, we have asked all
our authors to focus on two key themes that give them a number of ‘hooks’ on which they
can pin their analyses. We will explain these in more detail next, but it may be helpful to give
a brief summary of these fundamental elements of our project here at the very beginning
of this introductory chapter, to explain how they inform the arrangement of the Handbook
across its various sections, so that readers can approach the many chapters presented here
with a clearer understanding of how the volume is organized, and why we have chosen to
arrange it that way.
The first set of questions we posed for our authors is about the chronological develop-
ment of different ways of ordering the international, and how to navigate between structural
4 Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
change and continuity. To do this, we chose to adopt a focus on modernity as an organizing

concept, or possibly critical foil. We recognize that there are potential dangers in putting this
idea at the centre of our reflections on history and IR, and that some would see a fixation
with modernity as a significant source of problems within mainstream IR scholarship. For
example, the chapter by Ayse Zarakol on ‘Modernity and Modernities in IR’ (Chapter 28)
offers the most direct engagement with this theme, and illustrates the reflective and critical
manner in which we hope to handle the concept throughout the Handbook. Zarakol mounts
a forceful argument that the academic discipline of IR has been powerfully influenced by a
specific version of modernization theory that generates a number of dubious propositions,
provocatively labelled as three distinct ‘Wrong Answers’ to the questions of what mod-
ernity is, who made it, and how it interacted with other ways of organizing social, economic
and political life as it spread around the world. Zarakol contends that all of these ‘Wrong
Answers’ spring from an over-commitment to ‘the idea that “modernity” is a unique set of
developments that was experienced first or only by the West’ and radically underestimates
the agency of non-Western actors.
One important consequence of this is a tendency for IR theory to coalesce around
a particular conception of state sovereignty, and it is clear that this risks importing a spe-
cific Western perspective into any treatment of historical IR and international history.
We have therefore actively encouraged authors to imagine multiple modernities, alter-
native meta-narratives, and different pathways of change that, in Zarakol’s words, will re-
veal ‘a more open-minded survey of global history’. To take another example of the kind
of work that this involves, consider the account of global legal history offered by Lauren
Benton (Chapter 22), which rejects the narrow focus on Western sovereignty contained in
Zarakol’s ‘Wrong Answers’, and highlights instead the importance of ‘interpolity zones, or
regions marked by interpenetrating power and weak or uneven claims to territorial sover-
eignty’. We believe that thinking about the relationship between IR and History requires us
to understand both traditional state-centric answers to the question of how the distinctively
modern international system came into being and developed, and the critical responses
from scholars such as Benton (2010) that contest these formulations today and embrace a
much wider range of forms of global political ordering. By establishing ‘modernity’ as one
of the organizing themes for the Handbook, we hope both to acknowledge its central signifi-
cance in the development of historical IR, and to expose it to radical scrutiny as a limiting
factor on our ability to comprehend the complexity of how the international has developed
within a global context.
The second theme tries to unlock the potential for generating fresh insights by adopting
different framings in geographical space, historical time, and levels of both agency and struc-
ture, which we articulate through the idea of granularity. The sections on ‘Practices’, ‘Locales’,
and ‘Moments’ are all intended to offer opportunities either to step back to contemplate the
very broadest kind of analysis, or to zoom in on the personal and micro-political aspects of
the day-to-day. An example of the former is Linda and Marsha Frey’s chapter on the practice
of diplomacy (Chapter 13), which gives a sweeping survey that runs from the earliest periods
of recorded history up to the twentieth century in what one might call the ‘grand manner’
of diplomatic history; whereas for the latter, one could look at Christopher Lee’s analysis of
the Bandung Conference (Chapter 47) which homes in on the specific details of a particular
moment, and uses them as a way to think about the wider significance of this precise event,
and the persistent myths that flowed from it. These two chapters offer almost polar opposites
Modernity and Granularity in History 5
of the different scale on which the encounter between IR and History might be envisaged. In
between, our authors adopt a host of different perspectives. Several chapters—Eric Selbin’s
on ‘Revolution’ (Chapter 26), for example—aim to show how understandings of specific
phenomena can shuttle back and forth between micro-and macro-perspectives.
It is fair to say that ‘Practices’ invites the longue durée, whereas the examination of
‘Moments’ inevitably brings one up close to the personal and the immediate. However,
several of our authors break up this expectation. To take just one example, Musab Younis’s
fascinating study of the Haitian Revolution (Chapter 39) not only dives into the details of
what this moment represents as a specific event within the historical development of the
international politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also uses it
as a stimulus to expose ‘the limitations of the very categories we use to measure significance
and meaning when we study the international’, and concludes by suggesting how an intellec-
tual history of the Haitian revolutionaries’ own self-understandings could be the basis for
an alternative perspective on the international grounded in ‘anticolonial and postcolonial
cultural nationalism.’ At the same time, somewhat more cautiously, Megan Donaldson’s
analysis of the Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 (Chapter 45) warns about how the question
of scale opened up by this granularity theme raises the possibility that something may be
lost as we move from one perspective to another, how we can see very different things from
different vantage points, and how indeed some of these may be illusory.
The section on ‘Locales’ stands, as it were, in between the opposite ends of the spectrum of
granularity, and each chapter here gives its author an opportunity to examine the categories
that we frequently, and often unthinkingly, use to organize discrete subject areas for thinking
about historical IR. We think two of these are particularly significant: periodization and re-
gionalization. Historians and IR scholars tend to break their subject matter up either into
delimited chunks of time (e.g. the ‘early modern’ period, the ‘long nineteenth century’), or
into distinct geographical spaces (e.g. the idea of regional international systems in Asia or
Africa). There is a sense in which these categorizations would not exist, or be so popular, if
they did not capture something important and valuable, and so our purpose is not simply to
criticize or dismiss these as organizing devices for scholarship. Many of the chapters here,
such as Quentin Bruneau’s study of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (Chapter 31), broadly
work within this periodization, presenting current scholarship on how it is conceived in
History and IR, and sometimes (as in Bruneau’s case) offering novel interpretive insights
into how we should understand it and its place within the wider set of stories of historical
IR. Nevertheless, several chapters, such as Zarakol’s chapter on modernity discussed above,
or Julia Costa Lopez’s account of the ‘pre-modern’ world (Chapter 27), seek to unsettle
these conventional ways of carving up the huge expanse of historical time and geographic
space that we are operating within. As Costa Lopez warns, for example, ‘approaching the
premodern with periodization-derived preconceptions about its significance prevents us
from doing anything but confirming our own prejudices—whatever those may be’.
Our choice of specific ‘Locales’, ‘Practices’, and ‘Moments’ to include in the volume has
been guided by our desire both to inform the reader of conventional wisdoms about his-
torical IR, and to challenge these or open up new vistas. For example, among our ‘Locales’
we have a chapter not on the geographical space of Europe as such but on the imaginary
of the ‘West’, which (as Jacinta O’Hagan shows in Chapter 29) is the subject of multiple
narratives that depict it as variously ‘civilizational’, ‘liberal’, and ‘fragmenting’. This highlights
the way that we do not simply take regional classifications as starting points for analysis,
but as socially constructed entities whose meaning needs to be interrogated. As O’Hagan

remarks, the ‘West’ is not so much a geographically designated part of the world, but ra-
ther it constitutes ‘an imagined community that has acted as a strategic and normative refer-
ence point for the constitution of agency and identities in international relations’. This clearly
connects with and amplifies Zarakol’s point discussed previously, where the understanding
of ‘modernity’ in much IR and historical scholarship has traditionally been a vehicle for
privileging one view of the ‘Western’ experience of global political ordering at the expense of
alternative perspectives.
In a similarly critical vein, while our list of ‘Moments’ acknowledges some that would fea-
ture prominently in any textbook, such as the Peace of Westphalia (even if, as Andrew Phillips
explains in Chapter 37, much of the significance of this moment may be misconceived), we
have deliberately tried not to make this just a collection of canonically recognized turning
points. Instead, within the obvious limitations in terms of the number of ‘Moments’ we can
possibly cover, we have tried to include some where we think that there is a disappointing
absence of scholarly connections between historians and IR scholars, such as Dan Green’s
examination of the European revolutions of 1848 (Chapter 41). Moreover, mindful of the
importance of non-Western agency, we especially want to take the reader to places around
the world that might have been missed by the Eurocentric gaze of traditional narratives: we
start this section with Jonathan Harris’s study of arguably one of the most globally momen-
tous moments in the shaping of the modern world, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
(Chapter 36), and carry this forward in chapters such as Younis’s examination of the Haitian
Revolution mentioned previously. Of course, we cannot expect these editorial choices alone
to redress the balance of what has, or has not, traditionally been included in the scope of his-
torical IR, but we hope that they will offer a provocation that opens possibilities for new re-
search on times, places, and phenomena that have not received the attention or interpretive
weight that they deserve.
The Encounter between History and

International Relations
Before we examine some further, deeper aspects of these two themes of modernity and
granularity that run throughout the Handbook, we should acknowledge that, in pursuing
them, we are building on well-established traditions of scholarship in both the academic
disciplines of IR and History. The two have long been intertwined. From its own side, IR has
always been, and continues to be, profoundly influenced by History. One could argue that
many, perhaps even most, of the earliest people who are now recalled as ‘IR theorists’ were
historians by training or inclination: for instance, several of the key figures in the formative
period of the IR discipline—such as Raymond Aron, E. H. Carr, and Arnold Toynbee—had
close links to History in terms of their academic activities. This interest in the history of
the international system has been carried forward through the development of the field in
the later-twentieth century by groups such as the ‘English School of International Relations
Theory’ (Navari and Green 2014; and see Wight 1977; Bull and Watson 1984; Watson 1992),
and a great deal of more recent work across a wide range of IR theory draws inspiration
from historiographical innovations: for example, Duncan Bell shows in Chapter 7 how
the field of international intellectual history has evolved under the influence of methodo-
logical developments such as contextualist approaches to the history of thought; while Chen
Yudan applies a similar perspective to the way in which global history impacts on our under-
standing of the historical sources of international political thought (Chapter 11).
Admittedly, within the last four or five decades many scholars working within what is often
described as the mainstream of IR have come to conceive of the field as an ‘American Social
Science’ (Hoffmann 1977; see also Crawford and Jarvis 2001), understanding it as an inquiry
that is primarily concerned with identifying and explaining timeless recurring patterns of
interaction between sovereign states (Waltz 1979). This view of how scholarship should pro-
ceed is often expressed rather combatively, not only as an alternative to, but as a rejection of
more historical or normative approaches (for the origins of such controversies, see Singer
1969 and Bull 1969). Nevertheless, even scholars working within this positivist and scien-
tific self-understanding cannot avoid intrinsically historical questions about when and how
modern states came into being, the extent to which their interactions really do display strong
continuities over time, and the timing and character of major changes in the institutions
and structure of the international system: history is, at the very least, a source of data, and
often plays a much larger role than that (Elman and Elman 2001 is a good survey). An histor-
ical consciousness informs many fundamental works in IR theory (for example, Waltz 1959;
Levy 1983; Gilpin 1984; Ruggie 1998; Wagner 2007), and is evident even in some supposedly
‘ahistorical’ theories of neorealism (e.g., Fischer 1992, although criticised for its interpret-
ation of history by Hall and Kratochwil 1993). As Maïa Pal shows in Chapter 5, for those
focusing more on economic structures and processes, the history of modern capitalism and
its relationship to socialism inevitably looms large from both a historical materialist stand-
point and in historical sociology more generally; while Martin Bayly’s chapter on ‘Empire’
(Chapter 14) shows how this remains a relevant unit of analysis despite the Eurocentric in-
sistence on the primacy of sovereignty, and even after the waves of decolonization of the
1950s and 60s. Scholars today very often combine original historical research with new the-
oretical trends in the study of IR (for example, Teschke 2003; Bell 2007; Fazal 2007; Nexon
2009; Zarakol 2011; MacDonald 2014; Phillips and Sharman 2015; Shilliam 2015; Acharya and
Buzan 2019; Owens and Rietzler 2021). The ‘International History’ section is a growing ele-
ment of the field’s major professional body, the International Studies Association.
The relationship between History and IR is not a one-way street where the latter feeds off
the former. Although less frequently or explicitly acknowledged, the discipline of History
has been influenced by trends in the social sciences, including theoretical innovations by
IR scholars. Compare, for example, two seminal works in the prestigious Oxford History of
Modern Europe series by A. J. P. Taylor (1954) and Paul Schroeder (1994). The two books may
cover contiguous historical periods, but they are a distance apart in terms of the theoret-
ical perspectives and assumptions that underpin them. Taylor’s work is very much a crea-
ture of the 1950s, anchored in a straightforward, even trite, version of realism, whereas the
intervening 40 years have given Schroeder a wealth of alternative insights into the dynamics
of relations between states, many of which are derived from more recent, and arguably
more sophisticated variants of realist thought, but extending to entirely different theoretical
perspectives such as more social constructionist readings of IR as well.
Beyond these intramural developments characteristic of the ongoing dialogue between
History and IR, significant critical challengers are pushing for major reorientation of both
disciplines. As George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich show in their analysis of ‘Global History
and IR’ (Chapter 6), over the last few decades there have been repeated surges of interest
in the writing of ‘world’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global histories’ that deliberately attempt to
break free from the strait-jackets imposed by nationalist historiography, and offer intriguing
suggestions of links to the study of IR, but often also problematizing the state-centrism
that colors much work in this area (for example, Bayly 2004; Clavin 2005; Mazlish 2006;
Burbank and Cooper 2011; Osterhammel 2014; Conrad 2016). Nivi Manchanda’s study of
‘Race and Racism’ (Chapter 16), or Laura Sjoberg on ‘Gender, History and IR’ (Chapter 8),
show how such historical studies are often part of efforts to reorient not just units of analysis
but entire conceptual vocabularies to account for previously excluded, subaltern voices (e.g.
Fischer 2004; Getachew 2019; Pham and Shilliam 2016). Theoretical orientations such as
historical materialism, historical institutionalism, post-structuralism, and postcolonialism
have shaped and reshaped how history is studied, and whose history ought to be studied: as
well as Pal’s chapter on historical sociology here, one could also point to Zeynep Gulsah
Capan’s study of postcolonial histories and their place in IR (Chapter 9). Critical assessments
regarding what constitutes a ‘source’ and an ‘archive’, such as the powerful challenge posed
by the scholar (in an anthropology department no less) Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) and
taken up by those seeking to uncover and challenge the persistence of white supremacy
in academia, have begun to transform the way in which History is practiced. This in turn
destabilizes how scholars view the workings of the ‘international system’, and indeed how
they understand the very meaning and signification of that term and associated ideas within
the IR field (see, for instance, Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015; Spruyt 2020).
Such critiques reveal that interdisciplinary entanglements may just as easily reify and rep-
licate persistent patterns of exclusion and omission as move either or both disciplines for-
ward. For example, while the members of the ‘English school’ are often cast as defenders
of an historical approach to IR, the growing challenges to their historiography regarding
the so-called ‘expansion of international society’ (Bull and Watson 1984) as a narrative of
progressive evolution of the international system suggest that any narrative framing of his-
torical evidence for theoretical purposes, or generation of theoretical insights from histor-
ical narrations, may become fodder for deep critiques of the omissions and silences thus
facilitated (Keene 2014; Howland 2016; Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017). Moreover, during a
time of political upheaval in what had long been considered the relatively stable ‘West’, the
study of History itself has become intensely politicized and subject to backlash, with histor-
ical monuments sometimes being literally pushed off their pedestals even as people band
together to offer new defenses of old myths, all in a climate of intense pressure on existing
democratic and semi-democratic institutions. The space that brings IR and History together
is thus not simply a place for collaborative mutual learning, but can be a battlefield where bit-
terly opposed intellectual commitments confront one another.
What remains clear in all this turmoil is that it is inadequate to reify History and IR as
independent fields of enquiry, each of which has its own proprietary terrain, with a set of
questions, issues, and methods that belong to it exclusively. These are not closed guilds,
much as they may at times seem that way to scholars struggling to articulate new ideas in
a climate where secure academic positions are few and the weight of expectations often
induces conformity with established practice, and where professional opportunities can
be jealously guarded for students with a degree in the ‘right’ subject. It is thus with a cer-
tain humility and awareness of the contentiousness of our analytical categories, as well as of
the power dynamics involved in articulating both historical and theoretical agendas, that
this volume has sought to bring together writers from both History and IR. This awareness
also informs our editorial decision to ask them to orient their contributions according to
the two very broad organizing themes or concepts that we outlined at the beginning of this
Introduction: modernity and granularity. We want to conclude these introductory remarks
by explaining in more detail why we think these offer fertile sources of questions shared
across the disciplines, and give the chance to integrate them in productive ways without, we
hope, either ignoring what long traditions of scholarship can provide, or closing off the po-
tential for radical critique.
Modernity
‘Modernity’ is an almost inescapable category for imagining historical time, especially with
its rich variety of adjectival modifiers, ‘pre’, ‘early’, ‘high’, ‘late’, ‘post’, and so on. One might
think of the similar role that ‘democracy with adjectives’ plays in organizing contemporary
political science (Collier and Levitsky 1997), and it is not coincidental that the concept of
‘capitalism’ can be adapted in much the same ways. Yet, perhaps in part because of its ubi-
quity, modernity will always be a moving target, and a contested one. The use of the term in
ordinary language often serves to distinguish what is distinctively new in the ‘present’ in re-
lation to what was the ‘past’. But precisely because of this—because human beings draw such
distinctions with respect to everything from fashion to architecture to ideology to modes of
political and economic organization—the question of modernity constitutes a productive
forum for historians and IR scholars, among others (and there is much to be said for broader
cross-fertilization than just History and IR; many contributions in this volume are more
interdisciplinary than that if one begins to look closely at sources).
As we noted at the beginning of the Introduction, and in our brief discussion of Ayse
Zarakol’s contribution to this volume on this specific topic (Chapter 28), we do not in-
tend modernity to imply a single linear narrative that is to be imposed on a given topic. We
do not insist that modernity is the fiscal-military or bureaucratic state, the market, prop-
erty, or some such form of social or political organization, and that the question of mod-
ernity requires us simply to track the emergence of one or a few of these at different times
in different parts of the world. On the contrary, while acknowledging that these are signifi-
cant themes, we see modernity as presenting a series of puzzles and provocations that can be
taken as an invitation to open-ended intellectual inquiry, and even playfulness. How have
different people conceptualized what it means to be ‘modern’? Against what do we distin-
guish it, what lies outside of the modern: the ancient? The medieval? The primitive? The
traditional? The contemporary? The non-Western? How do we time the modern; and where
and in what configuration of forces do we locate the builders of modernity? Whose mod-
ernity are we analysing, and are those who resist or are different merely peripheral, or left
out of modernity altogether? What does it take to opt out of modernity, if that is even pos-
sible? To the extent that intellectual historians have identified modernity with something
like the ‘Enlightenment’, what is the relationship between the development of ideas and cul-
ture on the one hand, and the development and maturation of social, political, and economic
structures and practices on the other? What is at stake in the question of whether we should
consider modernity as a single overall phenomenon or set of structures, or whether in the

postcolonial moment we need to consider ‘multiple modernities’?
The question of what modernity is and what it does to our understanding of the inter-
national thus strikes us as an interesting way to integrate intellectual and political histories,
and to highlight common preoccupations as well as salient differences between the
disciplines of IR and History. Although some IR scholars may set History aside in their pre-
occupation with what they take to be the timeless condition of anarchy, and in some cases
those who model the subject in terms of rational actors with given sets of interests opt to
bracket questions about the historical development of such interests, we are hardly alone
in arguing that a productive way to comprehend IR is in terms of the historical develop-
ment of the forms of actors, institutions, modes of production, and both strategic and nor-
mative principles and practices with which we live today (for example, Rosenberg 1994).
Such a focus does not neglect but indeed raises interesting questions about the continuity of
social forms through time, considering whether a history should look like an evolutionary
narrative or something more akin to genealogies of contemporary phenomena, such as
nation-states or security dilemmas. But clearly a focus on the historical development of, say,
modern statehood, also raises questions about change, in the sense of the identification of
moments of profound discontinuity or transformation. How did the international order that
we live in come to be, and what is distinctive about it in comparison with ways of conducting
‘international relations’ outside the scope of what is identified as modernity?
Timing modernity involves not only looking at continuities and distinctions between
‘past’ and ‘present’, and hence the identification of the ‘pre-modern’, as in Costa Lopez’s
chapter mentioned previously; articulations of ‘the modern’ entail visions of a future as well.
Visions of a fully modernized or even post-modern future extrapolate from readings of how
certain pasts generated a given present, and how such trends bode for future configurations
of world politics. For example, a prominent theme in Lucien Ashworth’s chapter on ‘Liberal
Progressivism and International History’ (Chapter 4), and in Or Rosenboim and Chika
Tonooka’s study of how the specific terms of the ‘international’ and ‘the global’ were re-
imagined in the twentieth century (Chapter 35), is how a liberal reading of international
history envisions a future populated by liberal democratic states linked together by shared
legal constraints on the use of force as well as by more or less freely circulating commer-
cial and financial flows. And, as demonstrated in key works focusing on imperialism and
postcolonial world politics, historical inquiry serves to shape not only how we narrate the
past; a particular narration of the past may constitute a critical intervention in present-day
politics, as well as articulating a specific vision of the future (for example, Scott 2004; Wilder
2015; Getachew 2019; Spruyt 2020). Such interventions remind students of international pol-
itics that visions of the future constitute fodder for critical reinterpretation as the kinds of
questions we ask about contemporary world politics change. Far from being only about ‘the
past’, therefore, readings of history speak to the present and also shape visions of the future.
As they are played out in the contemporary discipline, questions about timing modernity
in IR often focus on how to pin-point the most significant discontinuities that shaped the
‘modern’ international system in the form of what Barry Buzan and George Lawson have
called ‘benchmark dates’ (Buzan and Lawson 2014). In the past these debates were often
quite open, with scholars looking back to events such as the Council of Constance or the
French intervention in the Italian wars in 1494 (which supposedly spread ideas about raison
d’etat and balance of power around Europe). However, R. B. J. Walker’s analysis of ‘origin
myths’ in the IR discipline (Chapter 2) shows how in more recent years the IR field has
coalesced around a (still-controversial) origin story pivoted on the Peace of Westphalia of
1648. While we think it is worthwhile to look in detail at this specific moment, as Andrew
Phillips does in Chapter 37, neither we nor Phillips want to subscribe to an over-simplified,
and frankly somewhat dubious, story about the ‘Westphalian moment’ as the key turning-
point when a principle of territorial sovereignty was first established as the basis of the
modern form of world order (see Keene 2002; Teschke 2003; Beaulac 2004). Our selection of
‘Moments’ in Part 4 of the Handbook is not an attempt to present a list of possible candidate
benchmark dates, but is intended in part to allow opportunities to reflect on different key
instances of discontinuity that might feature in such a story, and so to explore alternatives to
the Westphalian starting point.
Putting the historical discontinuities of modernity, rather than the supposedly timeless
logic of anarchy, at the heart of our enquiry also raises the question of where the international
system originated. Interwoven with chronological questions about periodization are geo-
graphical questions about social networks and connections that have traditionally been—
but are no longer—pushed aside by an often silent assumption of Eurocentrism (the locus
classicus for these discussions is Wight 1977, c hapters 4 and 5; see also Bentley 1996). Where
there once may have been a general consensus about modernity originating in Europe
with the European states-system, research in recent decades has shaken this consensus and
brought some of its assumptions and omissions under scrutiny. At the very least, the idea
of a European system as somehow self-contained demonstrates an inexcusable neglect of
the central role of imperial expansion and colonization projects as contributors to Europe’s
development.
There may be no consensus on when the ‘modern’ international system began, nor how
far it has spread, nor indeed whether some regions have already passed through to the
‘post-modern,’ or followed some different path altogether. Modernity therefore has the ad-
vantage of offering a common frame of reference without closing off debates about its geo-
graphic or temporal boundaries, nor indeed about what forms of political order ought to be
associated with it. We can thus engage questions about the shift from the medieval to the
modern international system; or, as David Kang does in the chapter on ‘ “Asia” in the History
of IR’ (Chapter 34), about the question of ‘modernization’ in Asia, for example, without
presupposing that we already know the answers. We can inquire as to the origin, transmis-
sion, and circulation of modernity’s core concepts and practices without assuming that
modernity belongs to a particular place (Europe) or even time (for example Hobson 2004).
While modernity must have some boundaries to render it a coherent organizational con-
cept, we do not presume a priori agreement on where those boundaries are located, either
in space or time. The contributions to this volume offer a diversity of ways by which mod-
ernity may be timed and placed, and especially in Part 3 on ‘Locales’ we have encouraged
our authors to think about the concept from the perspective of different regions or parts of
the world, and historical periods (themselves, we acknowledge, often socially constructed
artifacts of modernity).
Authority to determine and claim modernity can itself be contested, as can the contours
of what may be termed modern and what ‘backward’. As Yongjin Zhang shows, one of the
main ways in which modern forms of empire rationalized their exception to the principle
of the recognition of territorial sovereignty was precisely in terms of a heavily loaded dis-
tinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ (Chapter 15). Another key example of such
contestation is found in the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and its allies on
the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other (in Chapters 46–48 by Daniel
Gorman, Christopher Lee, and Benoit Pelopidas and Ned Lebow, respectively). Both
superpowers competed in modernizing their postwar industrial societies, and to attract
allies via the power of their example as well as the more direct promise of arms and aid.
This is an example of overtly contested modernity, describable within a familiar narrative of
competing ideologies of communism and capitalism.
More recently, the growth of China and India into great powers with hegemonic
aspirations and extensive commercial and patronage networks destabilizes older categories
used to classify economic and political systems, so that ideas of democracy and socialism
once associated with the ‘West’ or with the Soviet bloc are no longer the only models avail-
able for leaders seeking to revolutionize or ‘develop’ their societies. Indeed as Corinna Unger
makes clear in Chapter 24, the very meaning of development is one site of significant con-
testation within existing international institutions, and it has in fact been so contested for far
longer than normally acknowledged. To focus on modernity is to import these contestations
and political struggles into the heart of our analytical framework. These struggles have
different agents and indeed scales of agency, as well as different scopes, which brings us to
our second organizing theme for the volume.
Granularity
If asking the question of modernity evokes both spatial and temporal explanatory questions
and debates, the second theme orienting this volume zeroes in on questions of scope, scale,
and closeness of association when classifying or bundling phenomena together in posited
relationships. We have already implicitly made a number of assumptions along these lines by
repeatedly referring to the concept of an ‘international system’, as if that was an easy thing to
pluck out from the messy complexity of global interactions between people and institutions
(see, for instance, Butcher and Griffiths 2015, and 2017). What we might call the granularity
problematique arises from the tension between the richness, specificity, and individuality of
a social phenomenon within its immediate chronological and geographical context on the
one hand, and the desire to tease out general patterns and shifts across the longue durée and
the global on the other. Nor does this issue arise only at the very generalized level of the
system as a whole. How are ‘units of analysis’ determined in IR theorizing? What are the
consequences of choosing to focus on sovereign states rather than, say, economic classes or
individuals? Do cycles of the rise and fall of hegemonic powers constitute a pattern such
that when bundled together and compared, knowledge of such cycles advances our under-
standing of the past and expectations about similar patterns being repeated in the future?
The very delimitation of what constitutes a ‘case’ is a granular choice.
With fewer discursive associations than modernity (at least within the social sciences and
humanities), granularity as we envision the term evokes a bundle of issues clustered around
problems of scope and scale, and closeness of association when classifying phenomena.
From an amateur’s point of view the way the concept of granularity works in quantum
mechanics has to do with how energy ‘clumps’ rather than smoothly traveling or dissipating,
and we find it useful to stretch for something like this analogy when asking our authors to
reflect on how they are arranging their facts or data; how they are ‘casing’ their subjects and
objects of study (Rovelli 2021; Wendt 2015). How we articulate the objects and subjects, the
boundaries we draw around them, the classifications delimiting what they are not—these
analytical choices generate the granularity of a given study.
The question of granularity is clearly about issues of scope and method, but is not simply
about a clash between the interests or methods of the historian and those of the social sci-
entist: some of the latter concern themselves with fairly localized, ‘puzzle-driven’ or at
best ‘mid-range’ theorizing, while some historians operate at the grandest levels of ‘global
histories’ that stretch across centuries. Whatever their disciplinary labels, scholars al-
ways have to choose where to operate on a spectrum that runs from the millennium to the
moment, and from the global to the local. Asking historians and IR scholars to consider
how they approach the question of granularity opens up fault-lines within both fields, and
sometimes unites certain IR theorists and historians against alternative cross-disciplinary
coalitions. For example, Dirk Moses’s chapter on the ‘Diplomacy of Genocide’ in the
‘Practices’ section (Chapter 19) offers a fascinating insight into the political aspects of this
in terms of its implications for how specific genocides and specific interventions have been
handled, and informs controversies around these questions to the present.
Considered in terms of methodological debates within IR narrowly conceived, granu-
larity may recall the so-called ‘levels of analysis’ problem in terms of whether explanatory
theories base themselves on the systemic, state or individual level in terms of locating key
causal phenomena (Singer 1961). However, we prefer the term granularity because it offers
the possibility of a broader array of perspectives than just three or four ‘levels.’ Whereas the
term ‘level’ implies a plane, and levels of analysis categorizes explanatory schemas based on
which ‘plane’ they locate an independent variable, the notion of granularity is more topo-
graphically diverse, and implies that observing a phenomenon may entail an array of focal
points revealing either finer or coarser aspects of multi-dimensional systems and constituent
parts. For example, as noted previously, Eric Selbin’s chapter plays with the granularity
issue to interrogate multiple possible focal points for studying revolutions, while Megan
Donaldson’s also examines the trade-offs involved. As such, granularity has the potential
to encompass the standard methodological questions about choice of independent and
dependent variables, but goes beyond this to embrace approaches which eschew causal ana-
lysis altogether in favour of other methods such as thick description, analytical narratives,
or constructivist studies of constitution of social phenomena. It can also encompass the type
of distinctions made in economics between micro-and macro-level phenomena, without
limiting the choice to a binary.
We think of granularity as encompassing questions of texture, of focus, and of scale. As
with many methodological choices, choice of focus and of scale is seldom a matter of right
or wrong, but rather fitness to the question at hand. The focus one adopts, whether coarser
or finer-grained, allows one to see different aspects of a phenomenon, and thus offers quite
different kinds of knowledge and insight. A work may draw our attention to the significance
of a particular century for shaping international order, as Buzan and Lawson have recently
done, or it may argue for a closer look at the geographical location of the origins of practices
of humanitarian intervention, as embodied in Davide Rodongo’s study of the Ottoman
Empire (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Rodongo 2012). Within the choice of time and place are
nested further choices about which institutions, actors and practices are worthy of ana-
lysis; as we noted above in Megan Donaldson’s chapter on the Sykes–Picot Agreement, it is
also a question of perspective, and especially whose perspective we are taking up at any one
moment. States or foreign policy bureaucracies or particular foreign ministers; trade unions
or their individual organizers or the ideas which animate them; transport routes or supply
chains or the microbes transmitted along these: the range of possible scales and foci is vast.
The theme of granularity thus raises a broad set of questions regarding methodologies
and degrees of detail required to generate productive explanations and/or narratives.
For example, structural realism offers an entirely different granularity in terms of how it
conceives of structure than does classical realism (the latter tending to include actual human
personalities), the English School, historical materialism, or historical institutionalism. And
granularity is not just a question of size and scope, it is also a question of specification of the
appropriate unit of analysis, be it state, nation, class, network, individual, or genome. Just as
realists are found deploying a range of granularities from systemic to individual, so too can
rational choice scholars and game theorists vary in their specification of the units of analysis
and the relevant field of ‘play’. A game in which the players are individual policy makers will
have a different granularity than one in which the players are bureaucratic agencies within
states, states themselves, corporations, or financial networks.
The granularity problem also intersects with the modernity problem in interesting ways.
For example, for scholars engaging the debate on change in the international system, and
which sorts of developments count as changes ‘of ’ system rather than changes ‘within’ the
system, the issue of granularity will loom quite large, as it involves asking scholars to specify
their ontological focus and commitment: are they studying states, systems of states, produc-
tion and communication networks, epistemic communities, supply chains, inter-personal
connections among elites or activists, or cultural networks? Broadly framing these issues
in terms of granularity (rather than levels of analysis) may allow for a more ecumenical
approach as to what constitutes an object of study. For example, networks and flows may
be included along with systems, states, classes, individuals or empires, and these at different
‘granularities’—from circulation of ideas among individuals to historical changes in broad
institutional structures. As with modernity, the granularity problematique is something
that should engage both IR scholars and historians, and so has the potential for fruitful
collaboration.
Another aspect of the intersection between modernity and granularity, then, is that
different conceptions of change rest on different perceptions of the locus and scale of the
phenomena which trigger significant global change: working beyond the classic butterfly
wings rendition of this problem, one can think of arguments identifying climactic or other
types of ecosystem sources of change, familiar international systemic or geopolitical phe-
nomena such as balance of power dynamics and hegemonic cycles, domestic political
sources of international change such as revolutions, ideological sources of change such as the
Enlightenment or postcolonialism, individual human, even genetic, neurological, microbio-
logical, and quantum phenomena have been evoked as sources of either continuity or trans-
formation in the study of IR (Wendt 2015). So the granularity question serves as a productive
way to cut into the question of the scale and scope of continuities and transformations in
international politics, just as modernity serves as a way to delimit the character of those
continuities and transformations.
These choices recur throughout the book, but there are some places where they come par-
ticularly clearly into focus. In Part 2 on ‘Practices’, for example, we have deliberately invoked
the notion of a ‘practice turn’ in social theory and IR (Schatzki 1996; Adler and Pouliot 2011).
On the one hand, reflection on concepts and practices shows how the discursive frames we
bring to bear on international relations are themselves historically constructed and vari-
able. On the other, studying the history of key concepts and practices illustrates how ways of
conducting international relations—such as making war and peace, regulating commerce,
or participating in international organizations—have changed over time as practitioners
adopt new understandings of what it means to perform their roles competently. Both kinds of
reflections invite further exploration of appropriate granularities as applied to a specific concept
or practice. What level of structural detail is required to characterize whether an entity counts
as sovereign? Are the practices of diplomacy best understood by zeroing in on the activities of a
Talleyrand, or should one rather study diplomacy as an institution? We do not expect definitive
answers to such questions, but rather use them to invite the chapter authors to communicate the
rationales behind their methodological criteria and their chosen focal points.
Bringing History and International

Relations Together
As we have already noted, the academic fields of History and IR have long been intertwined
with one another. Despite tendencies (on both sides) to try to separate them by stressing
their different epistemological and methodological orientations as belonging to the
Humanities and Social Sciences respectively, they continue to enjoy a close relationship.
We believe that the scholars whose work is collected in this volume—some of whom would
probably self-identify as historians, some as IR scholars—offer strong evidence that this en-
gagement remains fruitful.
One of the principal purposes of this volume is to introduce readers to this rich, and still
unfolding, field of enquiry, especially students who are perhaps encountering historical IR
for the first time. We have also endeavoured, however, to set out some of the key questions
and challenges that thinking about both history and IR together poses for the student or
the researcher. In part, we want to inform the reader by providing examples of cutting-edge
work across a wide range of different subject areas, but at the same time we aim to stimulate
fresh enquiry by pointing to the issues that remain open to new investigations in what is es-
sentially an unending intellectual task. The questions of periodization, discontinuity, and
pathways of change opened up by the theme of modernity, and of scope, scale, and perspec-
tive posed by the granularity theme, not only provide a device with which to establish some
coherence across the volume, but are also, we hope, bridges across which people studying
History and IR can connect these two fields and strengthen their mutual entanglement.
There remains much to be discovered here, and we hope that the Handbook will demon-
strate how scholars currently engaged in this kind of enquiry are staking out new terrain for
both academic fields. Much of this effort in contemporary historical IR is devoted to looking
beyond the traditional narrative centred on the specific Western experience of global political
ordering in terms of a system of territorially defined sovereign states, gradually working out
and universalizing a modus vivendi among themselves based on norms and institutions such as
sovereign equality, balance of power, non-intervention, consent-based positive international
law, or permanent residential diplomacy. In the first place, this Handbook shows very clearly
that this is only part of a much larger set of stories that we can tell about change and continuity
in global political order; that many of these do not refer back to a core norm of territorial state
sovereignty; and that this is not even an adequate version of what international relations looked
like in the ‘West’, let alone the varieties that exist beyond that ‘imagined community’. The new
research presented here shows how scholars are taking on the exciting opportunities offered by
these new fields of enquiry. Furthermore, although our focus on historical IR inevitably draws
us back towards the past, the Handbook urges the reader to use this perspective to re-interpret
the present. In many commentaries on current affairs, there is a persistent tendency to suppose
that phenomena such as globalization, or the decentring of Western states such as the US as the
dominant actors in global politics, are unprecedented novelties. Very often, this assumption is
merely the result of a too-narrow historical understanding of modern international order in
terms of territorial state sovereignty. As many of the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate,
to reflect on the history of specific aspects of international relations, and the different ways in
which international relations have shaped global history, is not to trap oneself in the past; it
liberates us to ask new questions and achieve new understandings of the world we live in today,
and so envision new possibilities for action within it.
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PA RT I I
R E A DI N G S
chapter 2
Origins, Hi stori e s ,
and the Mode rn
Internati ona l
R. B. J. Walker
Immanuel Kant once defined history as the description of everything in time, the com-
plement to geography as the description of everything in space. Theorists of international
relations often like to think of themselves as specialists in the politics of the entire world,
in both space and time. Both have ambitions beyond description, though scholarship on
international relations has been especially attracted to the explanatory claims of the modern
social sciences. Moreover, prevailing understandings of both history and international
relations are now subject to challenge and revision in ways that necessarily implicate each
other. So there are many reasons why conversations between these two heterogeneous
modes of scholarship can be awkward.
I explore this awkwardness in two closely related contexts: first, how the study of inter-
national relations tends to differentiate itself from historical analysis while still grounding
itself in specific accounts of history; second, different claims about the origins of the modern
international system, a problem shared by both historians and theorists of international
relations. I focus on the work of a single historian who also played a role in shaping the
study of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline, especially in the UK: Martin
Wight. Wight, I suggest, opens out much that has been at stake in contested claims about the
origins of the modern international system as well as in the politics of claims about origins
more generally.
International/History
Historians often encounter literatures on international relations as a field controlling its

understanding of history through two familiar strategies. In one, historical specificities are
minimized, and sins of anachronism indulged in order to distil knowledge about structural
forms, especially systemic relations and balances of power among states. In this way, some
22 R. B. J. Walker
things—sovereignty, states, power, human nature, politics, reality—achieve an almost mi-

raculous state of continuity across space and time, whether by reification or essentialization.
Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes then seem to know what we think we know now and
do so through similar practices of knowing. This sustains hopes for replicable knowledge,
comparisons across a common ground, and status as a properly modern social science
among other social sciences. In the other, temporal contingencies are controlled through
some form of linear or developmental history. Instead of analysis on an atemporal ground of
the present, we find accounts of the development of Europe and then the rest of the world in
which the modern international system, like modernity more generally, appears as the des-
tination of all prior histories.
These strategies for controlling claims about history have their own long and complicated
history and politics. They enable selective historical references to obscure both many
histories and the contested character of all historical analysis. Despite apparent differences
they have much in common, including philosophical and theological distinctions between
being and becoming, transcendental eternity and immanent contingency, form and sub-
stance, and spatiality and temporality. They share two broad tendencies. One is the narrative
logic in which unity is both distinguished from and privileged over diversity: a logic some-
times traced to Aristotle and often expressed as the metaphorical and historical fate of
masters and slaves. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history often appears in discussions of
this point, often by contrast with both Kantian antinomies and Nietzschean genealogies. The
other is a distinction between those included within the presumed struggle between masters
and slaves, or singularities and pluralities, and those left somewhere and sometime beyond.
Anthropologists, postcolonial critics, and advocates for a world history have all commented
on this.
Historians rightly complain about overgeneralization across the social sciences and
have also engaged in philosophical disputes about universalizing and historicizing claims
to knowledge. On the other hand, even to refer to a system of states or an international
ordering of some kind is to express desires to understand systematic patterns and struc-
tural determinations. Indeed, the need for broad generalizations and systemic causalities
is precisely the point of scholarship that seeks to engage more than phenomena,
specificities, contingencies, actions, intentions, and agencies: to examine structural
forms and systemic forces on perhaps the largest scale available to the modern sciences of
humanity.
Furthermore, the modern international system is not just a possible object for yet another
academic discipline. To the contrary, many difficulties have been generated by the degree to
which knowledge claims about it have been shaped within specific academic institutions of
political or social science within specific national cultures within specific statist jurisdictions,
even though disciplines, nationalisms, and states already work within and on terms enabled
by the international system. Indeed, methodological internationalism may be an even more
pervasive though widely ignored problem for contemporary political analysis of all kinds
than its better-known nationalist twin.
The modern international system works as a systematic and sometimes highly determin-
istic ordering of inclusions and exclusions with its own externality or limits, both spatially
and temporally, geographically and historically. Most accounts of international relations
tend towards spatial and geopolitical modes of analysis and limits then appear as boundaries
of various kinds. These are usually expressed in territorial terms, as physical borders and
Origins, Histories, and the Modern International 23
legal jurisdictions, but also include the less tangible boundary between what is included
within the international system and whatever world, or worlds are necessarily excluded to
enable such a system of inclusions and exclusions. By contrast, accounts of international
relations in temporal and historical terms gravitate towards questions about limits as a
point of origin; often literally a point, 1648 in Westphalia most notoriously, but neverthe-
less a boundary at which to distinguish something like the international system we know in
the present from whatever came before. In this sense, international relations already express
specific understandings of spatiality and temporality, beginnings and endings, origins and
limits, shaping claims about histories, geographies, and whatever comes in between or is left
outside (Walker 1993, 2009, 2016).
Temporalities are intimately related to spatialities. Beginnings are also intimately
connected to endings, both spatially and temporally, and beginnings and endings shape
what comes in between. The practices and formalizations of such intimacies, including
what it means to speak of spatialities and temporalities, have been highly variable, and
these variations have consequences. Most significantly for now, many origin stories have
been told, encouraging affirmations and denials of other origin stories. Some—expulsion
from Eden or its possible reversal, Abrahamic sacrifice, a collapsing Tower of Babel, virginal
birth, teleological fulfilment—are palpable in contemporary understandings of something
international. It is important that in Christian doctrine the world was created together with
time, not in time, and that Greek geometries enabled the condensation of all horizons into
very sharp points and vanishingly thin lines. Other stories, especially those linked with cyc-
lical rather than linear conceptions of cosmology and temporality, are harder though not
impossible to identify in this context. Trickster gods might add interesting complications.
Nevertheless, while drawing on creation myths from many sources, the modern inter-
national system expresses a distinctive account of what one ought to find at its outer
edges: intimations of a world beyond a universalizing international, outside the world of hu-
manity, in spatial terms; and something sharply different from or just a bit less than an inter-
national system in temporal terms—some less elaborated system of states, some marker of
a coming into a system of internalities, externalities, and sovereign jurisdictions. Moreover,
the spatial and temporal modalities of the modern international system work together less
as intimacies than as co-constitutive antagonisms, internally and externally. More is at stake
here than the practices of specific academic disciplines.
Many scholars are aware of the constrained and politically consequential historiographies
expressed in structuralist and developmentalist readings of systems of states in general and
of the modern international system in particular. Some have noticed the relation between
such readings and other contexts in which dangerous temporalities have been captured
within spatialized territories, properties, representations, concepts of time, and practices
of sovereignty. Other histories have been explored, some akin to genealogies, some attuned
to micro-contingencies, some shaped by sustained meditations on the Owl of Minerva,
the Angel of History, the longue durée, conflicting interpretations of Darwinian evolution,
or anger about histories enabled by privilege. The contestable character of historical ana-
lysis and historiographies has been acknowledged, though often forgotten. Reifications and
essentializations remain pervasive, but it is a commonplace that sovereignties, powers, and
canonical texts exceed their codified appearances as structural universals or teleological,
providential, eschatological, Whiggish, or just naively progressivist versions of a philosophy
of history.
24 R. B. J. Walker
How, then, are we to understand the specificity of the modern internationalized

system of states as one case among many? How are we to think about structural or tem-
poral differentiations between that case and other cases, or other forms? At what point,
in space and time, can we be sure that we are dealing with what we think we are dealing
with? Where and when, we may eventually agree to ask, despite all misgivings about any
search for origins, did it all start? Or better, which creation myths and founding practices
still work for us and with what effects? And how can one even presume to offer anything
more than clichéd answers to any of these questions given that we ask them on the basis of
understandings of origins, spatialities, temporalities, discriminations, and ways of being and
therefore knowing generated within those forms of social and political organization we want
to examine?
Where? When? What?
Wight wrote a sequence of influential essays in the 1960s and early 1970s responding to three
key questions: Where might we find systems of states? When might we find them? How
might we identify them? Whatever one’s judgement about Wight’s standing as an historian,
or as a key figure in an English School of IR theory associated with heightened sensitivities to
(conflicting kinds of) historical analysis, these questions remain consequential (Wight 1977;
Hall 2006, 2019). The answers to each depend on, and have consequences for, answers to the
others and provoke further questions about spatialities, temporalities, political ontologies,
and how we have come to know what we think we know and with what kind of authority.
Assume that politics has a strong connection to the spatiality of a polis or city-state and one
has a good idea of what politics ought to be. Presume such an account of what politics ought
to be and one has a good sense of where politics will be found and when it started. Assume
that politics occurs in time, in the City of Man, rather than in a spatialized eternity, in the
City of God, and one has a good sense of what politics cannot be, no matter how desirable
that ideal may seem and how powerfully it has shaped accounts of what politics must be.
Instructively, Wight addresses the spatial or geographical question first, through
commentaries on relations among Greek city states, the Hellenistic and Roman era, and
fifteenth-century Europe. Turning to the European case, and with greater interest in
questions about temporality, he offers a doubled answer wrapped in a biopolitical metaphor.
Arguing against more influential claims on behalf of the Westphalia treaties of 1648 and in
favour of fifteenth-century Italy, he argues that ‘At Westphalia the states-system does not
come into existence: it comes of age’ (1977, 152).
Wight was aware that his search for ‘the origins of our states-system’, geographically
and chronologically, was grounded in an idea of what a system of states looked like when
it had come of age, by 1648. By then, one could identify the presence of many sovereign
states, mutual recognition among them, the presence of major or hegemonic powers, means
of regular communication, a body of international law, and mechanisms for defending
common interests (1977, 129). This explains why 1648 is so often treated as a definitive point
of origin, one all too conveniently close to the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Wight sensed the dangers of anachronism this identification implied for his engagement
with states-systems he identified in the Hellenistic and Persian world, after the Macedonian
invasion and Alexander the Great, in a context more frequently portrayed through concepts
of imperium, cities, and dynasties than of systems of states. In this case, Wight admitted that
he could not quite find what he was looking for, even that the experience of looking had led
him to doubt the very idea of a states-system (Wight 1977, 105–106).
Because Wight was so clear about what he was looking for, he saw origins of the modern
European system better located in the fifteenth century, centred on other conventionalized
dates: 1494 with the French invasion of Italy; and especially 1414–18 with the Council of
Constance. He even suggested one might consider 1492 as a marker for a reading of the al-
ready world-wide rather than merely European character of the modern states-system right
‘from the beginning’ (1977, 114–115). One might read this remark against subsequent stories
from English School history about a later ‘expansion of international society’ from Europe to
the rest of the world (Bull and Watson 1984), or to raise questions about how we understand
the relation between the Italian city-states and what we have come to mean by both Europe
and the rest of the world. Some of these questions have been taken up by admirers of the
English School in ways that respond productively to at least some worries about Eurocentric
concepts of expansion while invoking concepts of a civilizing process (Linklater 2016) or
globalization (Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017) that arguably run into related difficulties.
Wight already had categories of analysis to help fix far-off phenomena into recognizable
patterns. Finding those patterns, he could affirm and clarify claims about what we think we
are talking about: it looks a bit like Westphalia, so it must be a system of states. Moreover,
in the European case, the relation between a site of creation and what is created is scripted
through the metaphor of a coming of age, a script affirming problematic but constitutive
periodizations of a Renaissance, an early modernity, an Enlightenment, and their various
others (Butterfield 1955, 128ff; Davis 2008; Fabian 1983; Fasolt 2004; Fried 2015; Le Goff 2015;
Rubiés 2019). Wight thus gives an appealingly modest account of what it means to engage
in historical analysis, evidence of the tenacity of a specific philosophy of history allowing
him to find what he was looking for, and some naivety about the conditions under which the
former is easily appropriated by the latter despite his own scepticism about developmental
histories.
Wight is aware of other options. He contests F. H. Hinsley’s claims (1963) about the eight-
eenth century, an era where it becomes increasingly possible to think of a system of states
in the language of an international order. Wight sees this as just a further moment in a
coming of age. Other versions of ‘maturity’ might be thrown into the mix: processes of secu-
larization; translations of Protestant theologies into reworkings of older political concepts;
codifications by figures like Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, and many others of the rules of what
was increasingly systematized as an ordering of authorities and jurisdictions; processes of
industrialization, urbanization, rationalization, capitalization, enclosure, slave trading, co-
lonial exploitation, piracy, and so on that are conspicuously absent from the histories that
Wight and the English School tended to favour.
Indeed, if one wants to stay with dubious metaphors of a coming of age, Hinsley’s pref-
erence for the eighteenth century is probably more to the mark. Here one might look at
Kant as someone who understood the contradictory and not simply systematic character of
interstate order, and at his account of human history as it must work out within the confines
of an inter-republican system of some kind, thereby helping to shape our understanding
of what it means to come of age: to come to maturity, to think for oneself, to become self-
determining, both individually and collectively. One might also look to Kant for an account
26 R. B. J. Walker
of the processes through which people who have the capacity to become free but also to live
by a universal moral law may enter into the struggle for freedom in a history in which many
simply fall by the wayside.
History, after all, is not simply what historians do or what they find. From the eighteenth
century especially it came to be treated as a vehicle for emancipation and self-determination,
as a temporal ground on which politics happens both in harmony and conflict with the spa-
tial grounding of sovereign territorialities and authorities. History is now both an historical
achievement and a theory of politics. The modern international system itself can be under-
stood as an expression of this promise of history, a spatial expression of and condition of
possibility for a telos/eschatology of human possibilities in time and then in space: a practice
of development quite as much as of geopolitics. It is certainly in relation to this under-
standing of the eighteenth century, and of Kant’s critical project, that one can understand
crucial aspects of the transition from a mere system of states to an international order: a new
beginning for an order of self-determining authorities and subjectivities, both micro and
macro, realizing themselves in time but within limits that reach to the edge of the knowable
world rather than just Hobbesian subjects within a singular sovereign authority.
Even the eighteenth century might be premature. After all, Kant’s understanding of
republics is still at some remove from our understanding of modern nations, let alone
democracies, peaceful or otherwise. But how many more origins, or degrees of maturity, do
we need? The French Revolution? Or the revolution in Haiti as a reminder of what is missing
in narratives about France alone? The Congress of Vienna as a symptom of Europe’s increas-
ingly coherent institutionalization? Or the Franco-Prussian War as a rift foretelling Europe’s
future fragmentation? Transformations in patterns of colonization? Various episodes
in the articulation of industrialization, capitalism, struggles between free-traders and
mercantilists, and so on, in relation to the particularist claims of nation states? Clausewitz,
Weber, Schmitt, and Kelsen as paradigmatic responses to all these dynamics and more, in
ways that helped shape subsequent catechisms of political realism and political idealism and
the gradual institutionalization of an academic discipline defining international relations as
a sharply delineated object of analysis? Or the instructive origin of the influential American
journal Foreign Affairs as the Journal of Race Development (Vitalis 2015)?
Moving in this direction while ignoring questions about how one knows in which dir-
ection one is moving, one creeps ever closer to some present moment, a concept that is just
as troubling as the intimately related concept of origin (North 2018). Perhaps the United
Nations Charter was, literally, a constitutive event, the formal beginning of an order torn
between the claims of the system itself (‘collective security’) and its constituent states (‘do-
mestic jurisdiction’), not to mention the Peoples, and tacitly presumed people, in whose
name it was constituted. Perhaps one might also consider the Charter’s affirmations along
with the experiences of Partition: the imposition of modernity’s most exemplary form of dis-
crimination, the straight lines constituting new states and nations out of people and peoples
who had never before lived so sharply between such radically unnatural boundaries. Perhaps
one should reflect on various moments in the 1960s, the era in which processes of formal col-
onization were wound down and it became possible to claim that everyone on the planet
lives within the modern international; within conditions—such an elegant solution—that
allow us to appeal to various kinds of cultural/substantive plurality within a formally uni-
versal order. Still, we may want to ask, where did those divisions come from? When did those
discriminations originate? What exactly were those ‘colonizations’ that were supposedly
ending? Whose cartography and chronology are we charting here? Or are we again merely
noting continuities that many people experience as novelties, disruptions, erasures and
exclusions from a universalizing order of inclusions and exclusions?
One can imagine Wight affirming a version of his original response to Bull and
Hinsley: these are all later moments of the story largely marked by origins in fifteenth-
century Italy. As long as we convince ourselves that we know what it means to refer to an Italy
or to clear distinctions between eras—and historians regularly counter cozy categories with
dirty details in this respect, though not necessarily to great political effect—Wight’s case is
not easily dismissed even if it is open to many objections. Even so, a moment of ‘re-birth’
offers swampy ground for any claim to origins.
Apart from Westphalia and Renaissance Italy, the most persistent claim to an origin story
for IR involves selective references to Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War be-
tween Athens and Sparta. Historians and analysts of international relations alike have
extracted bits of supposedly timeless wisdom from bits of this salutary text. Still, it is not
obvious that its profundity lies just in the bits that have been extracted from or read into it
by people thinking about contemporary politics and in need of higher authority to convert
practical maxims about strength and weakness or challenges posed by rising powers into a
doctrine of political realism. In any case, Herodotus, another founding father of what we rec-
ognize as the study of history in some form, might be an equally interesting source. At least
we might wonder about the diversity of human experiences, to examine how the strangeness
of others came to be converted into more systematic forms of Othering, especially to a sys-
tematic ordering of friends and enemies among nationalized states (Hartog 1988).
Thucydides and Herodotus may be celebrated as historians of some kind, but they are
engaged largely as texts. Yet there are many other texts from classical Greece on which
historians might draw quite as readily as these two, most obviously Plato and Aristotle: two
names conspicuous by their absence in most contemporary discussions of international
relations. Plato is nonetheless famous as a conjurer of founding practices one might think
relevant for how we have come to understand a world of both states and systemic relations
between them, including the distinction between being and becoming and the privileging
of being over becoming that has shaped our fondness for structuralist comparisons and
developmentalist histories. Two such moves, two productions of a constitutive externality,
are arguably much more consequential in principle than anything to be found in either
Thucydides or Herodotus, depending on what one is looking for.
One is Plato’s staging at the beginning of his Republic of the theatrical joust between
Socrates and various young Sophists over the meaning of justice. Few figures are scripted
into this conversation. They do not include representatives of the prevailing even if fragile
traditional cultures raised on Homeric stories about old gods and heroes. Cephalus, the one
featured representative present in the opening symbolic walk from the port of Piraeus to-
wards Athens, is simply sent away to attend to his sacrifices after admitting to the debilities
of old age and, by implication, of a passing age. In what has become a familiar pattern, a
specific form of founding practice, a constitutive exclusion, shapes one of our key sources
for thinking about inclusions and exclusions. Properly philosophical discussion can then
begin, even if the first round ends in stalemate, another beginning must be made, and a new
city is imagined into being. Then after much ground breaking, Book 5 of this text articulates
another familiar sequence. First, establish a unity: hence, for example, women and children
in common so as to eradicate all private interests based on blood ties. Then contemplate
28 R. B. J. Walker
the limits of this unity: treat fellow Greeks reasonably well even when they are fractious,
while declaring that non-Greeks deserve no such accommodation. Finally, with the status of
unity/diversity and internality/externality sorted, we can start to talk about what counts as
proper philosophy. The sequence matters: presume unity; translate difference into alterity;
then discuss knowledge, power, and authority.
Now, There, Then
Why would Wight seize upon the Council of Constance and the French invasion of Italy in
particular? Is this really why what we call Renaissance Italy matters for us? Which us? Is this
why specific accounts of that elusive phenomenon have been constructed in retrospect, in
a view from an also elusive eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Why would he choose to
read whatever happened there and then on terms set up by a reading of institutionalized
structures identifiable in 1648? Was he looking for a birth, an inception, or a desire, to stay
with his biopolitical metaphor? What, after all, were the problems driving whatever was
going on in that specific time and place? How does his analysis square with other readings
of the Renaissance as considerably more than a matter of cracks in the authority of a
universalizing Christiandom and some military and diplomatic manoeuvres? What do we
think was at stake politically that still matters for the dynamics of the modern international
system?
That he knew what he was looking for was both the strength and fragility of Wight’s ana-
lysis. Moreover, he showed considerable sensitivity to the demands of historiography, even
if his religious commitments tended to keep him on the straight and narrow. Others also
know what they are looking for in a Renaissance, but find other things, other figures, even
too many phenomena to fit into a singular concept, or singular continent. Wight is open to
some of these and even begins to explore some of their consequences, but ultimately returns
to his initial path.
Machiavelli is often the first to answer the door to those looking for other things, es-
pecially to historians of political thought; or perhaps Hobbes pops up as a later and more
northerly expression of much the same, or more mature, perhaps even counter-vailing
version of the same epoch. At least, these figures have been forced to play commanding roles
in claims about international relations, including by Wight himself. Canonical figures bring
many interpretive difficulties, but there are elementary reasons why one might learn some-
thing about the politics of origin stories from the beginning of Machiavellian and Hobbesian
texts, as of many others (Jullien 2015; Steiner 2001). Both speak to the problems to which the
modern international system might be understood as a plausible response, as well as to the
elaboration of principles guiding that response.
Wight was primarily interested in similarities among systems. His work appeals to
scholars bringing structuralist/ comparativist inclinations to their historical claims.
Machiavelli had a more forceful sense of what he was up against: a universalizing imperium
understood both as a practical matter and as the ground of assumptions that no longer
helped him respond to practical matters. Empirically speaking, distinctions between the
hierarchical forms of medieval empire and a recognizably modern system of states can seem
cloudy at best. Wight himself understood that it might be possible to interpret ‘Western
Christiandom’ as sufficiently fragmented to be identified as a ‘double-headed suzereign

state-system’. He was more inclined to see it as an expression of ‘a single undivided societas
christiana . . . with a persistent theoretical emphasis on hierarchy rather than equality’, and
a ‘distribution and parcelling of power among an innumerable multitude of governmental
units’ organized through ‘pyramidal not horizontal lines’ but which ‘in due course gave birth
to the conceptions of “sovereignty” and “the state” ’. This Empire laid initially ineffective
claim to universal jurisdiction, a claim that ‘persisted, and characteristically grew clearer and
more defined after the Empire as a political institution had fallen to pieces’. It also made a
more effective claim to universal jurisdiction in spiritual matters. While there was an on-
going struggle between Empire and papacy within the societas christiana, it ‘was always
essentially a conflict between officers of the same undivided society’, though it eventually
‘degenerated into a struggle between two great powers’. Even so, ‘first the Emperor and then
the pope’ claimed to be ‘lords of all mankind’ (Wight 1977, 26–29).
This reading might endorse a continuity thesis or a radical rupture thesis. Looking at
events, historians might see more continuities than ruptures. Yet even though Wight knows
what he is looking for when looking back from 1648, he is also working from a sense of
emerging problems and sharply competing principles to read the significance of events. He
had clearly absorbed important things from R. G. Collingwood (1946) in this respect. He
understands, crucially, that imperium was organized vertically, pyramidally, whereas states-
systems are organized horizontally. Something new is afoot. Principles falter, as the Council
of Constance already revealed.
At this point Wight reads the origins of the modern international system less in relation
to the events he identifies on the basis of what he knows about 1648 than as a repudiation
of principles of imperium, of hierarchical subordination. What is a states-system? Not a
universal empire, even if it is an ordering of ‘dominant’, ‘great’, ‘world’, and ‘minor’ powers
(Wight 1978). When and where did this begin? In many places and many times, we might
say, as principles of hierarchical subordination were challenged by inchoate principles of
self-determination, especially as medieval Europe gradually gave way to something more
modern, but also as, say, the Ottoman Empire could no longer manage all its extraordinary
diversities (Barkey 2008). Why should we remember Machiavelli and Hobbes? Certainly not
because they were the political realists of popular notoriety but because they were figures
caught up in wider struggles to articulate responses to multiple disorders, not least through
ideals of ‘liberty’ in the former case and another concept of liberty along with assumptions
about ‘equality’ in the case of Hobbes. They also did so on the basis of distinctive figurations
of a politics of origins that are still in play. Consequences followed.
Machiavelli remains subject to intensely conflicted interpretations, partly because he
is such a liminal figure, an expression of continuities and ruptures as well as of options
eluding narratives of both continuity and rupture. Nevertheless, one clue to his signifi-
cance lies hidden in plain sight in the very first chapter of The Prince. This chapter begins
with a universalizing claim about political orders as being either republics or principalities.
Principalities are then divided and sub-divided into more and less interesting categories, the
interesting ones being, in increasing order of interest, those that are new rather than heredi-
tary, those that are completely new rather than added to something older, those that are used
to being free rather than under a prince, those that are gained by one’s own arms rather than
those of others, and those that are gained by one’s own virtu or virtuosity rather than through
Fortuna. So this founding text is itself set up from the beginning not as an analysis of politics
30 R. B. J. Walker
in general but of situations involving something new, a founding, and with princes acting on
their own and with their own (collective) capacities.
Even from this short opening, one can identify subversive intent on two major fronts: the
concern with novelty when prevailing norms stressed the perfection and thus permanence
of what had already been formed by the divine creator; and the possibility that humanity
rather than God is doing the creating. Call it a particular form of Renaissance humanism,
the celebration not only of humanity but also of the City of Man, subject to the whims of
Fortuna, of temporality, and thus as far more interesting than the eternally tedious City of
God. It is a subversion revealing both a crisis of authority and the possibilities of human
liberty, with liberty understood partly in relation to presumptions of an unchanging neces-
sity, as an almost god-like capacity to create, and partly as the possibility, even necessity, of
human self-creation.
Liberty, in time. Time to say a slow farewell to principles of justice as knowing one’s
place in the hierarchical Chain of Being, to modulate status into states, and to read politics
without the (direct) benefit of laws given by an essentialized Nature or a transcendentalized
deity. It is a long, contested, and constantly revised array of stories. Fortunately, Hobbes
offers the conveniently short version. Erase the old ways of knowing and being. Start again
with a recognition of the sensory origin of imperfect knowledge, then cultivate the right
form of reasoning through the right form of language authorized through the proper
definitions; dismiss those besotted by the old ways; redefine human beings as in a very spe-
cific sense both free and equal; draw the depressing consequences; then call this invention
a state of nature. Thus start yet again: define where and when you are, here and now, sort
of free but, crucially, equal and thus not subject to natural subordination; project a nega-
tively ‘natural’ version of humanity as it has been defined out to some other space and time;
then turn around so as to return as a subject of human/civil rather than natural/transcen-
dental law, within limits, all in a twinkling of a miraculous moment of fear and rationality.
The point of origin here is precisely the present moment, the here and now from which
other origins in space and time are constructed in order to confirm the sovereign authority
of that present moment and a specific version of sovereign humanity. The sequence really
matters here. As an origin story, in the old sacrificial mode but now articulated through
the formalizing sensibilities of a Galileo or Mercator, this ranks with the very best, even if
diluted into mundane and secularized accounts of a mere social contract, and if complex
practices of sovereignty have been turned into nationalistic clichés about monopolies of
power in isolated territories.
Hobbes says little about any system of states, explicitly repudiating any equation of
a state of nature between individuals with a state of war among states. What he does say
about relations between states makes him more a theorist of peace than of war (Thivet 2008;
Springborg 2018). Nevertheless, although primarily exercised by civil war, he helps to im-
agine the spatiotemporal contours within which a system of states might and perhaps must
take form (Walker 2011). The possibility precedes the actuality, one might say. Even so, like
Machiavelli, Hobbes is less interesting as a marker of origins in any clear historical sense –
both rework old ideas to articulate novel possibilities –than as an authorizer of an histor-
ically constituted account of origins: an authorizer of origins that authorize a specific form
of authority, the form of abstract law we call state sovereignty. Why would one fuss with
Westphalia when confronted with practices of creation and authorization like these? It is one
thing to identify a point at which something new takes recognizable form but quite another
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sexual ethics
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and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Sexual ethics
Author: Auguste Forel
Author of introduction, etc.: C. W. Saleeby
Translator: Ashley Dukes
Release date: October 18, 2023 [eBook #71898]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: The New Age Press, 1908
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEXUAL

ETHICS ***
SEXUAL ETHICS
SEXUAL ETHICS
BY
AUGUST FOREL, M.D., PH.D., LL.D.

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT
AND DIRECTOR OF
THE INSANE ASYLUM IN ZURICH (SWITZERLAND)
WITH INTRODUCTION
BY
Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin.
LONDON
THE NEW AGE PRESS
140 FLEET STREET
1908
Translated from the German by Ashley Dukes
INTRODUCTION
By Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin.
T here is something absurd, as such, in a request for an

introduction by any one to the work of one of the greatest of
living thinkers, and something still more absurd in the fact that
Professor Forel should, at this date, need an introduction to any
intelligent audience in any civilised country, as it seems he does to
English readers; but if compliance with that request is at all likely to
increase, even by one, the number of his readers, it is a duty to
comply with it.
Not to consider his treatises on philosophy and psychology, nor his
long series of original and important researches on the senses and
lives of the social insects, Professor Forel has already given to the
world a volume entitled Die Sexuelle Frage—this has now been
published in English[A]—which is by far the best work on the sex
question in any language, and has actually received on the
Continent something like the recognition which is its due. The gist of
its teaching is to be found in this little treatise on Sexual Ethics, and
the reader who may find himself or herself unconvinced, or even
repelled, by the brief and dogmatic theses of the following pages,
may be earnestly counselled to read the larger work. Here, and in
that, Professor Forel deals—always from the loftiest moral
standpoint, the interests of human life at its highest—with the
question which must remain fundamental for man so long as he is
mortal, and with which the statesmen of the future will primarily
concern themselves, realising as they will, and as the “blind mouths”
called statesmen to-day cannot, that there is no wealth but life, that
the culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and
must so remain so long as three times in every century the only
wealth of nations is reduced to dust and raised again from helpless
infancy. Professor Forel sees this question from the only standpoint
that is worthy of it. The sexual question is concerned with nothing
less than the life of this world to come. It is for this reason that every
productive sexual union should be a sacrament; it involves nothing
less than the creation of a human life—the most tremendous act of
which man or woman can be capable. It is the no less than sacred
cause of Eugenics or Race-Culture that gives the sexual life its
meaning and the dignity which it may rightly claim, and it is just
because the Swiss thinker sees this and never loses sight of it that
his work is so immeasurably raised above the ordinary discussions
of marriage, prostitution, venereal disease, and the like. His claim for
posterity on the ground of our debt to the past may be amplified by
the reflection that, in serving the racial life, and in making its welfare
the criterion of our sexual ethics, we are serving human beings as
real as we are ourselves, and tens or hundreds for units whom we
can serve to-day. There is always an interval—nine months at least
—and no one expects babies or politicians to associate cause and
effect over such abysses of time; but there are others who are
learning to think in generations, and Professor Forel will yet add to
their number.
[A] The Sexual Question. Rebman, Ltd.
In his criticisms of alcohol and the abuse of capital, Professor
Forel opposes himself to the most powerful of vested interests. Well,
if you invest your interests in any other bank than that of the laws of
life, you or your heirs will find that theirs is but a rotten concern. The
history of organic evolution is proof enough that the higher life and
the things which buttress it, “sagging but pertinacious,” will always
win through in the long run. As a direct enemy of human life, and
notably through its influence upon the sexual instinct, alcohol is
certainly doomed. If life is the only wealth, the manufacture of illth is
a process too cannibal to be permitted for ever.
Professor Forel speaks of subduing the sexual instinct. I would
rather speak of transmuting it. The direct method of attack is often
futile, always necessitous of effort, but it is possible for us to
transmute our sex-energy into higher forms in our individual lives,
thus justifying the evolutionary and psychological contention that it is
the source of the higher activities of man, of moral indignation and of
the “restless energy” which has changed the surface of the earth. As
directly interfering with this transmutation, the extent of which
probably constitutes the essential difference between civilised and
savage man, alcohol is the more to be condemned.
In what Professor Forel has to say regarding prostitution and the
ideal of marriage, he will win assent from all except the profligate
and those medical men who, in hideous alliance with the protozoon
of syphilis and the coccus of gonorrhœa, defend prostitution and
even acclaim it as the necessary complement to marriage. If there is
a stronger phrase than most damnable of lies to apply to such
teaching, here is certainly the time for its employment. On this
subject of prostitution, Professor Forel has said the last word in a
masterly chapter of Die Sexuelle Frage. In his praise of monogamy,
he is only echoing the stern verdict of the ages—delivered a
thousand æons before any existing religion was born or thought of,
and likely to outlast a whole wilderness of their dogmas. The
essence of marriage I would define as common parental care of
offspring, and its survival-value as consisting in the addition of the
father’s to the mother’s care. In the absence of parenthood, a sexual
association between man and woman is on the same plane as any
other human association; it means neither more nor less, and must
be judged as they are judged. It is when the life of the world to come
is involved that new questions arise—questions as momentous as is
the difference between the production of human life at its best and of
a child rotten with syphilis, or permanently blinded to the light as it
opens its eyes for the first time, or doomed to intelligence less than a
dog’s.
I, for one, have no shadow of doubt that the ideal of sexual ethics
will some day be realised, that pre-eminently preventable—because
contagious—diseases like syphilis and gonorrhœa will be made an
end of, that prostitution will disappear with its economic cause, that
we shall make parenthood the privilege of the worthy alone, and thus
create on earth a better heaven than ever theologians dreamed of in
the sky. “There are many events in the womb of Time which will be
delivered.” Individuals are mortal, and churches, and creeds, but Life
is not. Already the gap between moss or microbe and man is no
small one, and the time to come is very nearly “unending long.”
Uranium and radium will see to that.
C. W. SALEEBY.
SEXUAL ETHICS
T he two conceptions of morality and sexual life are frequently

confounded and expressed by the same term in the popular
usages of speech. The word “moral” is commonly used to mean
sexually pure, that is to say, continent; while the word “immoral”
suggests the idea of sexual incontinence and debauch. This is a
misuse of words, and rests upon a confusion of ideas, for sexuality
has in itself nothing to do with morality. It points, however, to the
undoubted fact that the sexual impulse, since it has other human
beings as its object, easily leads to moral conflicts within the breast
of the individual.
It will be convenient to discuss our subject under the two heads: I.
Of ethics in general; and II. Of sexual ethics in particular.
I. Ethics
Ethics is the science of morals. Morals may be said to consist of
two very distinct factors, which we will attempt to analyse:—
1. An instinctive sense, the conscience, sense of duty, or ethical
impulse, which says to us: “This shalt thou do, and that shalt thou
leave undone.” A person in whom it is highly developed experiences
satisfaction if he obeys the “voice of conscience,” and remorse if he
fails to do so.
2. The second factor of morals includes the objects of conscience,
that is, the things which conscience commands or forbids.
The great philosopher Kant founded upon the instinct of
conscience his Categorical Imperative, and held the further
investigation of its causes to be unnecessary. If the conscience says
“Thou shalt,” one must simply act accordingly. This is, in Kant’s
opinion, the absolute moral law, which bids or forbids an action
independently of any other consideration.
The further they progress, however, the more do reason and
science rebel against the conception of the Categorical Imperative.
Kant, great as he was, was not infallible. The imperative of the
conscience is in itself no more categorical and absolute than that of
the sexual impulse, of fear, of maternal love, or of other emotions
and instincts.
In the first place daily observation shows us the existence of
people born conscienceless, in whom the sense of duty is lacking,
who are aware of no “Thou shalt,” and in whose eyes other
individuals are merely welcome objects for plunder or inconvenient
hindrances. For these “ethically defective” persons there can be no
categorical imperative, because they have no conception of duty.
The ethical sense may exist in varying degrees of intensity. In
some persons the conscience is weak, in others strong; and there
are cases in which it is developed to an exaggerated and morbid
extent. People of this type suffer pangs of conscience over the
merest trifle, reproach themselves for “sins” which they have never
committed, or which are no sins at all, and make themselves and
others miserable. How can all this be reconciled with the absolute
moral law as stated by Kant?
The theory of the Categorical Imperative becomes even more
absurd when we consider the actions to which men are guided by
their consciences. The same habit—the drinking of wine, for instance
—may be for one man a matter of duty (for a Christian at the
Eucharist or for an officer at the toast of the King); for another (the
Mohammedan) it may be forbidden as a deadly sin. Murder, which is
certainly almost universally prohibited by conscience, is a “duty” in
time of war, and even for certain persons in the duel. Such instances
could be multiplied indefinitely.
We will presently state the profounder reasons which prove Kant’s
error; but we must first mention another source of pretended ethical
commandments. The religions exhibit a remarkable medley of
various products of human mystical phantasy and human emotions
which have crystallised and formed themselves into legends and
dogmas, and these latter have become interwoven with human
morals in such a fashion that they seem at first inextricable.
The instinct of fear and the lust for power, the hypertrophy of the
Ego and the ethical sentiments have here intermingled in a thousand
different ways. More especially we may mention the fear of the
unknown, of darker powers, and of death; the expansion of the
beloved Ego, which becomes idealised in the conception of
godhead, and then immortalised; the feelings of sympathy, antipathy
and duty towards other individuals, and so forth. The mysterious
powers which move the universe are then conceived as
anthropomorphic (personal) gods, or as one such God.
The next stage is the attribution of godlike qualities to man, which
flatters his vanity considerably, and gives him a sense of satisfaction.
As a result of this habit of thought, and assisted by the
hallucinations of highly imaginative, hysterical, or insane individuals,
there have developed the various conceptions of a direct intercourse
between the Godhead and man. Hypnotism and psychiatry, in the
respective cases of the sane and the insane, teach us how
extraordinarily sensitive the human brain is to such impressions.
In this way the legendary revelations, according to which God has
manifested himself directly and personally to certain individuals, and
dictated to them commandments for the guidance of Humanity, have
resulted.
In this, and in no other way, has come into existence the social
tyranny of religious dogmas. Certain men have made God in their
own image, and have, in the course of centuries, imposed their own
handiwork upon whole nations, mainly by means of the organising
ability of their more ambitious successors. Even to-day such
prophets frequently arise, both within and without the walls of lunatic
asylums. Each one declares that he alone possesses the true
revelation.
The divine injunctions vary considerably according to the different
religions, and are often mutually contradictory. Among them are
commandments relating to the Godhead which have nothing to do
with natural moral law, and yet are amalgamated with it. Some of
these are from the human point of view frankly immoral. Many, on
the other hand, represent the precepts of a more or less suitable
moral code, which varies according to the personal views of the
founder of the religion.
The Koran ordains polygamy and forbids the use of wine, while
modern Christianity allows the latter and ordains monogamy. Both
Moses and Mohammed, however, regard woman as subordinate to
man, and as his private property; a view which contradicts a higher
and at the same time a more natural moral law.
Mental science has now the hardihood to maintain, Kant and the
religious dogmas notwithstanding, that the moral law is completely
accessible to its investigations; that true human ethics can be
founded upon human nature alone; that the dogmas and
commandments of pretended revelation serve only to check a
progressively higher development of morals; and that the dogma
which holds out promises of heaven or threats of hell in the hereafter
is in its effect actually immoral, inasmuch as it seeks to regulate the
moral conduct of men by purely selfish motives—by the aid of a bill
of exchange upon the future life, so to speak.
In order to understand natural human ethics we must consider its

natural source, that is to say, the origin of the sense of duty or social
conscience.
The sense of duty is, as an inclination, inborn, and therefore
hereditary. It can indeed be developed or dulled by education, but it
cannot be acquired; and only diseases of the brain can destroy it
where it once clearly exists. What is actually inculcated or acquired,
as the case may be, is not the conscience, but the object towards
which it is directed, as is the case with the feeling of shame or
modesty. Just as the European woman is ashamed to exhibit her
bare legs, but not her face, while with the Turkish woman the reverse
holds true, so the objects of the conscience, according to acquired
local customs, can be absolutely opposed to one another, or at least
very different in their nature. They have, however, for the most part
certain features in common, which are suited to the requirements of
human nature. The reason for this we shall see below.
From what does conscience, or the sense of duty, arise? First of

all from a conflict between two groups of instinctive emotions allied
with instinctive impulses: (1) the group of so-called egoistic feelings
and impulses, directed towards self-preservation and self-
gratification; and (2) the group of sympathetic or altruistic impulses
directed towards the preservation and well-being of others.
If I feel sympathy or love for a person, an animal, or an object, I
suffer personally and feel displeasure as soon as the object of my
sympathy suffers or is endangered. Hence the words compassion
and sympathy (suffering with). I therefore seek to help the object of
my sympathy, to save him even at the risk of personal injury; and
thence the conflict arises. If my egotism triumphs I do not come to
his aid, or at most only do so if I risk nothing thereby. If, on the other
hand, my sense of sympathy is victorious, I sacrifice myself.
In the former instance I experience a feeling of dissatisfaction, the
feeling of neglected duty and of remorse; in the latter I have the
pleasurable sensation of duty fulfilled. And yet the nature of the
object matters little. Only the intensity of the sympathy, together with
the individual development of the conscience, determine the intensity
of the sense of duty in any given case. An insane person can feel the
most vehement sense of duty or remorse without any real object, or
as the result of entirely perverted conceptions.
As every living creature, particularly if it possesses a separate
nervous system, has the instinct of self-preservation, the conscience
therefore results directly from the conflict between this instinct and
the secondary emotions of altruistic sympathy. These latter are of
later origin, and have for the most part been evolved from the
attraction between the sexes (sexual love), or from the relationship
of parents to the offspring dependent upon them (parental love).
The first feelings of duty and of sympathy in the animal kingdom
are therefore confined to the family, and adapted to the preservation
of the species. They are also exclusive, and may only persist for a
short time (as in the case of cats), but frequently they are of lifelong
duration. The conjugal fidelity of certain apes and parrots is
exemplary.
But the necessity of protection against common foes brought
about in the case of many animals a ripening of the sense of
sympathy, and it became extended to whole groups, so that here
and there free communities (swallows, buffaloes, monkeys) have
resulted. Finally certain species have developed the senses of
sympathy and duty to such an extent that they have led to a
complete anarchistic Socialism, as is the case among wasps, bees,
and ants. Here the social sense has so far overcome both egotism
and altruism limited to a few individuals that it wholly dominates
them. The individual devotes his whole energy and labour to the
communal existence, and even sacrifices his life for this object. He
never, however, sacrifices his life for another single member of the
community, unless the latter is of primary importance for the
maintenance of the species. One worker-bee does not immolate
itself for another, but does so without hesitation for the queen and
the hive. It will even empty the whole contents of its stomach into the
queen bee’s mouth and starve in order to save her. The altruism of
the ants and the bees knows nothing of family affection or sexual
love; it is confined absolutely to the hive or nest. Different beehives
or ants’ nests are either inimical or indifferent to one another.
Nearer to man stand the higher mammals. Every one is aware of
the sentiments of sympathy and duty in the dog, for instance. In man
himself these affections are pre-eminently domestic, as may be seen
in the love of mother and child, husband and wife, father and son,
and in all the obligations thus contracted. But they also have a
considerable tendency to extend to other intimate objects or persons
with whom the individual frequently comes into contact—to friends,
animals, etc.
We can also observe this inclination among bees and ants, where
strangers are received into the hive or nest after a short period of
familiarisation. But among mankind the tendency always maintains a
strongly individual character. The result is on the one hand a
grouping into communities, such as castes, tribes, and nations; and
on the other a host of individual friendships and enmities.
This fundamentally individual character of the human sense of
sympathy rests primarily upon the fact that our nearest ancestors in
the animal world, the parents of the existing anthropoid apes, were
domestic and solitary, while our primeval ancestors lived in
numberless tiny communities, inimical to one another.
In this way there appeared among mankind instinctive and
exclusive impulses of sympathy and of duty, combined with intensely
selfish predatory desires. The extraordinary complexity of the human
brain is responsible for the strange many-sidedness of character
which resulted. For example, crime and heroism developed side by
side; child murder, parricide, rapine and robbery, slavery, war, and in
particular the vilest subjugation of woman as an article of commerce
or a beast of burden—these represent the fruits of egotism and its
attendant cunning and meanness. On the other hand we see self-
sacrifice, valour, heroic martyrdom, patriotism, sense of justice,
asceticism, pity for the weak, and persistent labour for the family and
the State, resulting as the fruits of the instinct of sympathy and the
social sense.
The primitive sense of duty, which arose from direct assistance
rendered to the object of sympathy, is now being enlarged by a
higher racial and individual development, and is, indeed, resolving
itself into a universal inclination to subdue egoistic instincts and
passions.
If from a sense of duty I do something which is wearisome or
dangerous, it is for the most part no longer out of direct sympathy
with the particular object. The primeval impulse (which led to conflict)
is becoming independent, and is taking the form of a higher and
secondary instinct, tending towards the suppression of baser desires
and weaknesses. And yet it is necessary, in order to prevent the
degeneration of this instinct, that the objects towards which it is
directed shall be ever more adequately and better suited to the
social welfare of the community.
From the above brief sketch, which is based upon the theory of
evolution and the researches of science, it is clear as the day that
moral laws can only be relative. They were always relative to the
family, to the tribe, to the fatherland; they must become relative to
mankind. The racial (that is, inherited and instinctive) social sense in
man is unfortunately very variable in individual cases. In the average
it is extremely weak and chiefly directed towards a few individuals.
Moreover, as the result of centuries of bad habits and ancient
prejudices, its objects are falsely or unsuitably taught in process of
educating children. Instead of the child’s sense of duty being
directed to the necessity of labour and social sacrifice for mankind as
a whole and posterity in particular, it is directed towards false codes
of honour, local patriotism, family exclusiveness, private property,
pretended divine commandments, and so forth.
The Earth is small, and human intercourse becomes more
extensive every year; the union of all civilised peoples into a single
great civilised community is inevitable. Ethics must, therefore, as far
as reason permits, be directed towards this object. We require

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International Relations Mlada

The Oxford Handbook of the History Phenomenology

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The Oxford Handbook of the Sources of International Law

The Oxford Handbook of Central American History Robert

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The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-​volume set of reference books

11. Global Sources of International Thought 155

25. Governing Finance 363

38. The Seven Years’ War 560

Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science

change and continuity. To do this, we chose to adopt a focus on modernity as an organizing

but as socially constructed entities whose meaning needs to be interrogated. As O’Hagan

The Encounter between History and

consider modernity as a single overall phenomenon or set of structures, or whether in the

Bringing History and International

Historians often encounter literatures on international relations as a field controlling its

things—​sovereignty, states, power, human nature, politics, reality—​achieve an almost mi-

How, then, are we to understand the specificity of the modern internationalized

Where? When? What?

Now, There, Then

Christiandom’ as sufficiently fragmented to be identified as a ‘double-​headed suzereign

Title: Sexual ethics

Author: Auguste Forel

Author of introduction, etc.: C. W. Saleeby

Translator: Ashley Dukes

Release date: October 18, 2023 [eBook #71898]

Original publication: United Kingdom: The New Age Press, 1908

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings, and the Online

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEXUAL

AUGUST FOREL, M.D., PH.D., LL.D.

Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin.

T here is something absurd, as such, in a request for an

T he two conceptions of morality and sexual life are frequently

In order to understand natural human ethics we must consider its

From what does conscience, or the sense of duty, arise? First of

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The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-volume set of reference books

11. Global Sources of International Thought 155

25. Governing Finance 363

38. The Seven Years’ War 560

things—sovereignty, states, power, human nature, politics, reality—achieve an almost mi-

Christiandom’ as sufficiently fragmented to be identified as a ‘double-headed suzereign