Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

(Cambridge University Press) How would the history of international relations in ‘the East’ be written if we did not always read the ending – the Rise of the West and the decline of the East – into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of ‘not-Europe’, but saw it as a space of with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result? For the first time, Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It also uses that history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline.

Provides a comprehensive and connected history of Asian/Eurasian international relations between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Reconceptualises foundational terms in IR (and cognate social sciences) such as sovereignty, centralisation, international order.

Makes a timely intervention to debates about global crises (e.g. on the decline of the liberal international order, power transition between US and China, political effects of climate change etc.) by disrupting conventionally Eurocentric historical accounts and offering a wider historical universe for IR to draw examples from.