In their book, Barry Buzan and George Lawson synthesize an impressive range of material to argue that what they call the long nineteenth century amounted to a profound transformation in world politics, which continues to shape and affect the international system today. They further argue that the discipline of international relations has mostly ignored this transformation, and that a deeper understanding of the nineteenth century will better position us to understand the twenty-first.
Buzan and Lawson’s masterfully curated account is a welcome addition to the growing body of historically oriented IR scholarship, not least in that it provides a much less Euro-centric understanding of the nineteenth century than IR’s conventional narrative. In Chapter 1, they define the global transformation as a configuration of industrialization, rational state building, and ideologies of progress that together have produced what we know of as modernity. Chapters 3 through 8 are each organized around a different transformative aspect of the period.
Chapter 3 chronicles changes in interaction capacity (e.g., the steamship, railroad, transatlantic cable), claiming that these had a far greater impact on interpolity relations than analogous technological changes in the centuries before or since. Chapter 4’s claim is that the novel idea that progress is necessary for modern society took root in the nineteenth century, through the rise and spread of ideologies of liberalism, socialism, nationalism, and “scientific” racism. Chapter 5 argues that with the industrialization of capitalism, what it meant to be a state changed in the nineteenth century, such that today’s neoliberalism can only be understood as an outgrowth of those changes. Chapter 6 focuses on the birth and trajectory of the modern core—periphery relationship. Chapter 7 details how that hierarchical relationship is today being undermined, proposing that even the erosion of the distinction is itself rooted in dynamics from the nineteenth century. Finally, Chapter 8 argues that the meaning of great powerhood changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century, and that the twentieth-century volatility of great-power relations was born from those developments and is constitutively linked to patterns of peripheral conquest whose effects we still feel today.
Buzan and Lawson’s strategy in these chapters of building from IR, historical, and sociological scholarship nicely models the interdisciplinary conversation that The Global Transformation seeks to advance. Because it speaks the language of the discipline while pushing us beyond our comfort zone, the book is poised to become a canonical resource for those in IR seeking deeper engagement with the nineteenth century.
As welcome as the book is for its historical contribution, however, analytically it is less satisfying. Buzan and Lawson argue that an IR more sensitive to the nineteenth-century transformation would be better positioned to “take its place as an ‘historical social science’” (p. 332). This is an admirable goal that I share, but I am still unclear about the relationship between historical study and social science that the authors ultimately advocate. While they show that we should engage the nineteenth century, they do not clearly guide us on how to do so. With that in mind, in these comments I want to push them a little on how one might use their book as a primer for the historical social science of IR. Drawing especially on Chapters 2 and 10, which contain their critique of the discipline and their suggestions for a way forward, I pose two questions.
First, how would Buzan and Lawson characterize the epistemic constraint on historical narrative posed by the language of science? There are different meanings of “social science,” and it is unclear from their treatment of conceptualization and generalization exactly where they come down. On the conceptual side, the explanatory status of the central concept linked to the global transformation, “mode of power,” is unclear. They define it as “the material and ideational relations that are generative of both actors and the ways in which power is exercised” (p. 1; italics added). Understood this way, mode of power has a structural and constitutive feel, along the lines of Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s “productive power” (“Power in International Politics,” International Organization 59 [Winter 2005]: 39–75). They also state that “social transformations arise from the conjunctural intersection of sequences of events and processes that are causally, but contingently, interrelated” (p. 1, note 1). Mode of power here seems more a causal mechanism generating outcomes than a constitutive force. They also suggest that today’s international political dynamics are rooted in the nineteenth-century configuration, so that by understanding that century we are better poised to manage them today (e.g., p. 318), which could be read as a teleological claim that once a mode of power is in place, the trajectory of power relations simply unfolds.
Unfortunately, their definition can be interpreted in several different ways that might not be consistent, and when the term is referred to later, it is contrasted only to the blunt foil of the distribution of power, rather than developed in relation to cognates in IR scholarship (see also Daniel Deudney, “Regrounding Realism: Anarchy, Security, and Changing Material Contexts,” Security Studies 10 [Autumn 2000]: 1–42), which might have helped make the concept more precise and its explanatory claims clearer.
Then again, perhaps the concept is not meant to be explanatory. At times, Buzan and Lawson pull back and refer to mode of power as part of an optic (pp. 21, 269, 319) rather than as a concept. This seems more consistent with the way that the term only loosely tethers their historical narrative. But optics and concepts are different—an optic renders its object more visible and meaningful, while a concept nails down its object’s properties and causal (and/or constitutive) relations, ideally providing some explanatory leverage. The authors seem to waver between the two and in the end, I was unclear about the role of concepts in their historical social science.
Another ingredient in social science is generalization, and here, too, there is ambiguity. While Buzan and Lawson are careful to say that they do not reject the possibility of generalization across time periods, neopositivist IR’s zealousness with generalizations comes in for great attack in Chapter 2. More importantly, their treatment of the nineteenth century reflects ambivalence about the practice of generalizing beyond the modern period. As they develop the special status of the long nineteenth century, they come close to denying that pre-nineteenth-century versions of concepts that we rely on in IR, such as international law, the balance of power, or sovereignty, could be at all relevant for understanding world politics today. They also claim that changes in world politics since 1919 are somehow not as consequential for thinking about today’s political problems and processes as those of the previous century.
The analytics behind these claims are not clear. For one, as Buzan and Lawson acknowledge, ideas such as sovereignty and liberalism, whose nineteenth-century instantiations are the core of their argument, were formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If the ideas came from beforehand, why are the politics of those earlier times, which presumably inspired the thinking, not relevant for understanding today? On the other end, the twentieth century brought enormous political changes, from decolonization and the end of dynasticism to the spread of democracy. True, the seeds of these changes were planted in the nineteenth century, as the authors point out. But why are the nineteenth-century seeds more important to the twentieth century than eighteenth-century seeds were to the nineteenth?
More generally, it is not clear why the nineteenth century should be treated as the primary progenitor of today’s world. Certainly a time traveler from 1750 would find him- or herself more at home in 1850 than a traveler from 1850 would in 1950. This is not mainly because of industrialization or technological change, but because of the vastly different social structures in these different periods. Europe in 1750 and 1850 was equally dynastic and imperial, for example, whereas by 1950 both dynasties and empires were gone. Indeed, 1919, 1945, or 1989 might constitute alternative ruptures, and someone who wanted to argue against Buzan and Lawson might say that what we see in the nineteenth century is the last gasps of dynasticism, rather than the birth of modernity. I am not saying that highlighting the nineteenth century is wrong or that this alternative reading is correct. But the burden is on the authors to show that their reading is more right than other readings, and I did not find the analytical resources in the book to adjudicate between the two interpretations. If generalization is permissible, then what are the criteria for demarcating a historical change or a transformational rupture?
Overall, taking these points together, I felt a tension in the book between the nominal goal of laying foundations for a historical social science and the argument developed in the book, which edges away from any social-scientific constraint. To be clear: I am not trying to push Buzan and Lawson into a narrow positivist mold. But the term science does imply some epistemic constraint on our narratives, and I had trouble pinning down theirs.
My second question is: In what way should we approach history in this historical social science? On the one hand, Buzan and Lawson criticize mainstream approaches in IR for taking what elsewhere Lawson has called a “scriptural,” ahistorical approach, where historical events are merely data used to support or undermine theories. He contrasts that to an approach that takes historical context seriously (George Lawson, “The Eternal Divide? History and International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 18 [no. 2, 2012]: 203–26). There, he clearly advocates the latter, but Buzan and Lawson’s historical account in this book has a scriptural feel. Rather than beginning with a discussion of their own context, or taking a Skinnerian approach and focusing on the self-understandings of actors in the nineteenth century, the argument is that IR should pay attention to the long nineteenth century because it truly is the birth of modernity. But as Lawson pointed out in “The Eternal Divide,” the historian cannot be separated from the history; our histories always are dialogues between the present and the past. Certainly that applies to their book, and I would have liked to see more of the historian’s self-awareness reflected in the argument. What might it be about today’s political situation that drives them, and so many of us lately, to the nineteenth century rather than to other periods—the eighteenth, the twentieth—that we could be mining? What specifically are Buzan and Lawson trying to get out of a discussion that positions the nineteenth century as the origin of contemporary practices and problems? The answer cannot be because it truly is the origin. That answer reflects a view of history as Truth that feels out of sync with the thrust of their approach, and a better fit, actually, for the neopositivist work they criticize.
In sum, I am very sympathetic to the overall agenda of The Global Transformation and already find myself using it as a resource for the history. As a guide for moving IR toward being an historical social science, however, the book was not as satisfying. This likely reflects the difficulty of such an enterprise as much as any particular “problem” with the book: It is intrinsically difficult to combine a deeply contextualist approach to history with even a broad notion of social science, and I would be interested in continuing a conversation with them on how to take their thinking further on the contours of historical social science.
