El. knyga: Two Worlds of Nineteenth Century International Relations: The Bifurcated Century

This edited volume presents a new, grand and global narrative for international relations (IR) history for the pivotal nineteenth century. Typically considered by IR scholars to be largely a long century of relative peace after 1815, the contributors offer a re-conceptualization of patterns of IR in this century arguing that it is in fact temporally a "bifurcated" century, with very different patterns of IR in the first and second halves.

The mid-century discontinuity – a "pivot period" - is the transition phase in Europe and globally when, in the space of a few years, there is a marked shift from a comparatively calm, less connected world to new scrambles for territory and a shift in the value placed on imperial possessions and conquest. All the chapters in the book deal with characterizing patterns of relations in the first half of the century or the second, with a couple addressing the discontinuity in the middle. In the first half of the book aspects of regional orders are described (in Latin America, East Asia and Europe) alongside crucial developmental processes (missionaries and colonial expansion, the agency of regionally localized actors, of leading elites). In the second half, we have again a discussion of regional developments (East Asia, Europe), but now under the onslaught and pressures of the second half of the century, and looking more closely at the role of industrialization’s impacts and international law.

In presenting this new narrative for the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that an era long considered uninteresting on Eurocentric grounds, is in fact absolutely crucial and pivotal in global terms.This work will be of interest to students and scholars of the history of international relations.