Description

Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses/ and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases/ debates and issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the international systems that traditionally existed in Europe/ East Asia/ pre-Columbian Central and South America/ Africa and Polynesia. The second part discusses the ways in which these international systems were brought into contact with each other through the agency of Mongols in Central Asia/ Arabs in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean/ Indic and Sinic societies in South East Asia/ and the Europeans through their travels and colonial expansion. The concluding section concerns contemporary issues: the processes of decolonization/ neo-colonialism and globalization – and their consequences on contemporary society.