Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (LSE International Studies)

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 List of Figures and Maps page Acknowledgements What Is the East? - Theorising Sovereignty and World Orders in Asia and Eurasia Cihannüma Making the East: Chinggisid World Orders - The Empire of Genghis Khan and Its Successor Khanates (Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries) Dividing the East: Post-Chinggisid World Orders - The Timurid and the Ming (Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries) Expanding the East: Post-Timurid World Orders - The Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) How the East Made the World: Eurasia and Beyond - Chinggisid Influences on a Globalising World (Sixteenth Century) Lessons of History Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders - Lessons for International Relations Uses and Abuses of Macro History in International Relations - Am I a ‘Eurasianist’? Bibliography Index Before the West presents the first comprehensive account of the international relations in 'the East', weaving together histories of the regions we today call East Asia, Central Asia, Eurasia (Russia), the Middle East and South Asia, and also rethinks the concepts of 'sovereignty', 'international order' and 'decline'. Zarakol presents the first comprehensive history of the international relations in 'the East', and rethinks 'sovereignty', 'order-making' and 'decline'.