History of International Relations: A Non-European Perspective

by Erik Ringmar, Open Book Publishers (Contributor)

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 the processes of decolonization, neo-colonialism and globalization - and their consequences on contemporary society.History of International Relations provides a unique textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations, and anybody interested in international relations theory, history, and contemporary politics. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an introductory international relations textbook. Its goal is to reintroduce history into international relations, by providing a brief world history that focuses on international systems that predate the European system of sovereign states that dominates today. This goal is admirable, especially given so much of contemporary policy research assumes the sovereign state model as the only viable one and endeavors to remake non-Western states in the image of their former colonizers. The problem is that the history contained in this book is extremely rudimentary and overly simplistic; as a result the complexity of these other models is lost. Admittedly each section includes a brief list of texts for further reading. However, I think that international relations students would be better served by requiring them to take a substantial number of history courses and more specifically courses that approach history from a post-colonial perspective as part of their degree requirement.