When and how did the modern world become an international one? Jens Bartelson, a leading scholar of the history of international thought, provides new answers to this question by analyzing how relations between polities have been conceptualized across different historical contexts from the sixteenth century to the present day. A global intellectual history of the international system, this book challenges the widespread assumption that this system emerged as a result of a transition from empires to states, instead proposing that the international realm is but a continuation of imperial relations by other means. Showing how the international system spread through the creative appropriation of European concepts of nation and state by non-Europeans, Bartelson argues that this system has taken on a life of its own, to the point of becoming an empire in its own right.

'Lucid, learned, and challenging, Becoming International is Jens Bartelson's most ambitious work to date. Its unfailingly critical perspective questions our most fundamental categories - the international and the imperial, the global and the planetary - and will productively reframe myriad pressing contemporary debates.'

David Armitage - Author of Foundations of Modern International Thought

‘With characteristic boldness, erudition, and conceptual sophistication, Jens Bartelson traces the emergence, proliferation, and ideological functions of the idea that we live in an ‘international realm' - a world divided into sovereign states - and how this belief system has framed understandings of politics and disguised the continuity of imperial forms of rule. Original, erudite, and ambitious, Becoming International is a major contribution to political theory and the history of international thought.'

Duncan Bell - University of Cambridge