This section establishes several themes that serve as the backdrop to the more detailed discussions that animate later parts of the book. Chapter 1 addresses world historical transformations as a general phenomenon, showing how the nineteenth-century global transformation fits into broader patterns of macro-historical change. Chapter 2 sketches out the limited ways in which IR scholarship currently examines the nineteenth century, why its appreciation of the global transformation is weak compared to cognate disciplines, and why IR’s failure to give global modernity systematic attention is a problem both for how the discipline theorizes its subject matter and how it understands the nature of macro-historical transformations.