The key theme of this chapter is the emergence before 1914 of the modern concept of ‘the international’, and international relations, as something that needed to be studied. During these decades, most of the current approaches to IR took shape, but not in an integrated way. Nevertheless, this period can be seen as laying the foundations for modern IR, predominantly, but not only, in the West. The first conscious moves towards making IR a discipline happened during and after the First World War. Throughout this period there was a strong sense of separation between international relations and international society on the one hand, seen as being about relations among the ‘civilised states’, and on the other hand, colonial relations, which were not viewed as ‘international’ though they were very concerned with differences of culture, race and development. There were also significant lines of IR thinking emerging in the periphery, mostly with an anti-colonial inspiration. We conclude that IR’s founding myth of 1919 is not wholly wrong, but it is also quite far from being an accurate account, distorting as much as it enlightens.