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Transformation at the margins: Imperial expansion and systemic change in world politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2018

Jeppe Mulich
Jeppe Mulich*
Affiliation:
LSE Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science
*
*Correspondence to: Jeppe Mulich, Department of International History, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. Author’s email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Taking the phenomenon of empire as its starting point, this article seeks to provide a framework for addressing the question of how and why international systems change over time. Synthesising elements from network-relational analysis and practice theory, I argue that international systems are best thought of as being composed of multiple partially overlapping and interrelated hierarchical networks. These networks are made up of social ties – as in classic network analysis – but also of specific repertoires of practice. Systemic transformations happen through the reconfiguration of networks, both through shifts in social ties and through changes in their practices. Empire provides a particularly illuminating window into the topic of systemic change, in part because a major driver of historical transformations has been the expansion of empires and their encounters with other heterogeneous polities across the globe, and in part because a focus on imperial interactions highlights the limitations of existing unit-centric perspectives. Drawing on examples from the nineteenth century, I illustrate the usefulness of the framework by showing how different regionally anchored systems came into contact with the expanding spheres of Western empires and how such points of interaction contributed to the development of an increasingly global international system.

Keywords

ColonialismEmpireHistorical Change, International SystemsPractice TheoryRelationalism
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 694 - 716
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

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References

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61 For more on the role of liminal actors in unsettling existing balances-of-power, see Mike Glosny and Daniel Nexon, ‘The Outsider Advantage: Why Liminal Actors rise to System-Wide Domination’, paper presented at the ISA Annual Convention, New Orleans (18–21 February 2015). What is particularly interesting in the case of the Gold Coast is that the initial rising power was a local, African, empire, rather than a European one.

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73 Ibid., pp. 172–216. This legibility did not appear out of thin air in the nineteenth century, of course. For earlier Qing engagements with an emerging inter-imperial legal order, consider the treaties between China and Russia dividing up the Central Eurasian Steppe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. See Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 161–72; Mancall, Mark, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

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75 From TNA CO 881/8/2, p. 1.

76 From TNA CO 881/8/2, p. 9. See also the correspondence between London and Wellington in New Zealand Parliamentary Papers, Confederation and Annexation, Papers Relating to the Islands of Samoa and Tonga (London, 1885), pp. 1–5. Indeed, New Zealand would develop into a quasi-imperial power in its own right, governing several Pacific island colonies including, eventually, Western Samoa. See O’Brien, Patricia, ‘From Sudan to Samoa: Imperial legacies and cultures in New Zealand’s rule over the mandated territory of Western Samoa’, in Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne (eds), New Zealand’s Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 127–146 Google Scholar.

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79 Indeed, the very process of decolonisation included numerous examples of political experimentation diverging from the narrow model of the nation-state. See, for example, the many attempts at transnational federalism in the British Caribbean: Fraser, Cary, Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940–1964 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1994)Google Scholar; Chávez, John, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 184–212 Google Scholar; and in French Africa: Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

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