Empires have returned as features of the international scene. With the Cold War's global ideological contest gone, alternative structures such as the War on Terror or the Clash of Civilizations losing credibility, and even the unipolar position of the USA no longer self-evident, the operations of competing empires, history's best known form of order imposed over territories and peoples, acquires renewed credibility. Empire and International Order presents a critical examination of how useful the concept of empire is for understanding varieties of international order across time and place. Original contributions from an international team of upcoming and distinguished scholars analyse a wealth of theoretical approaches alongside contemporary themes enabling the reader to understand the desire to shift the ground of analysis away from the current literature of immediate issue of the US towards the disciplines of international relations, politics, and political/sociological theory.

International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century. “Rage for Order is a book of exceptional range and insight. Its successes are numerous. At a time when questions of law and legalism are attracting more and more attention from historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire, but still tend to be considered within very specific contexts, its sweep and ambition are particularly welcome...Rage for Order is a book that deserves to have major implications both for international legal history, and for the history of modern imperialism.” —Alex Middleton, Reviews in History “Rage for Order offers a fresh account of nineteenth-century global order that takes us beyond worn liberal and post-colonial narratives into a new and more adventurous terrain.” —Jens Bartelson, Australian Historical Studies

Examines early modern Spanish contributions to international relations by focusing on ambivalence of natural rights in European colonial expansion to the Americas.

What are international orders, how are they destroyed, and how can they be defended in the face of violent challenges? Advancing an innovative realist-constructivist account of international order, Andrew Phillips addresses each of these questions in War, Religion and Empire. Phillips argues that international orders rely equally on shared visions of the good and accepted practices of organized violence to cultivate cooperation and manage conflict between political communities. Considering medieval Christendom's collapse and the East Asian Sinosphere's destruction as primary cases, he further argues that international orders are destroyed as a result of legitimation crises punctuated by the disintegration of prevailing social imaginaries, the break-up of empires, and the rise of disruptive military innovations. He concludes by considering contemporary threats to world order, and the responses that must be taken in the coming decades if a broadly liberal international order is to survive.

Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries.

This book reveals how the structures and practices of past empires interact with and shape contemporary 'national' ones.

Although empires have shaped the political development of virtually all the states of the modern world, "imperialism" has not figured largely in the mainstream of scholarly literature. This book seeks to account for the imperial phenomenon and to establish its importance as a subject in the study of the theory of world politics. Michael Doyle believes that empires can best be defined as relationships of effective political control imposed by some political societies—those called metropoles—on other political societies—called peripheries. To build an explanation of the birth, life, and death of empires, he starts with an overview and critique of the leading theories of imperialism. Supplementing theoretical analysis with historical description, he considers episodes from the life cycles of empires from the classical and modern world, concentrating on the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa. He describes in detail the slow entanglement of the peripheral societies on the Nile and the Niger with metropolitan power, the survival of independent Ethiopia, Bismarck's manipulation of imperial diplomacy for European ends, the race for imperial possession in the 1880s, and the rapid setting of the imperial sun. Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.