Search

Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an urgent contemporary challenge. Building on ideas first advanced in Reus-Smit’s On Cultural Diversity (2018), this groundbreaking book advances a new framework for understanding the nexus between culture and order in world politics. Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, it argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and demonstrates that the organization of cultural diversity has been inextricably tied to the constitution and legitimation of political authority in diverse international orders, from Warring States China, through early modern Europe and the Ottoman and Qing Empires, to today’s global liberal order. It highlights the successive ‘diversity regimes’ that have been constructed to govern cultural difference since the nineteenth century, traces the exclusions and resistances these projects have engendered and considers contemporary global vulnerabilities and axes of contestation.

Introduction This chapter advances Global Historical Sociology (GHS) by offering a new interpretation of Europeans’ incorporation into an Asian-dominated global economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Two main flaws have tarnished classical accounts of European expansion into Asia: bello-centrism and Eurocentrism. Specifically, conventional accounts either celebrated or lamented Europeans’ allegedly precocious bellicosity as the key to their success in imposing themselves on supposedly supine Asian societies (Cipolla 1965; Pannikar 1969; Parker 1996). Alternatively, revisionists have stressed themes of Asian indifference to explain how Europeans managed to infiltrate an Asian-dominated global economy (Chaudhuri 1991; Clulow 2014: 10; Kling 1979). This revisionist school correctly stresses Asian powers’ preponderance over the Europeans before the mid-eighteenth century. But it also reinforces tropes of Asian passivity, casting European “expansion” as the result of locals’ passive acceptance of Western encroachment rather than the product of a dynamic process of “contained conflict” (Subrahmanyam 1990: 250) and eventual (if uneasy) mutual accommodation. Against both impositionist and indifference accounts, I advance here an incorporative argument to explain European “expansion” into precolonial maritime Asia. Consistent with Global Historical Sociology’s relational rather than substantialist ontology (Go and Lawson Introduction), my argument conceives European intruder polities and Asian host polities alike as territorially nonexclusive power networks, which promiscuously intersected and enmeshed during the first three centuries of Europeans’ incorporation into maritime Asia. With rare exceptions, Europeans lacked the means to unilaterally impose themselves on their hosts. Instead, they relied on local customs of commercial extraterritoriality, and drew on compatible practices of patrimonial rule and congruent conceptions of patriarchal hierarchy uniting both Europeans and Asians, to insinuate their way into maritime Asian entrepots. Far from regarding European entry with indifference, Asian rulers actively sought to pull Europeans into extant political and commercial networks for their own purposes, while the existence of sophisticated and extraverted indigenous merchant elites in Asian ports was likewise a critical precondition for the success of the company sovereigns (Erikson Chapter 8). Exemplifying the “interactive multiplicity” (Go and Lawson Introduction) that is the hallmark of Global Historical Sociology’s conception of the international, early modern Asia hosted a diverse menagerie of European and local polity types, which interpenetrated without ever converging to a dominant form (Phillips and Sharman, 2015).

Durable diversity in the early modern Indian Ocean rested on three factors: contrasting but compatible preferences between Europeans and local polities, distinct but equivalent beliefs concerning heteronomous authority, and improvised practices of localization. As much as this argument stands alone, it is important to establish that after 1750 we do not see the unfolding of a familiar conventional story of interaction driving convergence on the sovereign state model, thus replicating the European experience, albeit with a 250-year lag. Instead, this chapter advances two crucial interlinked points that illustrate the Indian Ocean's continuing distinctiveness, and the danger of basing International Relations theory on the presumed universality of the European experience. First, rather than being abolished, the region's existing diversity of suzerain, galactic and vassal arrangements was incorporated within new, Western-dominated hybrid imperial frameworks after 1750. Second, whereas in Europe the international system evolved from heteronomy towards an anarchical system of sovereign states, in the Indian Ocean right down to the post-World War II era, the progression was from heteronomy to imperial hierarchy. Globally, the European sovereign state system therefore remained the exception rather than the rule right down to the second half of the twentieth century. By 1849, despite lacking any decisive technological military advantages over its local rivals, the English East India Company had conquered a population of over 150 million people on the Indian subcontinent. Beyond India, the company had also wrested control of the Cape Colony, Ceylon and Dutch settlements in the Indonesian archipelago from the Batavian Republic (the VOC having by then gone bankrupt) and had also subjected central Java's feuding sultanates to direct European rule for the first time. While London transferred the sovereignty of Dutch possessions in Indonesia to the newly formed United Kingdom of the Netherlands after 1815, the British Raj there-after spread throughout the Indian Ocean, a web of suzerain linkages tying polities in East Africa, the Persian Gulf and South-East Asia to the empire's subcontinental core.

And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place … Deuteronomy 12:3 With the conclusion of the Peace of Augsburg and the signing of the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis four years later between the Valois and Habsburg crowns, the possibility of a return to order in Western and Central Europe momentarily presented itself. In officially recognising the empire's permanent religious division, the Peace of Augsburg constituted an explicit acknowledgement that Christendom's spiritual unity was lost beyond recall. Equally, while the terms of Cateau-Cambresis naturally favoured the Habsburg victors, the Habsburg patrimony's division between the dynasty's Spanish and Austrian lines removed the possibility of reconstituting international order in Western Europe in an imperial form. With the struggle between Europe's two mightiest crowns momentarily in abeyance, and with both dynasties united alongside a revived post-Tridentine Church in their determination to eradicate heresy, the prospects for stability seemed promising. As it transpired, the period between Cateau-Cambresis and the Peace of Westphalia would prove one of exceptional violence, with the prior breakdown of Christendom's spiritual unity and its fundamental institutions paving the way for a protracted descent into immature anarchy. While the Augsburg Peace established an uneasy truce between Germany's warring confessions, elsewhere the hardening of confessional allegiances triggered a wave of religiously inspired revolts.

Existing accounts for the transformation of international orders How are international orders transformed? A range of suggestive but incomplete answers may be drawn from the literature on international systems change. Cyclical theories of order emphasise international orders' dependence on the fate of great power sponsors, with their transformation being driven by shifts in the balance of power away from conservative status quo powers and towards more dynamic revisionist powers. Linear-process theories, conversely, see international orders as the systemic residue of largely endogenous processes of state formation. Seen through this lens, the nation-state's contemporary ubiquity is a testament to a centuries-long process of Darwinian institutional selection, with the global state system representing nothing more than the most efficient available means of organising political authority on a global scale. A third set of perspectives conceptualises international systems change in terms of punctuated equilibria, affording causal primacy either to far-reaching transformations in the mode of production or destruction, or to the irruption of subversive new forms of collective identity in explaining orders' transformation. Each of these accounts provides valuable insights, but none by itself is adequate as an explanation for international orders' transformation. International orders and the rise and fall of Great Powers The notion that international orders are hostages to the fortunes of their Great Power sponsors superficially has much to commend it. Intuitively, it makes sense that orders would reflect the interests of the powerful, and that they would tend towards disintegration as their sponsors' relative power ebbed.