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Disciplinary International Relations (IR) grew in part out of the discipline of History. Even so, the subfield of Historical International Relations (HIR) is a relatively new one. A mere decade ago, a handbook such as this one would have seemed unthinkable. Sure, there were books about History and IR (Elman and Elman, 1997) and more on the way (Bukovansky et al., forthcoming), people discussed the “problem of history” in IR (Armitage, 2004; Vaughan-Williams, 2005) and it was asked what history could be in IR (Hobson and Lawson, 2008). These takes nevertheless all supposed either the existence of a divide to be bridged or a continuum where the enterprises of History and IR were commensurable. The emergence and institutionalisation of a distinct subfield over the last decade has radically changed that landscape. Writing in 2020, it is obvious that a burgeoning subfield of HIR not only exists within the discipline, but that it has come to age and is thriving. As the ensuing chapters vividly demonstrate, so much material is being produced that a stock-taking exercise is both possible and necessary. This handbook attempts just such a stocktaking.

This chapter tackles seascape as a symbolic space. It explores the political symbolisation and the symbolic power of the sea via a twofold empirical focus. The first move examines the maritime imagining of a nation-space with the example of Estonia’s ex-president and ethnographer Lennart Meri’s historical travelogue Hõbevalge [Silver White] (1976). This imaginative reconstruction of Estonia’s ancient seafaring history and connectivities with the Baltic Sea region and beyond was a conscious exercise in linking a forgotten Baltic province to the mental map of a Nordic-Baltic region. Silver White provided a national mythology for a small nation which was denied an autonomous political present and future as part of the Soviet Union. As a second move, the chapter looks at the emerging maritime posture and posturing of NATO in the Baltic Sea region. Proceeding from Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritualisation as a culturally strategic way of acting in the world and exercising power, NATO’s maritime presence in the Nordic-Baltic space emerges as a case of ritualised performance of deterrence towards Russia. In both instances of cultivating a national mythscape via the sea and performing a multinational military alliance via exercising extended maritime deterrence, the Baltic Sea emerges as a crucial arena for creating and enacting political subjectivities and communities in world politics

The chapter provides an overview of Global History as a field within history and identifies its relevance for International Relations (IR). To this end, the chapter identifies three main, and yet distinct approaches to Global History. We reconstruct scholarship conceptualising Global History as (1) a hermeneutic device for extending the analytical scale of history through space; (2) as history of globalisation understood as an integrative process over time; and (3) an approach that prioritises entanglements, connections, circulations and exchange as units of investigation from a historical perspective. We argue that a broader conception of Global History, which subsumes a sensibility to entanglements, offers a way out of reproducing the two birth defects in history writing – methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism – in historical research in international studies. The chapter concludes by outlining how concerns of Global History have recently entered IR.

The Middle Ages occupy a central yet problematic role as both the point of origins in historical narratives of International Relations (IR) and as the ever-present Other in the conceptual apparatus of the discipline. In this chapter, I focus on three ways of reimagining the Middle Ages that may potentially be fruitful in gaining a better historical understanding and disentangling the medieval from some of its problematic connotations and functions. First, I consider how to break with the notion of the singular, unified medieval by looking at alternative periodiations and breaks within what is conventionally considered to be the Middle Ages. Second, I challenge the isolation and locality of the period by looking into global connections and circuits. Finally, I tackle the role of the medieval in reproducing a specific metageography of Europe by looking at how it can point to alternative spaces and spatial imaginaries.

Historical periods are a central part of how the field of international relations (IR) defines the subject of its analysis but also how it regards itself as a field of analysis. On the one hand, historical periods represent the temporal unfolding of specific (spatial) logics of interactions among various and differentiated political units in a space that come to define what the international is. On the other hand, historical periods are not simply a referential point the boundaries of which are set outside the writing of history. Quite the contrary, historical periods are constructed and as such offer a window into the practice of that writing in IR. The aim of this chapter therefore is to set some of the parameters to conceptualise and discuss the processes of periodisation by first seeing how historical periods, beyond their historical accuracies and robustness, should be seen as heuristic devices dependant on a scholar's working hypothesis. The chapter then reflects on why Historical IR tends to largely consider ‘remarkable’ periods – such as economic or systemic ruptures, or the (Western European) state. Finally, some of the challenges and invitations that could be further explored by Historical IR are discussed.

Almost any conversation about Historical International Relations (IR) appears to be, at least implicitly, always already about Europe. The geographical and intellectual centrality of Europe shapes the way in which historically oriented work in IR operates. Paradoxically, despite a long and powerful lineage of disciplinary Eurocentrism, Europe has only rarely emerged as a conceptual focal point of historical investigation. Quite the contrary, its presence appears to go without saying. This chapter locates the reason for this in a teleological theory of history implicitly invoked with the articulation of Europe. We excavate how this implicit theory of history organizes debates in the English School tradition, in Historical Sociology, and in European Integration Theory thereby producing Europe as vanguard and telos of world history. In this way, we demonstrate that the centrality of Europe for Historical IR is not a matter of empirical focus but more fundamentally a question of conceptual and epistemological presuppositions. By addressing such conceptual Eurocentrism, we suggest, the horizon of possibility for historical and political engagements with Europe can be significantly expanded.