Long-Term Patterns of Change in Human Interconnectedness: A View from International Relations

Abstract

Recent scholarship has witnessed ‘the return of the grand narrative’. The establishment of ‘world history’ and the emergence of ‘big history’ and ‘new global history’ are examples of that trend. Similar tendencies are evident in the study of international relations. In the main, those writings have developed independently of each other, and it is unclear whether they add up to a coherent narrative. But they share an interest in understanding what has been identified as the central theme in recent studies of world history, namely the development of human interconnectedness over the last few centuries and millennia. They represent a growing recognition of the need for a broadening of the historical imagination to reveal how ‘encounters between strangers’ have influenced the evolution of societies and civilizations, and indeed the social and political development of the species as a whole. The study of international relations is clearly central to a study of long-term processes that foregrounds such encounters. Precisely what it contributes, and what it can profit from engaging with the larger literature on the evolution of interconnectedness, is the subject of this article.