Description
This paper attempts to bring together IR theory, global history and relational sociology to develop a new way of conceptualising international order in the nineteenth century. It starts by looking at how IR theorists have empirically conceptualised the ‘international system’ in this period, particularly in the Correlates of War project and the International System(s) Datasets. They suffer from problems involved in how to define the system’s boundary, and how to classify different kinds of system member, because they rely on a notion of the system’s members as territorially sovereign states, which offers a distorted picture of a world where international relations were not exclusively organised around this principle. Instead, borrowing a term from global historians such as Lauren Benton, I argue that we should think of the nineteenth-century world in terms of an ‘interpolity system’. To begin mapping an outline of this system, I look at global patterns of treaty-making activity throughout the period, and use these to develop a series of conjectures about regional and chronological variations in the nineteenth-century interpolity system. I conclude by asking how the concept of an ‘interpolity system’ might be extended both backwards and forwards in time.
