Description
A growing critical scholarship rethinks the origins of international politics through distinctions articulated through the notions of sovereignty and the nation-state, understanding those as social relations. International politics is then conceived as a limited realm formed by the ontological exclusions that delineate modern political thought: the domestic as outside the international, and the private sphere or the uncivilised as outside politics altogether. However, by taking the rise of modern political thought as its point of origin, this literature reproduces the notion of modernity as a historical rupture. Drawing from the literatures on racial capitalism and historical sociology, this paper argues that grounding this double exclusion on concrete social practices and historically specific actors allows us to reconstruct the novelty of the modern international order while also highlighting how it draws on logics of exclusion that precede it. The study of Transatlantic slavery in the early modern period mobilises a rich historiographical literature that details the social and geopolitical practices shaping the context in which modern political thought itself rises, and in which the double exclusion it posits is constituted. By tracing a social history of the international as a double exclusion, the article provides an account of how its reproduction continues to rely on premodern foundations.
