Description
Several generations of scholarship have identified European imperialism as a crucial factor in the development of the modern international system. Yet, based on a stylized conception of the ‘Westphalian-territorial state,’ traditional approaches to great-power politics do little to explain the effects of imperial expansion upon modern interstate rivalries. In this article, I seek to fill this lacuna by making three related arguments concerning the imperial dynamic of European geopolitical relations, c. 1830-1914. First, rejecting traditional ‘balance-of-power’ and ‘diplomatic history’ explanations, I situate the analysis of European power politics within an alternative a historical sociology of imperial state-formation: the emergence of transcontinental composite polities, where the combined challenge of managing dispersed territories while relying on local intermediaries generated distinct geostrategic challenges. Rather than treating foreign and diplomatic policy as the work of unitary territorial states, this historico-theoretical framework explains inter-imperial power politics as the product of struggles within disaggregated empire-states, shaped by the relations between diverse political, economic and colonial elites. Second, I present a detailed empirical study of two principal features of nineteenth-century imperial rivalries: the dynamics of ‘partition diplomacy’ and ‘peripheral competition’ which accompanied the expansion of the British empire. These power struggles centered on the contest for influence in world affairs — as in classical theories of Realpolitik — but they emerged from distinctly imperial modes of foreign policymaking, international hierarchy, and military intervention which cannot be captured by the Westphalian narrative of modern state sovereignty. Third, I focus on the feedback-effects of overseas imperialism upon the European interstate order itself. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, imperial competition not only intensified; through a process of uneven and combined development, it also began to permeate the logic of intra-European state relations, generating power-maximizing strategies of external expansionism which ultimately shattered the traditional balance-of-power system.
