Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories

Abstract

This paper addresses three recent developments in historical sociology: (i) neo-Weberian historical sociology within International Relations; (ii) the "civilizational analysis" approach utilized by scholars of "multiple modernities", and (iii) the "third wave" cultural turn in US historical sociology. While these developments are responses to problems identified within earlier forms of historical sociology, it is suggested each fails to resolve them precisely because each remains contained within the methodological framework of historical sociology as initially conceived. It is argued that their common problem lies in the utilization of "ideal types" as the basis for socio-historical analysis. This necessarily has the effect of abstracting a set of particular relations from their wider connections and has the further effect of suggesting sui generis endogenous processes as integral to these relations. In this way, each of the three developments continues the Eurocentrism typical of earlier approaches. The paper concludes with a call for "connected histories" to provide a more adequate methodological and substantive basis for an historical sociology appropriate to calls for a properly global historical sociology.

Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects

“…However, despite the upsurge of interest in historical sociology (Hobden and Hobson 2002;Lawson 2007), and a burgeoning scholarship on intersocial forms of historical development (Hobson et al 2010), much IR scholarship remains cut off from the world beyond the West (Shilliam 2008). Bhambra (2010) argues that, despite appearances to the contrary, historical sociology in IR remains stuck in a purview that sees interconnections as something constituted by European societies to 'others', thereby granting the latter only a subaltern identity. Intriguingly, although postcolonial enquiry has sought to illuminate this identity by concentrating on the constitutive impact of the nonEuropean world on the formation of the modern world, it frequently omits these coconstitutive interconnections.…”

“…Indeed, the colonial inflection of sociological analysis evident in much classical theory and social anthropology denies the coconstitutive relationship between the primitive, the premodern and the modern (Asad 1973). Gurminder Bhambra's (2010) contribution to this forum engages specificallyand critically-with this inflection. Bhambra's critique is situated within one of Sociology's most prominent subfields-historical sociology.…”

“…Given that so many contemporary academic approaches are either transdisciplinary (poststructuralism and the broader cultural turn) or joint-disciplinary (such as gender and ethnic studies), the type of engagement suggested by this forum (in general) and by Bhambra's (2010) piece (in particular) can be considered as both potentially fertile and increasingly widespread (Lawson 2008a). Given this, and granting the narrowness of much of IR's intellectual agenda as sketched out in the first part of this Introduction, it is hardly a surprise to see a call by IR scholars, funding bodies and the wider academy to work beyond the confines of sometimes arbitrary and frequently constraining disciplinary perimeters.…”

Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-making : Insights from 'Africa's World War'

“…Yet it is important to recognise that even in the relatively parochial narrative of European state formation its sources of authority, as Tilly points out, are not consent and democracy, but war, coercion and accumulation. When colonisation is added to this narrative, which, as Bhambra (2010) argues, is constitutive and not a consequence of modernity, it shows that European states were not entirely self-made but have benefited from extraction, exploitation and war in the colonies.…”

Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency

“…Indeed, "many forms of social organization and cultural production that, since Discipline and Punish, we have come to consider as important, such as wage-labour and the factory system, in the emergence of European modernity were first developed well beyond the Northern Europe of Michel Foucault's analyses" (Mitchell 2000, 3). And these developments then fed back to enable the British industrial revolution (Williams 1944;Rodney [1972Rodney [ ] 2012Inikori 2002;Hobson 2004;Bhambra 2007;Anievas and Nişancio glu 2015).…”