Foto: Jens Bartelson

When and how did the modern world become an international one? Jens Bartelson, a leading scholar of the history of international thought, provides new answers to this question by analyzing how relations between polities have been conceptualized across different historical contexts from the sixteenth century to the present day. A global intellectual history of the international system, this book challenges the widespread assumption that this system emerged as a result of a transition from empires to states, instead proposing that the international realm is but a continuation of imperial relations by other means. Showing how the international system spread through the creative appropriation of European concepts of nation and state by non-Europeans, Bartelson argues that this system has taken on a life of its own, to the point of becoming an empire in its own right.

Jens Bartelson received his doctorate from the University of Stockholm in 1993. His fields of interest include international relations and the history of international thought. Jens Bartelson has published extensively on core concepts in international thought and their history. He is the author of Becoming International (Cambridge University Press, 2023), War in International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Visions of World Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Critique of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2001), A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 1995), as well as of numerous articles in leading journals across the human, legal, and social sciences.