Introduction
Disciplinary International Relations (IR) grew in part out of the discipline of History. Even so, the subfield of Historical International Relations (HIR) is a relatively new one. A mere decade ago, a handbook such as this one would have seemed unthinkable. Sure, there were books about History and IR (Elman and Elman, 1997) and more on the way (Bukovansky et al., forthcoming), people discussed the āproblem of historyā in IR (Armitage, 2004; Vaughan-Williams, 2005) and it was asked what history could be in IR (Hobson and Lawson, 2008). These takes nevertheless all supposed either the existence of a divide to be bridged or a continuum where the enterprises of History and IR were commensurable. The emergence and institutionalisation of a distinct subfield over the last decade has radically changed that landscape. Writing in 2020, it is obvious that a burgeoning subfield of HIR not only exists within the discipline, but that it has come to age and is thriving. As the ensuing chapters vividly demonstrate, so much material is being produced that a stock-taking exercise is both possible and necessary. This handbook attempts just such a stocktaking.
Taking stock implies casting the nets far and wide. What follows is thus not an overview of the subjects we have decided upon as the most important in or for HIR, it is more like an inductively generated catalogue of current and past HIR. This is also not a handbook about the history of IR, as it offers no complete or coherent historical account. Rather, it seeks to give a comprehensive overview of the historical work undertaken by IR scholars over the past three decades, initially as part of different traditions or theoretical enterprises and, later, more or less consciously as belonging to the subdiscipline of IR which we now call HIR. Over the last decade, we have spent countless hours as programme chairs for conferences, members of awards committees and as supervisors and lecturers. This forms the basis for the selection of subjects below ā these are the subjects which animate scholars doing HIR at the current stage. While we hope that many see the texts as concrete inspiration, we also fully expect others to be inspired by omissions.
In this introduction, we start by presenting the overall trajectory of historical work in the IR discipline, how it was central to the founding of scholarly IR but was somewhat marginalised during the Cold War, and how it has had a gradual resurgence since the 1980s, gaining steam around the turn of the century. We follow this up with a discussion of how the literature of the last decades transcended the earlier discussions about history and/in/for IR, leading up to what we see as the distinctiveness of HIR and the justification for this handbook as an IR project rather than a multidisciplinary one. Finally, we lay out the broad contents of each of the ensuing sections of the book.
Historical International Relations
As detailed in recent IR historiography, the Anglo-American (or perhaps rather, Commonwealth-American) discipline of IR grew out of a number of different academic traditions, including colonial administration, international law, history and political science (Long and Schmidt, 2005; Bell, 2009; Ashworth, 2014; Vitalis, 2015; Rosenboim, 2017; Davis et al., 2020). It makes sense to claim that international history was one of the academic midwives in IR's long formative phase. During the first decades of disciplinary development, no particular justification for turning to history was needed. For a discipline which grew partly out of History, more or less explicitly theoretically informed historical narrative was the predominant form of scholarship. The gradual move towards behavioural social science, game theory and quantitative methods from the 1960s onwards implied a less explicit focus on historical analysis (Guilhot, 2011, 2017), but history remained as a quarry for data, a testing ground for theory and a site of investigation. Quantitative research obviously relied on the coding of historical data and involved making historiographical decisions (Fazal, 2011). Historical analysis could also be found on the margins of the American discipline, for instance in World-Systems Theory (Denemark, 2021 in this volume) and the English School (e.g. Dunne, 1998). History remained one of the unacknowledged partners of IR ā unacknowledged, but still formative and a constant presence. The āscientificā approaches to international relations nevertheless implied that history could no longer serve as its own justification. Furthermore, even if scholars across the discipline were clearly engaging with historical data and history (albeit often relatively recent history), there was little explicit reflection about how and why one should engage history. As Christopher Thorne lamented, history was more often than not abused in IR (1983: 123).
The situation changed in the 1980s. Within the discipline, a gradual intellectual opening up changed the terms of discussion for historically-oriented IR. The many and broad challenges against the perceived āneo-neoā consensus involved history in two distinct ways. First, as one of many different alternative approaches, historical analysis benefited from the general opening up of the discipline. Second, and more importantly, history served as one of the central spanners in the works of mainstream theorising. This was obvious in the work of thinkers as diverse as Walker, Cox, Ruggie and Kratochwil, all engaging with history to demonstrate the shortcomings of the allegedly āscientificā approaches (Cox, 1981; Ruggie, 1986, 1998; Kratochwil, 1986; Walker, 1993; see the discussion in Leira and de Carvalho, 2016). These two different openings towards history have had slightly different implications for HIR. On the one hand, studies engaging history started emerging in all corners of the discipline, some of them with a fairly traditional view of history and concerned with getting the facts straight and using them to build, modify or test theories. On the other hand, historical arguments were being engaged more thoroughly in the parts of the discipline at the time lumped together as ācriticalā: poststructuralism, constructivism, historical sociology and so forth. It has been a guiding principle of the editors of this volume, that both of these approaches fit within the broader project of HIR.
Looking at external factors, the turn to history seems obviously related to the relatively rapidly changing conditions of world affairs since 1989. Whereas decades of Cold War and the perceived centrality of the Euro-Atlantic area enabled relatively ahistorical conceptions of an unchanging system, the breakdown of bipolarity, the multiplication of actors and the emergence of new powers in the global south led to a return to history. Faced with an uncertain future, an increasing number of scholars have looked to the past for guidance, patterns and ideas. This tendency has been clear, despite theoretical and methodological differences. Some look to the past to find recurring patterns, others to bring forth unacknowledged legacies, and yet others to denaturalise taken-for-granted concepts and ideas or to understand how we come to find ourselves in our current predicament (Bartelson, 1995; Reus-Smit, 1999; Jahn, 2000; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004).
By the turn of the century, enough historically-oriented scholarship was coming forward for observers to comment on a possible āhistoricalā or āhistoriographicalā turn in the discipline (Bell, 2001). The interest and investment in historically-oriented scholarship has continued to grow since this diagnosis was first put forward, and with the growing diversity and globalisation of the discipline, the scope of HIR was broadened significantly by scholars from outside of the traditional ācoreā of IR (Towns, 2009; Shilliam, 2011; Vitalis, 2015; NisĢ§ancıogĖlu, 2020; Manchanda, 2020; Ćapan, 2020). More and more scholars are self-consciously describing their work as historical, grounding it in HIR and engaging in ever more sophisticated theoretical and empirical historical analyses. After initial explorations and excavations in many directions, it is now possible to see some cohesion emerging and to take stock of the developments.
Writing Historical IR
Thinking of HIR of course immediately brings up debates about the relations between History and IR. As noted previously, this has always been a close relation: not only were history and historians crucial in the birth of the IR discipline, but most IR work includes an (implicit) historical dimension (Hobson and Lawson, 2008). And yet, at the same time, the relation between IR and History has been extensively and explicitly debated, and these debates have both drawn on and informed the way in which work in HIR has been carried out (Suganami, 2008; Yetiv, 2011; Leira, 2015; Kratochwil, 2016).
For many years, this engagement was based on the assumption of a stark division between IR and History: where IR scholars focused on theory and concepts, on nomothetic knowledge, historians were concerned with the particular, the contingent and the ideographic. In terms of the production of historical knowledge, this led to an (implicit) inferiority complex of IR that asked how it could learn from history. In this view, the writing of historians, based on primary sources, paying minute attention to detail and historical context, mastering ancient languages and a multitude of texts, was just superior to that of theory-minded IR scholars. To be sure, what history can learn from IR was also correspondingly asked, leading to a counter-dismissal of history as pretty much an auxiliary science for IR scholars to mobilise in their pursuit of more noble, theoretical aims (Yetiv, 2011). This division of labour, and the privileging of historical writing by historians, is epitomised in Elman and Elman's claim that āall international relations theories need historical facts against which they can be measuredā (1997: 7).
And yet, most reflexive engagement about history and IR since then has sought to challenge this āeternal divideā (Lawson, 2012) and instead brings both disciplines closer together. The epistemological debates in IR provided an important context for this, for the original position implied that there is a somehow complete historical record that can best be accessed by historians and from which IR scholars can consequently draw. In challenging this position, IR scholars have pointed to the problems of assuming historical objectivity, to the presence of a variety of substantive assumptions about the nature of history, to different forms of historical consciousness already present in IR and to the status of History as a social science (Vaughan-Williams, 2005; Reus-Smit, 2008; Lawson, 2012; Glencross, 2015). Ultimately, in doing so, they have tried to overcome the perceived gulf that divided History and IR in the self-image of the discipline, seeking to put both disciplines closer together along a continuum or even negating substantive difference.
In setting up this handbook, we build on this reflexive tradition as a way of thinking about HIR. And yet, we do not seek to position ourselves in the ongoing epistemological debates about the status of historical truth or the notion of historical knowledge, particularly because doing so would not do justice to the genuinely open spirit that has so far characterised this field of study. At the same time, while we sympathise with arguments that use the reflexive tradition in order to attempt to overcome the āeternal divideā, this volume makes evident that the different disciplines and activities cannot easily be collapsed unto each other. HIR scholars seek to answer different puzzles, ask different questions, about different peoples and processes: ultimately, HIR writes different histories, and these are the ones that are reflected in this volume.
This means that HIR increasingly starts from the fact that historians have no privileged epistemological position from which to write history. Certainly, there is a longer tradition, reflection and experience of what the craft of writing histories involve, reflected in more extensive methodological writings, approaches and training at graduate levels that IR scholars can definitely benefit from. Ultimately, however, the writing of history relies on the linking into a narrative of a variety of pieces of past traces ā sources ā on the basis of a present-asked question (Thies, 2002 gives a handy how-to guide for HIR). And as the chapters in this volume emphasise, not only is there no impediment for IR scholars to write their own histories, but doing so may seem increasingly necessary. For historians engage with historical topics, select and interpret sources, and write histories in the context of conversations that, while may at some level resonate with IR concerns, are still disciplinary-specific. As kindred spirits in another discipline, HIR scholars engage with these bodies of knowledge, but relying on them in order to solve our puzzles may leave us in a state of constant short-sightedness. This is thus neither a handbook of the history of international relations nor a handbook about all historical writing and research of relevance for IR. Rather, the chapters in this handbook take stock of the historical research that is being conducted in IR, by IR scholars, in answer to IR questions.
Organisation of the volume
Handbooks come in many different shapes and forms. Some consist of topical essays, others of what amounts to annotated bibliographies. Likewise, some come with strict editorial guidelines, with overall topics to be covered in each and every chapter, while others leave the structure of each chapter to the individual authors. We have tried to steer a middle course. In recognition of the wide variety of subjects covered, we have chosen not to enforce some overarching processes or issues for all to address. We have furthermore encouraged authors to use their own voices and explore their subjects in the ways they see most fit. The point has not been to bring forth consensus views or greatest hits, but to provide a high-quality set of curated essays on the current state of HIR. However, to ensure coherence and usefulness for our readers, we have tasked all authors with undertaking two core tasks: engaging with the current state of HIR knowledge in the specific field and pointing to openings and opportunities where the field may (or should!) go in the future. The chapters in this volume in this sense constitute both an exercise in mapping the field and one in setting (possible) agendas for HIR.
As in any exercise in mapping, it is important to reflect on the selectivities at play in the composition of āthe fieldā. When two of us edited the four-volume set on HIR (Leira and de Carvalho, 2015) five years ago, it became clear to...
