Confronting Eurocentrism, reductionism, and reification in International Historical Sociology: A reply

Abstract

This article reiterates and further develops some of the core arguments of Capital, the State, and War in response to the criticisms articulated by John M. Hobson, Kees van Der Pijl, and William Mulligan. In so doing, it seeks to constructively engage with the potential problems of Eurocentrism, economic reductionism and reification of ‘the international’ raised by my interlocutors in relation to the theoretical and historical analysis of the book, while relatedly addressing the proper explanatory scope of the concept of capitalism in studying international relations. While endorsing the call to ‘recover’ the significance of non-Western agency in the making of modern world politics, the article re-affirms the need for a more historicist and genuinely international theoretical account of the Thirty Years’ Crisis of the two World Wars which places the violently destabilizing consequences of capitalism at the forefront of analysis as provided by the perspective of uneven and combined development.