From Global Transformation to Big Bang-A Response to Buzan and Lawson

Abstract

Buzan and Lawson (2012) ( International Studies Quarterly ) persuasively argue that IR scholars must pay greater attention to the nineteenth-century global transformation. Nevertheless, their account would be strengthened by a greater acknowledgment of the critical role indigenous intermediaries played in facilitating Western colonialism, and also by a clearer recognition of the limited and late impact that rational state-building and ideologies of progress exerted on the shape of Western colonial empires. These amendments are necessary to avoid overstating the distinctiveness of modern empires relative to their pre-nineteenth-century forerunners, and thereby missing the true significance of the twentieth-century “big bang” that saw empires’ ruin and replacement by a global sovereign state monoculture.