Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T03:47:40.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Uses and Abuses of Macro History in International Relations

Am I a ‘Eurasianist’?

from Part II - Lessons of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Ayşe Zarakol
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

This chapter engages with the normative implications of the grand narrative developed in this book, as well as its methodological choices. It gets at the questions of where macro-historical narratives can go wrong by sympathetically discussing scholars at the end of turn of the twentieth century who attempted their own versions of such macro-histories of Asia and Eurasia: Kencho Suematsu, Ziya Gökalp and George Vernadsky, on the one hand; and Arnold J. Toynbee, Karl Wittfogel and Owen Lattimore on the other. It concludes by offering a spirited defence of the use of macro-history in IR theorising. If we dismantle Eurocentric grand histories that have animated our modern international order without replacing them with anything but micro-oriented work, those macro-historical accounts that we think we have dismantled will simply live on as zombie common-sense versions of themselves, filling in the blanks wherever there are some, and every account has blanks.

Type
Chapter
Information
Before the West
The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders
, pp. 244 - 272
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×