The Global Transformation: Critical reflections on the historical sociology of

the Long Nineteenth CenturyLUKE COOPER*

Abstract

George Lawson and Barry Buzan’s The Global Transformation advances the claim that International Relations (IR) has mistakenly overlooked the Long Nineteenth Century as a transformative era. They argue this period saw a shift in the mode of power, i.e. how power was utilised and expressed, and not merely a change in how it was distributed amongst competing political entities. The following offers a sympathetic critique of their theoretical claims. Highlighting the role of geopolitics and the societal changes of the public sphere, the article argues that the historical sociological method utilised by these authors is ‘neither realist nor liberal enough’.

Barry Buzan and George Lawson The Global Transformation; History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

* Luke Cooper is Lecturer in Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He can be contacted on luke.cooper@anglia.ac.uk

Introduction

The great strength of Barry Buzan and George Lawson’s The Global Transformation lies in their recognition of the significance of the ‘ideologies of progress’ to the historical sociology of the modern world system. In some ways, this blind spot is a feature of International Relations (IR) alone, because the claim that a series of ideational transformations in the Long Nineteenth Century reconstituted the basis for state power is not unusual within the wider milieu of the Humanities, (White, 1975) Sociology (Habermas, 1991) and Cultural Studies (Eley, 1993). Consider how the American literary critic Irving Howe, reflecting on the cultural transformations of the modern world, once remarked that, ‘God died in the nineteenth century, utopia died in the twentieth’ (Howe, 1984, p. 351). Implicitly sharing in this analysis of the rise and fall of the political imaginary of modernity, Buzan and Lawson trace the origins of the contemporary world system through a series of cultural and ideological shifts. They draw out with considerable clarity how the hope that human reason, scientific exploration and political action could dismantle, or at least reinvent, traditional society for the collective good, spread feverishly in the nineteenth century, animating a whole series of practical projects and grand schemas for social change. This created considerable ‘downstream consequences’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2013, p. 620) for the following century. ‘It is common place to think of the twentieth century as the period in which titanic struggles about ideology dominated world politics’, argue the authors but ‘…it is less common to trace these ideologies back to their (mainly) nineteenth century origins’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 36) In other words, it was the very enthusiasm with which subjects pursued ‘the ideologies of progress’ of the post-1789

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world that tragically meant the twentieth century would be characterised by bitter and violent clashes between them.

There is more, however, to The Global Transformation than a historical claim about the origins of this ‘age of extremes’ (E. J. Hobsbawm, 1994), because the two authors also make a powerful intervention into debates on the historical sociology of the modern world system. They argue that modernist ideologies were one component of a shift in the very nature of power seen with the advent of modernity (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). This naturally lays the basis for a critical intervention into IR theory, whose realist mainstream has generally failed to ascribe any causal power to the construction and spread of mass ideology in the workings of the international system. While this, in part, reflects a backlash against the normativity of liberal theory (Hyde-Price, 2006), the preoccupation of realism with ‘anarchic’ many state systems, geopolitical competition, and power balancing has created a tendency for empirical enquiries to find in historical events only affirmation of the view that there exists ‘an international system… populated by states that have to help themselves’ (Waltz, 2000). Although Hans Morgenthau recognised cultural conventions shaped how international politics was undertaken, he insisted this did not affect the innermost interests of states, which exclusively concerned their own survival (Morgenthau, 1947, pp. 151 – 168). In contrast, Buzan and Lawson treat historical processes as a source of transformative social change, potentially requiring a re-thinking of cornerstone concepts. Positively, within their conception of social and political transformation ‘forms of consciousness’ are ascribed a central role.1

Buzan and Little argue that in the nineteenth century the ideational changes in how subjects thought about their communities, values and ideal futures intersected with industrialization, in the economic sphere, and a turn to ‘rational state-building’, in the political sphere, to generate ‘a new basis for how power was constituted, organised and expressed’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). This new ‘mode of power’ – essentially, the penumbra of political, social, economic and cultural changes characteristic of rapid industrial modernisation – dramatically empowered those states able to harness it, consequently leading to the displacement of the ‘polycentric world with no dominant centre by a core-periphery order’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). Their challenge to realists – whose theories still dominate IR – is therefore that they need to ‘think more about the mode of power and not just its distribution’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 327). While the text situates itself in the disciplinary mainstream the influence of critical approaches is evident throughout. The theory of uneven and combined development, which has been widely debated amongst historical sociologists in IR in recent years (Allinson and Anievas, 2009; Anievas, 2012; Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015, 2013; Cooper, 2014, 2013; Matin, 2013a, 2013b; Rosenberg, 2010, 2006), provides a framing device for their discussion of the uneven developmental consequences elicited by the intensification of interaction amongst societies (combination), itself arising from a dramatic expansion in the wealth and technical capacities of leading states (Buzan and Lawson, 2015b). World-systems theory likewise influences the vocabulary used to describe the unequal power relations between the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ generated by the new ‘mode of power’. Meanwhile, postcolonial scholars will welcome, indeed some have already welcomed (Mulich, 2015), the highly critical appraisal of the role played by colonialism in the construction of modern international society. As Buzan and Lawson put it, ‘no system

1 As such, they arguably occupy a novel position vis-à-vis the various theoretical debates of IR because they appear to argue that ideational processes are necessary for the constitution of power without accepting the wider epistemological claims of the constructivists commonly associated with this position (Ashley, 1984; Wendt, 1992)

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in world history so united the planet, while simultaneously wrenching it apart’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 35).

Buzan and Lawson demonstrate, with a thorough survey of forty-eight introductory textbooks and key readings generally utilised on ‘Introduction to IR’ courses, that the idea the nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change has gained little hearing in the subject (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 54). They found only five of these books involved a significant level of engagement with the nineteenth century, and these texts only analysed it in terms of the inter-state relations of the post-1815 era of ‘collective hegemony’, rather than the social changes of the period (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. ibid). Buzan and Lawson argue persuasively that the reason for this lies in the fact the ‘foundational story of IR emerges out of the First World War’, with a consequential focus on war and peace that has occluded other perspectives and issues (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 61). In short, the discipline developed a fixation on the ‘problématique of war-peace-order’, which has come at the expense of studying the anterior processes of social and cultural transformation that key to international relations (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 62). By correcting this, the book fulfils a welcome double-function. Firstly, it reinserts the Long Nineteenth Century into the subject matter of IR as an epoch of hugely significant change requiring empirical study. Secondly, it contributes to the task of bringing historical sociology, with its methodological concern for understanding processes of social change, into the mainstream of a subject that is still far too preoccupied with a state-centric concern for ‘power politics’.

Somewhat predictably, however, this review article will focus on the areas of disagreement. I begin, firstly, by demonstrating how Buzan and Lawson tend to avoid the kind of explicit explanatory statements that might make clear their view on why the global transformation occurred. This reflects an inherent ambiguity present in their concept of the ‘mode of power’, because it is far from clear whether is seen as a product or cause of the acceleration in global development between 1750 and 1850. Problematically, the concept is used as a catchall term, combining all the cultural, economic, and political facets of industrial society. Secondly, I show how Buzan and Lawson are wrong to downplay the importance of the distribution of power to the causes of industrialisation, rooting this in an application of the theory of uneven and combined development that departs from their usage of the concept. Thirdly, I offer a critique of how Buzan and Lawson treat the ‘ideologies of progress’ they correctly highlight as central to the nature of the nineteenth century. By beginning their analysis with broad definitions of these ideological phenomena – socialism, liberalism, nationalism and scientific racism – they do not discuss the sociological changes necessary for the emergence of such mass discourses. Taking these two criticisms together, I argue that Buzan and Lawson’s analysis of the Long Nineteenth Century is simultaneously not realist enough – for it downplays the causal significance of geopolitical conflicts – and not liberal enough, because it fails to locate the ideational shifts of the period in the emergence of a ‘public society’. While these arguments might appear at first to be contradictory, each element of critique, the geopolitical and the sociological-ideational, can, I argue, be integrated into a causal use of the theory of uneven and combined development.

Why? A classic circularity problem

A welcome synergy, arising from Buzan and Lawson’s focus on the ‘mid-modern’ (c. 1750 – 1850) epoch as the decisive era of social and political transformation, lies in

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its amenability to non-eurocentric accounts of modernity. Non-eurocentric authors argue that the ‘great divergence’ in development between the West and Asia lies not in the internationalisation of European maritime trade after 1500, but only some three centuries later, c. 1800, as Britain at first, followed afterwards by its European rivals, pursued a policy of industrial modernization (Hobson, 2004; Pomeranz, 2000). As Buzan and Lawson put it:

Up to around 1800… the principal points of wealth differentiation were within rather than between societies… There were not major differences in living standards amongst the most developed parts of the world: in the eighteenth century, GDP per capita levels in the Yangtze River Delta of China were around 10 per cent lower than the wealthiest parts of Europe, less than the differences in the contemporary world between most of the EU and the US.(Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 26)

In contrast, the Long Nineteenth Century saw a dramatic increase in the wealth of the industrialising Western states. And this, coupled with the use of colonialism to develop and retain their competitive advantage through the subjugation of Southern and Eastern societies, either formally or informally, gave rise to the core-periphery world order. There is little that can be objected to in the factual account of this process that Buzan and Lawson outline, which synthesises a range of literature from non-eurocentric historical sociology, macroeconomic history, and IR. Even their claim that the global transformation is equivalent in its significance to the shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agricultural societies, which began around 10,000 BC, is well supported by their arguments and evidence (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 17 – 18, 23). However, while their treatment of the how (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 37 – 42) and when (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 32 – 37) is highly persuasive, their discussion of the why (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 28 – 32) is, unfortunately, much less so. Buzan and Lawson list out what they see as the four principal positions on why the great divergence occurred: those that stress (a) economic advantages flowing either from institutions or capitalist class relations; (b) those that emphasise the political, either in the form that European state formation assumed or the nature of the continent’s geopolitics; (c) those that, in one way or another, see ideological processes, such as modernist rationality, as key; and, finally, (d) those that concentrate on geographical, demographic or technological advantages (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 28 – 29). They then summarise their own case – ‘that global modernity arose from a configuration of industrialization, rational state-building and ideologies of progress’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 30) – but do so without commenting critically on the other paradigms surveyed. This leaves the reader ‘none the wiser’ as to whether Buzan and Lawson believe one or other of the existing literatures complements their own approach. Moreover, they also add three antecedent inter-societal processes of particular significance to generating the new mode of power that allowed European states to dominate the Long Nineteenth Century: (a) the creation of ‘imperial circulatory systems’ at the apex of which were European colonial powers, (b) the, often coercively won, control of international trade; and (c) the utilization of non-European ideas and technologies for development purposes (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 30 – 31). The incorporation of these factors creates a tension between their own tripartite explanation of a new mode of power constituted by mass ideology, the rational state and industrialization. It is one that is difficult for the scholars to resolve, because the mode depicts the point of arrival – the outcome of a ‘power gap’ between the global north and south – and not the point of departure, i.e., why this great divergence occurred. Indeed, each aspect of the mode of power groups together a series of different economic (‘industrialisation’), ideationally (‘ideologies of

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progress’) and political (‘state-building’) changes across the nineteenth century. But they do not in themselves – or taken together as a ‘configuration’– constitute an explanation as to why these transformations occurred.

Not realist enough?

Buzan and Lawson appear to ‘hedge their bets’ on the most contested conceptual questions concerning the historical causes of the great divergence in development levels between north western European states and their rivals in Asia. However, insofar as they offer a distinctive account based on their understanding of the mode of power, the three additional factors – imperialism, control of maritime trade, and appropriation of ideas and technology – they incorporate into their account of why this occurred pose questions for their wider analysis. Recall that for Buzan and Lawson it is the social mode of power and not the distribution of material capabilities, as realists maintain, which was ‘the source of a power gap that was both unusually big and unusually difficult to close’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 307). Yet these arguments appear in tension to the additional causal factors they introduce in their discussion of why the great transformation occurs, which lays particular stress on imperialism. Indeed, one cannot separate the unequal exchange that took place within the European-dominated maritime trading system – i.e. Buzan and Lawson’s second intersocietal factor – from the leading European states’ propensity for imperialism (their first). Arguably, then, they are denoting a single factor: European colonial-merchant capitalism. The latter represents a form of domination that is only possible where material capabilities are distributed unevenly. And, indeed each factor they highlight – European imperialism, dominance of maritime trade, and utilisation of Asian technologies – arguably all occurred due to the competitive pressures arising from a geopolitical milieu with an uneven distribution of power. In other words, Buzan and Lawson appear to acknowledge an empirical analysis, which strongly implies a theoretical position they want to reject.

This becomes clearer still if we follow some of the concrete examples Buzan and Lawson use to elaborate their account of why the global transformation occurred. To illustrate the role of imperialism, they discuss East India Company taxation regimes in Bengal, the compulsory cultivation of opium and its export to China ‘backed up by force of arms’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 30). Likewise, to highlight the role of European control of maritime trade they note the unequal economic relations Britain was able to impose on a sovereign Argentina and a colonised India, which in both cases privileged British producers (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 31). And they also credit migration, specifically the European ‘settler revolution’, with providing the channels for the ‘emulation and fusion of non-European ideas and technologies’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 31). There is obviously a common theme present in each of these examples. They are all impossible to disentangle from a single factor: European imperialism. If power had not been distributed unevenly across a fragmented geopolitical milieu then European colonialism would not have imposed its dominance. Naturally, Buzan and Lawson would reply that this was only possible due to the mode of power European states drew on. Consequently, this brings us back to the question of the causal explanation for the development of the new mode of power.

To develop this one needs to deepen the stress on early to mid modern European imperialism that is already present in The Global Transformation. Indeed, a strong case can be made that it was the intense nature of European geopolitics

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(Arrighi, 2009, pp. 23 – 31, 2007, pp. 211 – 249; Braudel, 1992) which established the incentive structure for industrial modernisation. Crucially, this context was favourable to sidelining the vested interests hostile to it within the domestic sphere, as the imperative of the security of the realm was used to push aside conservative objections to modernisation. While when reviewing the literature Buzan and Lawson note some of the scholars who have argued this (Bobbitt, 2003, p. 74; Howard, 2009; Kennedy, 1989; Mann, 2012, pp. 24 – 26; Tilly, 1992, pp. 14 – 16), the extent to which they accept their analysis is unclear. If they do, it remains curiously understated in the text. They do not, for instance, discuss the seventeenth and eighteenth century world economy as the ‘age of mercantilism’ for European states as they vied with one another in the military-commercial sphere to secure the rewards a strong position in maritime trade promised. This has a crucial significance to the formation of the new mode of power with the onset of British industrialisation. As Patrick O’Brien puts it:

For a European economy to thrive in a mercantilist economic order riven with dynastic and imperial rivalries, an island state needed to allocate considerable resources to preclude invasion, preserve internal stability and retain advantages over equally violent competitors in armed struggles related to global commerce and colonization. Geopolitical conditions formed inescapable parameters within which state formation institution building and macro-economic growth occurred (O’Brien, 2010, p. 29).

A key advantage the English and, later, British realm enjoyed was its long-term investment in the Royal Navy, which grew out of the basic security needs of the island state, but gave the kingdom a competitive edge as the economic importance of maritime trade grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This ‘geographically conditioned but sustained commitment to a naval strategy for the defence of the realm’ had ‘unintended but important consequences for the development of a leading maritime public-cum-private sector of the British economy over time’ (O’Brien, 2010, p. 28). The militarised state apparatus provided internal and external security, creating a system of protected property rights for wealthy elites that proved favourable to capital investment, both domestically and in the expanding opportunities afforded by Britain’s overseas territories. Propertied classes were willing to pay for the protections a militarised state ensured. ‘Between 1670 and 1815, total revenues from taxes rose by a factor of around seventeen’, substantially outpacing growth in the national income which ‘increased by a multiplier of three’ (O’Brien, 2010, p. 29). As a result of this strong coercive basis for state power, the potentially destabilising consequences of industrial urbanisation were mitigated by the capacity of the realm to ‘secure the peace’.

Emphasising the significance of European geopolitics and English/British state formation in the construction of a new mode of power does not mean departing from the type of multi-causal analysis Buzan and Lawson evidently favour. But the importance of highlighting the central role played by the international geopolitical context is due to the part it plays as a key proximate cause. The interlocking conflicts that the military-bureaucracies of the European Ancien Régimes were enmeshed provided a series of immediate imperatives for reform. Long-maturing causal factors, such as the transformation of the social property relations of English agriculture from the late sixteenth century onwards (Brenner, 1997, 1977; Wood, 2002), or the diffusion of technologies from the hitherto more developed polities of the wider Eurasian land mass (Hobson, 2011, 2004), clearly played a role in ‘opening the door’, i.e. creating the possibility, for rapid industrial change. However, neither explains why the British realm was the first to ‘walk through it’ and why they did so at the conjuncture of the mid eighteenth century. Answering this requires recognising the

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aggressive nature of British colonial policy. The war-making propensity of the British state, which was almost permanently involved in major overseas and naval conflicts across the eighteenth century, had a series of direct payoffs for its development. War tended to have a ‘multiplier effect’ on the domestic economy, with ‘iron-smelting, coal mining, building, engineering, as well as horse rearing, sails, ropes, cannons, guns’ all experiencing the benefits of ‘war-induced demand, investment, and, often, technical change’ (Hudson, 2014, p. 56). Not only did success in war open new markets, boosting exports and thus encouraging private sector investment, but there was a also a direct link between military spending and industrial innovation. Consider, for instance, how the War of Austrian Succession stimulated a new iron-smelting technique or how the iron railroad emerged in the Seven Years’ War, giving a significant boost to iron exports thereafter (Hudson, 2014, pp. 56 – 57). In short, there is ample evidence in the rise of British power that the conflicts typifying a European state system riven with geopolitical rivalries – one of ‘war and preparation for war’ as Tilly put it (Tilly, 1992, p. 14) – spurred on industrial development.

To a certain extent, the explanatory ambiguity of The Global Transformation appears to be a matter of conscious design on the part of the authors, presumably reflecting a desire for their synthesis to retain amenability to a number of different conceptual positions. The way Buzan and Lawson use the theory of uneven and combined development strongly suggests this is the case. Trotsky’s theory stressed the role of geopolitical competition in spurring industrial modernisation (what he called the ‘whip of external necessity’) (Trotsky, 1967, p. 23). An application of this conception of geopolitically combined development to the ‘great divergence’ debate would thus insert European mercantilism explicitly into an account of why a new mode of power emerged in the late eighteenth century. In a reply to a roundtable discussing the book, Buzan and Lawson offer an intriguing but question-begging explanation of why they demurred from drawing on the more sociological and causal aspects of the theory of uneven and combined development:

… Our use of UCD… is analytical- heuristic rather than causal-explanatory. Using UCD as a framing device allows us to construct a relatively simple account of macro-historical periodization: during the early phases of the global transformation, ‘development’ became both more uneven and more combined; in recent years, there has been a (partial) reduction of the former and a (powerful) intensification of the latter. We resist deploying causal dynamics often associated with UCD: ‘the privilege of historical backwardness’, ‘the whip of external necessity’, etc. Nor, more importantly, do we deploy a ‘subterranean historical materialism’ in which industrialization serves as ‘the basis’ of our analysis. The book is premised on the interplay between the three dynamics we see as constituting the global transformation – it is the whole package rather than any hierarchical relationship between them that fostered the modern mode of power (Buzan and Lawson, 2015b).

This formulation of their approach is instructive. The simple story of ‘macro-historical periodization’, which they use uneven and combined development to tell, is essentially a descriptive summation of how the differential spread of the ‘new mode of power’ resulted in a dramatic power gap between the core and periphery. To explain why this was the case, however, we have to factor in the distribution of power between polities and, specifically, the ability of those in the South and East to resist and, creatively adapt to, the threat of European colonialism (or not). Where the power gap became greatest, for instance with the ‘Asian giants’ of India and China, the lack of a fully functional and unified sovereign state capable of resisting imperial predation was arguably the critical factor supressing development capacity. The ‘whip of external necessity’, was experienced negatively within these polities, because, while the pressure to catch-up existed, a state with a strong institutional base capable of

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responding to it did not. Only a small number of states experienced what Trotsky called a ‘privilege of historical backwardness’ (Trotsky, 1967, p. 22) i.e. successfully appropriated techniques and social forms from the most advanced states to rapidly catch-up. The extent to which these polities’ combined development was hindered by colonialism was thus the critical variable. As we can see, these aspects of the theory elicit a causal story about the nineteenth century in which geopolitical conflicts play a critical role in both the formation and spread of the ‘configurative’ new mode of power Buzan and Lawson highlight, giving impetus to the changes producing it and determining its uneven expansion. In short, given the significance of geopolitical conflict to this transformations occurring across this epoch, one could even put the point rather strongly: ‘no uneven distribution of power, no new mode of power’.

Not liberal enough?

The second track of the argument I will present here – the need to locate the changes of modernity within the historical formation of the public sphere – may appear to move in an entirely different direction from the hitherto established critique. However, geopolitical conditions, and the associated power struggles they entailed, provided an ever-present causal context that proved highly significant to shaping the forms of social consciousness associated with the modern public sphere. Indeed, a focus on the ‘geopolitics of it all’ has often been seen as the natural means by which IR scholars have intervened into debates on the sociological transformations modernity entailed (Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). Interestingly, this is not the approach that Buzan and Lawson favour, because their principal theoretical claim – on the importance of the social mode of power vis-à-vis the distribution of power across states – seeks to challenge the realist propensity of IR scholarship to focus on geopolitical conflict above all else. As we have seen in the foregoing, they strongly imply that the new mode of power is predicated on European colonialism, without going so far as to say so categorically. But, additionally, they include within the instantiation of this ‘mode’, both a series of ideological trends within European societies and the formation of urban-industrial society. Unfortunately, this leaves the concept as little more than a catchall term to describe the enmeshed series of transformations – cultural, social, and economic – associated with industrialisation from the mid to late eighteenth century onwards. While the vocabulary they use implies the presence of an explanatory intervention, they do not actually make a causal claim about the sociological changes, which fostered these revolutions in human consciousness and society. By emphasising the role of European colonialism in triggering the emergence of a new mode of power, they pose the question, which goes unanswered, of whether it was equally necessary for its perpetuation, or, if not, what exactly replaced this order. Indeed, the Global Transformation devotes almost as much space to the post-nineteenth century world as it does to the origins of this historical change (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. chapters 7, 8 and 9). Consequently, the text raises a series of question about the relationship between the ‘colonial century’ of the nineteenth and the ‘liberal century’ of the twentieth that they inevitably occlude with their stress on the transformative nature of the former vis-à-vis the continuity they see in the latter.

Ultimately, however, these problems are matters of theoretical design, rather than empirical scope, because they arise from an ambiguity over what specific historical processes the mode of power refers to. Buzan and Lawson clearly want to avoid the pitfall of a crude materialism, which they seem to associate with an

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emphasis on industrialisation as the primus movens of modernity (Buzan and Lawson, 2015b). They are therefore at pains to stress how they give equal weight to both the ‘material’ and ‘ideational’ elements in the formation of the mode of power, seeing each dimension as ‘generative of both actors and the ways in which power is exercised’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015b). But such formulas are, surely, too abstract to be useful. In their attempt to demonstrate, correctly, the intermeshed nature of cultural, economic and political changes of the post 1750 world order, they have ended up grouping together a diverse set up of processes under the rubric of a social, rather than merely geopolitical, conception of power politics. But, in doing so, they appear to have accepted conventional demarcations of what constitutes ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’, or ‘the ideational’ and ‘material’, and so on, with industrialisation firmly seen as part of the latter, and ideologies equally as part of the former. A social conception of industrialisation, in contrast, would not consider the shift in scientific techniques and the social organisation of labour c. 1800 as merely ‘economic’ or ‘material’ processes, which mechanically produced a series of cultural changes in human societies. But, rather, would treat the formation of industrial society as a process in which cultural transformation in human activity was a necessary condition for realising rapid growth in production. The problem is not, therefore, that Buzan and Lawson are wrong to see the processes as enmeshed together, or to exhibit caution over making a prioritised claim for one cause alone, but, rather concerns how exactly these multiple causes interconnect with one another. It is debateable whether simply referring to them collectively as a change in the mode of power is a sufficiently precise way of grasping the nature of this dramatic sociological transformation.

The section of the book dealing with what they call the ‘ideologies of progress’ illustrates this wider problem in the text as a whole and poses questions about how the rise of a mass, political society, or the ‘public sphere’, should be incorporated into an IR-based account of the Long Nineteenth Century. Curiously, this chapter hinges the entire discussion on the concept of progress, which is arguably only one expression of a deeper ideational rupture seen in this period. For Buzan and Lawson the sense that social change was becoming ‘normal rather than exceptional’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 97) was the central ideological feature of the global transformation. As they put it:

These ideologies [liberalism, socialism, nationalism, scientific-racism] expressed an important, novel feature of modernity – that progress was necessary for modern societies. Without this sense of forward momentum, it was politically difficult to justify the inequalities generated by industrial capitalism.(Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 100)

This claim to novelty is, however, a highly debatable one. Firstly, if one defines it simply as a sense of ‘forward momentum’ within which social change is valued for its own sake, then the idea of progress clearly stretches back several millennia (Nisbet, 1980). Secondly, hinging the entire discussion on the concept of progress badly understates the importance of ‘traditional’ imaginaries to the ideational construction of modern communities. Buzan and Lawson recognise in their discussion of nationalism, for example, that it has the ‘paradoxical quality of being deeply rooted in modernity, on the one hand, while appealing to older understandings of community on the other’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 115). But such desires for the reestablishment of a past sense of order, and concern about the implications of rapid urban-industrial change for social stability, went far beyond the sphere of national identity. Indeed, conservatism was a cornerstone feature of the ideational landscape of the Long Nineteenth Century. For there was just as great a backlash against narratives

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of progress, as there was belief in them. Much of this was based on the perceived danger revolutions posed to the order and stability of European society. For example, consider how Ioannis Capodistrias, the founder of independent Greece and a liberal nationalist whose mindset typified that of the stability-craving European elite after the Napoleonic Wars, warned rebellions ‘which unfold from day to day, enclose the seeds of a long future, and perhaps of a future which, even in the most civilized parts of the world, will not allow us to return to the former allures of diplomacy or the charm of social relations’ (Cited in Grimsted, 1968, p. 178). For Capodistrias it was Napoleon and the French Revolution that epitomised the threat of ‘popular despotism’ (cited in Grimsted, 1968, p. 179), a remark that serves as a reminder of the far from amenable relationship between democracy and property-orientated classical liberalism in this period. But, of course, even Napoleon Bonaparte himself exhibited all of the contradictions of ‘being modern’ in the early nineteenth century. While he was ferociously anti-clerical, a pioneer of agrarian and state administrative reform, and a believer in the body politic, he also established the House of Bonaparte as a new dynastic order, distributed a series of monarchical titles on the basis of kinship, sought legitimacy for these endeavours by marrying the daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor, and openly drew on the aesthetic of the Roman imperial tradition (Roberts and Westad, 2007, pp. 2040 – 2058).

As this testifies, a sketch of the ideational landscape of the nineteenth century reveals a series of complex ideological amalgams that developed within and among the ‘ideologies of progress’ Buzan and Lawson emphasise. But the role of historical sociologists should be to explain these contradictory juxtapositions by analysing the nature of the social transformation underway in these societies. One needs therefore to dig deeper than the surface appearance of the ideological claims. Buzan and Lawson suggest what this might entail when they argue that ‘collectively’ liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and scientific-racism ‘constituted an assault on dynasticism and religion, and the link between these two in the dynastic claim to rule by divine right’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 100). However, they do not pursue this observation to its conclusion by highlighting the societal process causing dynastic and clerically based political orders to unravel. For these ideas, distinctive as they often were, could nonetheless be welded to dynastic and religious claims. It was, rather, the societal transformation underway with the emergence of the body politic – or public sphere – that was unseating the old Europe of aristocratic titles, kinship and fixed social rank. Both the ideologies of progress, and those of tradition, were compelled by force of circumstance to reconcile themselves to the emergence of a mass society, and looked for ways to bind its subjects together with common values, goals and aims. The transformation of British Toryism in the second half of the nineteenth century represents a consummate example of how even the most conservative, traditionalist ideologies also had to be rearticulated in a mass political form. This populist turn thus reflected the emergence of a public society in which ‘politicians were required to define and mobilise their audiences, and to cultivate adaptively cross-class support’ (Windscheffel, 2007, p. 24).

An account of the global transformation, which is sensitive to the role played by ideational factors, needs therefore to locate them within a radically changing societal context. Buzan and Lawson’s discussion of each of the ‘ideologies of progress’ is lacking in this regard, as they tend to focus on cornerstone political science definitions, and empirical examples which illustrate the ideological trends they stress, rather than discuss the changing architecture of global development that produced these new forms of social consciousness. Consider, by way of example,

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their discussion of the emergence of liberalism. This section focuses narrowly on the development of a self-consciously ‘liberal’ political ideology, allowing the authors to argue that it only emerged in this form ‘during the early years of the nineteenth century, when it was used to refer to the curtailment of arbitrary monarchical power through a constitution’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 102). This permits them, in turn, to stress the second half of the nineteenth century as representing the critical moment for the ‘lift off’ of liberalism as a dominating political ideology. There is, however, a tension between this argument and the parallel claim they make that ‘following the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century liberalism became closely associated with principles of individual rights, popular sovereignty and self-determination’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 104). This poses the question of how to understand the relationship between the subjective emergence of liberalism as a self-conscious doctrine, on the one hand, and the social-cultural changes that were necessary conditions for mass liberal politics, on the other. Implicitly, Buzan and Lawson appear to recognise that deep changes encompassing how the relationships between individuals, society and the state were understood represented vital antecedent conditions for the formalisation of a ‘liberalist’ politics. However, they do not explore the nature and modalities of these sociological shifts.

An engagement with the literature on the public sphere, or associated theoretical discussion on the origins of national identity, would have enriched the book greatly, and put their stress on the emergence of mass political ideology as a constitutive dimension to the new mode of power on firmer explanatory grounds. Indeed, this need for a strong sociological grounding is particularly posed by the strength of the epochal claim Buzan and Lawson wish to make about the change European societies witnessed at the close of the eighteenth century. To do this while also avoiding reductionism and emphasising the ‘ideational moment’ as a key dimension of this radical shift, then these mass ideologies need to be located within an account of the genesis of a public society.2 It was this, and not the idea of progress as Buzan and Lawson imply, that imparted genuine historical novel to state-society relations in the early nineteenth century. Jurgen Habermas, while arguably giving too great a degree of normativity to this historical transformation (Cooper, forthcoming) nonetheless captured the change ably in terms of a societal shift from ‘representative publicness’ to the ‘public sphere’. The former described a specific condition of European feudalism in which ‘publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm’ but instead formed the ‘status attribute’ of the ‘manorial lord’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 7). He displayed himself, presented himself”, wrote Habermas, ‘as an embodiment of some sort of higher power’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 7). This representative publicness should, he argued, be sharply distinguished from modern forms of representation, such as when ‘the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his clients’, because it was ‘inseparable from the lord's concrete existence, that, as an “aura”, surrounded and endowed his authority’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 7). In contrast, to this feudal form of publicity, the creation of a body politic in the eighteenth century provided the essential societal foundation for the ideologies of progress, each of which were attempting to shape the preferences of the ‘public opinion’ brought into being by this anterior, sociological transformation.

Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere has parallels with Benedict Anderson’s theorisation of the origins of national identity (Anderson, 2006) insofar as

2 There is some limited discussion of the rise of ‘mass politics’ empirically, but not conceptually and sociologically. See (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 139 – 141)

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both see the expansion of the print-media as a vital element in the formation of a sphere capable of transcending the web of local and status-based identities characteristic of feudalism. These ideas are also potentially amenable to Buzan and Lawson’s discussion of how changes in technological and social interaction capacity shaped global modernity, but their focus is on the ‘nineteenth century breakthroughs’, the steamship, railways, telegraph, radio, etc., and the parallel growth in international organisations (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 67 – 96). While this draws out the significant ‘downstream’ consequences of these developments for the twentieth century in a persuasive fashion, the authors neglect the anterior changes in social interaction capacity that triggered a shift in concepts of community, identity and politics with the formation of the public sphere. As Habermas explains:

Just as… one could speak of “mail” only when the regular opportunity for letter dispatch became accessible to the general public, so there existed a press in the strict sense only once the regular supply of news became public, that is, again, accessible to the general public. But this occurred only at the end of the seventeenth century. Until then the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word.(Habermas, 1991, p. 16)

One might, of course, debate the temporal claim that Habermas makes here. There is evidence of a public society existing in an embryonic form with the rise of the pamphleteers during the English Civil War, for example (Raymond, 2006; Zaret, 1999). But clearly such societal transformations take place across the longue durée and not in a ‘big bang’. While this is a point Buzan and Lawson also make explicitly (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 36), the problem remains that they do not make theoretically grounded arguments about the changes that intersected across the longer span of time, which led to the global transformation they, rightly, emphasise. By excluding the formation and extension of the body politic from their account of the emergence of the ‘ideologies of progress’, they have lost sight of a sociological dimension on which these popularly adhered to ideas were conditional.

Had Buzan and Lawson addressed the ideational element of their analysis in these terms, they could also have reflected on how an IR-based perspective might modify the central assumptions of the classical literature on the public sphere. They would, of course, not have been bereft of IR literature if they wished to move in this direction. Many IR scholars have highlighted the dynamic relationship between the internal and external dimensions of order in the construction of sovereign territorial states (Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). As John Ruggie argued ‘the chief characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the consolidation of all parcelized and personalized authority into one public realm’ (Ruggie, 1993, p. 151). Undertaking this process, he argued, ‘entailed two fundamental spatial demarcations: between public and private realms and between internal and external realms’ (Ruggie, 1993, p. 151). In other words, the creation of a public power to secure privately held property rights was a process that had to take place within a defined spatial context. As such, two outcomes appeared in tandem with one another: the emergence of the public, capitalist state power and nationally bounded territorial communities, together superseding the Europe of percelized dynastic realms (Wood, 1981). Buzan and Lawson’s sidestepping of the issue is disappointing given their take up of the theory of uneven and combined development, which highlights the role of ‘the international’ as a key element in the shift from a realm-based to a nation-state-based world order (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015). The highly ‘combined’, fractious nature of

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European geopolitics was thus a key causal factor for the drive to modernise, the establishment of a strong state power and the crystallisation of national identities.

The combined development(s) of the global transformation

By expanding the conception of ‘the international’ beyond the narrow confines of inter-state relations, uneven and combined development can offer a creative synthesis of the two critical interventions made in the foregoing on the sociological causes of the global transformation. While recognising the uneven power distribution amongst states is a key factor in the competitive pressures (‘the whip of external necessity’) eliciting industrial modernisation, this is cast as only one dimension of the geopolitical and social combination of eighteenth and nineteenth century European politics. A further dimension – in addition to the integrative impact of modern economic development more frequently highlighted – can be found in the manner in which intersocietal conditions shaped the evolving social struggles that each contested the form the public sphere would assume across the Long Nineteenth Century. These struggles over the ‘ideologies of progress’ took place within and between the fragmented geopolitics of Europe, and their internal social/class and external political/economic conflicts proved highly amenable to pushing the most powerful polities on a trajectory towards nationalism and imperialism. This is, surely, one of the key stories of the nineteenth century: that the modes of violence employed by the formation of a public state power to establish security for private, market-based accumulation strategies were extended globally through the use of colonialism. Consequently, the formal distinction between liberal and imperialist ideology disguises a clear symmetry in the power relations they gave legitimacy to. This is not to reduce the ideational to the economic or structural, but, rather, simply to point to the tension-ridden yet reciprocal connections between culture, ideas and societal change. In other words, one needs to locate the genesis of new ideologies within the uneven and combined development of capitalist geopolitics in the nineteenth century.

A grasp of these interconnections may also be able to elicit a clearer sense of the particular importance of one of the nineteenth century ‘ideologies of progress’: the ‘lift off’ of nationalism and its significance in the evolution of a distinctively capitalist world system. Indeed, the rise of the nationally conscious polity was a rupture in conceptions of community and statehood the significance of which was not lost on the more perceptive contemporaries of the age. Paul Samuel Reinsch, an American political scientist, whose text World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century was first published in 1900, arguably captured a wider set of sentiments3 in his musings on the century’s close. Reinsch argued the century was chiefly characterised by a decline in hope for the realisability of humanistic, cooperative visions of social and political development. ‘There has been a complete change of ideals during the past hundred years’ (Reinsch, 1900, p. 7), he wrote. ‘The century opened with a broad humanitarianism, with a belief in the saving power of general culture,’ he added, further stating that ‘the main characteristic of the time was a rationalistic optimism which saw in reason the guiding influence in human affairs’ (Reinsch, 1900, p. 7). For Reinsch this ‘age of reason’ had, across the nineteenth century, been displaced by the ‘age of force’, with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions 3 Reinsch’s text, while critical of the turn to national-imperialism, also repeatedly conflates ‘race’ and ‘nation’ and appears to see the former as the basis for the latter. This is a confusion that clearly reflected the assumptions of the age. It thus appears to confirm Eric Hobsbawm’s point that many felt the allure of ‘national chauvinism’, but ‘no doubt almost all’ were ‘deeply imbued with the fundamental racism of nineteenth century civilisation.’ See (E. Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 160)

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the decisive blow against humanistic governance in favour of one based on ‘the blind and passionate forces of the will’ (Reinsch, 1900, pp. 7 – 8). Reinsch may be guilty of romanticising Enlightenment philosophy, but the remarks bring to light the struggles that took place over the establishment of the nation-state system. In doing so, he captured some of the complexity of the Napoleonic empire. The latter echoed the classical Roman vision, in which orbis terrarun and imperium were almost interchangeable (Reinsch, 1900, p. 13), because the world that mattered was in the orbit of the city-centred civilisation, and legitimacy for the imperial order was bestowed by the way of life that empire offered geographically dispersed elites. However, these aspirations for a ‘global’ empire were negated ‘from within’, by the French nationalism integral to Bonaparte’s domestic authority, as much as they were ‘from without’ by the rise of other nationalisms in Europe. One might ask the question therefore of why, given other types of political entity were envisaged by Napoleon and others, did the national form prove so hegemonic in this period? While this is a complex issue, the theory of uneven and combined development points towards an answer rooted in Europe’s societal multiplicity. This meant that the new public sphere – made possible by advances in interaction capacity – came into being unevenly across multiple polities and led to stratified ethnic and social identities being displaced by homogenous national identities, which were defined in territorial terms.

A stress on nationalism and imperialism as distinctively predominant qualities of nineteenth century civilisation also poses questions for Buzan and Lawson’s wider analysis, in particular of how to understand the ideational, economic and political shifts the world witnessed after the close of the Long Nineteenth Century. Indeed, a tension exists in the analysis between their claim that ‘a global transformation emerged during the Long Nineteenth Century and is still unfolding’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 274), on the one hand, and the way that they, on the other hand, categorise this span of time into three distinct periods of ‘Western-colonial international society’ (to c. 1945), ‘Western-global international society’ (to c. 2000 - 2010), and ‘decentred globalism’ (post-2010) (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 273 – 274). While Buzan and Lawson attempt to sidestep the debates over the assertion of historical ‘turning points, cumulative vs. disjunctural changes, and the nature of temporality itself’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 36), their analysis remains question begging regarding the nature of the continuity and discontinuity from the Industrial Revolution to the present. These two scholars wish to treat ideational transformations as partly constitutive of the new mode of power, which they also see as having elicited change in ‘how polities and peoples related to each other’(Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 37). But their failure to locate these processes within a sociological account of the emergence of a multiplicity of ‘public societies’ weakens their analysis. In the twentieth century the national public sphere has become more universal, a fact that expresses the outcome of political struggles, which were antagonistic to the colonial power relations previously established. Although it took a different form, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on igniting national sentiments within Europe did create a precedent that would be repeated in the struggles against colonialism in the periphery.

This suggests an intimate relationship exists between the dynamics of capitalist industrialisation and geopolitical antagonisms over the distribution of power amongst societies. While formal colonialism has, thankfully, been consigned to history,4 struggles over the distribution of power amongst states remain firmly part of the international order. But the concept of the mode of power is arguably too vague a formulation to capture these transformed power relations. Contrastingly, seeing the 4 Buzan and Lawson lay out the reasons for this very well. See (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, pp. 240 – 270)

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post-eighteenth century mode of power as geopolitically driven (and, as such, uneven and combined) capitalist development arguably expresses these interconnections between state formation and industrialisation more clearly. Buzan and Lawson’s analysis, on the other hand, makes potentially inconsistent claims on the continuities and discontinuities the world has seen across the longer span of time. For example, they argue socialism and ‘scientific racism’ were two of the key ‘ideologies of progress’ which partially constituted the new mode of power, and, further argue, that the transformation entailed by this mode are still on going today. But they also recognise the influence of both these ideologies has ‘greatly diminished’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015a, p. 281). Naturally, this poses a question of why national identity and political nationalism have remained of enduring importance as these other ideologies have declined, i.e. what sociological processes explain the ‘stickiness’ of one set of ideas and the decline of another? If Buzan and Lawson had situated their analysis of this consciousness within the sociology of the national-public sphere, then this could have provided the basis for an account of why national identity and the nation-state has remained of paramount importance to today’s world order - and how this contrasts to the numerous historical problems ‘transnational’ political experiments have encountered. A causal use of uneven and combined development explains the latter difficulties in terms of the antagonistic effects of political multiplicity.

The immense scope – in terms of the temporal range of the study, the theories addressed, and evidence assessed – is undoubtedly both the ultimate strength and weakness of The Global Transformation. Several of the criticisms made in the foregoing could be seen as ‘complaints’ that some issues were not engaged in sufficient theoretical depth. But it is also a tribute to the scholarly rigour of the text that theorists across intellectual traditions will find in the work ample material with which to frame complementary and critical interventions alike. As a result, the work is very likely to spark a long-overdue interest in the nineteenth century as an epoch of social transformation, and, in doing so, recast many core assumptions of both IR and Historical Sociology.

Biography. Dr Luke Cooper lectures in Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He is a historical sociologist working in the disciplines of Politics and International Relations and has a particular interest in the role of nationalism, national identity, and geopolitics in social and political transformation. He is currently writing a monograph on the Long Nineteenth Century. Bibliography Allinson, J., Anievas, A., 2009. The uses and misuses of uneven and combined

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