For cosmopolitans, global democracy is valuable both in itself and as a means to global justice. Their preferred principle of political enfranchisement is the All Affected Principle which, given global interdependencies, means that virtually everyone should have a vote virtually everywhere. Anti-cosmopolitans want to resist that conclusion. They try to do so by appealing instead to the All Subjected Principle. But you are subject to a law whenever it claims to apply to you, and in contemporary practice states typically claim authority to make many laws that apply even to non-nationals abroad. On the All Subjected Principle, they too should have a vote over those laws. The All Subjected Principle would thus have similarly expansionary implications for the franchise as the All Affected Principle, contrary to the fondest hopes of anti-cosmopolitans.

The article analyzes the contested concept of global health through the lens of orders of worth. Drawing on pragmatist political and social theory, especially the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, I conceptualize orders of worth as moral narratives that connect visions of universal humankind to ideas about moral worth and deficiency. They thereby differ from the self/other narrative of political identity that is emphasized in International Relations scholarship. Orders of worth do not pitch a particularistic identity against foreign identities, but tie collective identity to a higher common good. They provide tools for moral evaluation and the justification of hierarchy. I use this heuristic to reconstruct four main conceptions of health in global politics: The order of survival, the order of fairness, the order of production, and the order of spirit. Each of them articulates a distinct political identity, as ‘we species’, ‘we liberals’, ‘we bodies’ and ‘we souls’, and implies different notions of virtuous and selfish conduct in the global community. These orders are derived from scholarly writings and the policies of global health institutions. Finally, I discuss the nature of compromises between the four orders regarding contested issues such as health emergencies or digital medicine.

In International Relations arguments about historical origins provoke theoretical debates, as origins assume an emergent theoretical unit of inquiry – an international order, system, society, etc. – while at the same time defining its core properties and dynamics. By boldly casting the long 19th century as the origin of global modernity and, in turn, the modern international order, Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation challenges the romance with Westphalia that undergirds so much of our theorizing. Yet, the contributions to this symposium push deeper than usual, challenging established ways of conceiving change, and suggesting very different models of proper theorizing. While all of the papers ostensibly debate large-scale systems change, three modes of change are in contention: breakpoint, evolutionary, and processual. The further one pushes towards the latter, however, the more elusive the idea of ‘system’ becomes, eroding the fundamental boundary condition that undergirds the systemic mode of theorizing that dominates the field. Similarly, a persistent theme in these contributions is Buzan and Lawson’s purported failure to theorize change. But instead of offering rival theories, contributors advance very different conceptions of theorizing, from pre-observational conceptualization to causal explanation. This not only challenges the field to reflect more systematically on the process of theorizing, but to acknowledge forms of theorizing that it currently brackets.

Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation establishes that many of the basic parameters of world politics originated in the ‘long 19th century’. Despite finding much to admire in their book, we are concerned that it lacks an explicit theory of change. In its drive to highlight the novelty and exceptionalism of the 19th century, it offers insufficient guidance on two key issues: first, how international relations scholars should situate Buzan and Lawson’s ‘global transformation’ in existing debates over transhistorical processes; and, second, how they should apply lessons from that transformation to understanding emergent trends in the contemporary world. We argue that a more explicit study of causal factors might help account for why the 19th century was unusual. We conclude with thoughts about how the field should proceed after The Global Transformation. In particular, it points to how concatenating changes could profoundly alter international politics – an approach we term ‘Exotic International Relations’. Buzan and Lawson’s book therefore serves as a marker for the importance of systematically theorizing how radical potentialities for transformation might rearrange existing structural assemblages in world politics.

This essay examines the relationship between history and theory through a historical and political analysis of the rise of distinctly social theories, concepts, and practices in the ‘long 19th century’. Sociomania, obsession with things ‘socio’, is a problem in international theory. It is also a serious missed opportunity for Buzan and Lawson’s study of the 19th century. The Global Transformation contributes to international theory in showing how mainstream IR has failed to grasp the full significance of this period. But, in this crucial regard at least, so too have its authors. In adopting rather than fully historicizing the rise and expansion of social theories, works of ‘historical social science’ obscure rather than illuminate the historical and political origins of social forms of governance and thought; underestimate their significance for the history of international theory; and are unable to identify the more fundamental governance form of which the rise of the modern social realm is a concrete historical expression.

While The Global Transformation makes a compelling case for the importance of the oft-ignored 19th century for IR theory, the book also represents an opportunity for an audience for which it was probably not intended: American IR scholars working in the quantitative empirical tradition, whom it should prompt to re-think the question of how the interactions that they seek to understand are conditional on deeper material and ideational dynamics.

Debates engaging the problems of ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) theory have taken on new dimensions in recent years. Scholars from a variety of different theoretical traditions have aimed to reconstruct IR theory on stronger historical–sociological grounds, while re-orienting the study of IR away from the fetish of ‘Western’ thought and agency. Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation offers a welcome contribution to these endeavours to furnish a non-Eurocentric historical sociology of international relations. This article seeks to push their project further by re-assessing the relationship between history, theory, and contingency. In particular, it interrogates whether Buzan and Lawson’s ‘configurational’ approach to the ‘global transformation’, emphasizing the contingent concatenation of historical events and social processes, results in a displacement of theory through an over-emphasis on the interaction of free-floating contingently related causes, causes that are external to any theoretical schema. This approach obscures the deeper, structural forces in the making of global modernity, most notably those that escape Buzan and Lawson’s singular focus on the ‘long 19th century’.

This article critically engages the Global Transformation thesis through the lens of multiple early modernities. The 19th century undeniably saw a profound shift in the global mode of power, driven by industrialization, rational state-building, and the rise of ideologies of progress. But this triad impacted on regions that had already been reconfigured by an early modern Eurasian Transformation, centered on an ‘industrious revolution’, absolutist state-building, and the spread of ‘civilizing processes’. This Eurasian Transformation yielded distinct early modernities and regional orders, which fundamentally conditioned the nature, extent, impact, and legacy of later Western expansion. Acknowledging the diversity of these early modern orders enhances our understanding of the variance in patterns of order reconfiguration that attended the Global Transformation. Equally, it strengthens the case for reconceptualizing international systems change as encompassing reconfiguration as much as revolutionary transformation. This cautions against thinking of ‘great transformations’ in world politics as constituting radically discontinuous breaks with the past.

While IR’s Eurocentric limits are usually acknowledged, what those limits mean for theorizing about the international is seldom clarified. In The Global Transformation, Buzan and Lawson offer a ‘composite approach’ that goes some way towards addressing IR’s Eurocentrism, challenging existing myths about the emergence and evolution of the international system and society. This paper seeks to push the contribution made by Buzan and Lawson in two further directions: first, by underscoring the need to adopt a deeper understanding of Eurocentrism; and second, by highlighting how this understanding helps us recognize what is missing from IR theorizing – conceptions of the international by ‘others’ who also constitute the international. I illustrate this point by focussing on a landmark text on Ottoman history, Ortaylı’s The Longest Century of the Empire.

This response concentrates on two sets of issues raised by the contributors to the symposium: the first centers around theory, the second around history. On the former, our argument is that, contrary to some of the comments made by our interlocutors, the book contributes to theoretical debates ranging from issues of causation to those concerning history as a theoretical enterprise. We use these arguments to engage with, and extend, historical questions raised about the book, paying particular attention to the issue of comparisons across time. Our overarching reaction to the symposium is positive – the book has generated an exciting range of responses. This makes us hopeful that The Global Transformation will stimulate both intra- and inter-disciplinary conversations, even if these conversations sometimes emerge from frustration with paths not taken and issues not addressed.