This chapter presents the book’s research design and central argument. I begin by considering accounts of the ‘rise of the West’ that explain Western expansion through reference to European exceptionalism, global logics of uneven and combined development, or the facilitating role of local networks and patterns of collective identity in enabling colonial conquest. Having critiqued these accounts, I then advocate an alternative Eurasia-centric approach that stresses the vital parallels and interconnections between ‘barbarian’ Mughal, British and Manchu conquests in early modern South and East Asia. A combination of military, economic, cultural and administrative developments across Eurasia made it easier for ‘barbarians’ to conquer and preserve empires on a subcontinental scale. After 1500, formerly stigmatized outsiders from Eurasia’s steppe, sea and forest frontiers capitalized on these opportunities to carve out the empires that eventually crystallized into the modern post-imperial states of India and China. These empires emerged from ‘barbarian’ efforts to overcome similar challenges, and yielded strikingly similar incorporative ideologies and models of imperial governance.

Few have interrogated the seeming inevitability of the Westphalian or modern system of international relations. The starting point of enquiry for this project is to question our Westphalian reality historically. It locates the birth of the modern international relations system in the death and erasure of its last viable alternative – the East Asian tribute system, which I call Eastphalia. The analytical focal point of this article is a critical case study of the 1875 Un'yō crisis between Japan and Korea. Like many other systemic changes, East Asia’s induction into Westphalian international relations is most legible retrospectively. The kind of “systems encounter” of interest to this chapter comprises a collision between two constitutive sets of interlinked conceptual and legal regimes, institutional apparatuses, and bureaucratic protocol. Often moving at a glacial pace, such systemic changes are not easily visible to a human eye in the midst of unfolding events, partly because our capacities for observation are not calibrated to appreciate changes that occur at such speeds. I consider these frustrated instances of misrecognition as the fricative encounter of two different systems of knowledge and power. I have specifically chosen a confrontation between two East Asian neighbors with a long history of relations, rather than one between an Eastern and a Western entity in order to reveal the Westphalian transition as a systemic harmonization. Such an approach rejects a triumphant modernist narrative of the so-called “West” and Western values over the East.