Academic international relations has often been neglectful of its own past. Either the history of the subject is ignored altogether or else textbooks rely on stories about “Westphalia,” on images of endlessly recurring debates between realism and liberalism, or on the idea that the subject “really only began” after World War I. Fortunately, the past 20 years have seen the emergence of a far more serious and sustained body of scholarship that takes us beyond these sorts of fairy stories. However, even within this body of work, there are important gaps and omissions—and none more so than the nineteenth century. In part, this neglect may have to do with the relative absence of canonical figures beyond, say, Marx, Mill and Mazzini. The “visions of global order” analyzed in this excellent volume are those of a broad and fascinating cast of characters that includes thinkers and theorists but also many others involved in the cut and thrust of day-to-day political debate. In part, the relative neglect of the period may have to do with the difficulty of fitting these Victorian visions into the narrow concern of academic international relations with the power-political relations among the major states of the system. As Duncan Bell argues in his own contribution to the volume, the nineteenth century witnessed numerous attempts to think beyond the state and to imagine new forms of human association, including ideas about the “global state” and varieties of imperial federation. Even if we never quite escape the state, the chapters highlight the development of our political vocabulary and the ways in which understandings of “state,” “nation,” and “empire” are not fixed but evolve throughout the period.

The volume has been well edited by Duncan Bell, and the standard of the individual chapters is very high. As the book demonstrates, there are many important reasons why the nineteenth century matters—both for those concerned with how ideas about global order developed historically and for those interested in understanding our contemporary dilemmas. The book is a particularly rich source for all of those interested in the complex practices of empire and in the manifold contradictions within liberal imperialism.

Many of the chapters are concerned with the evolution and impact of the two great revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the liberal democratic revolution, on the one hand, and the rise of Europe to global predominance, on the other. And some of the sharpest and most interesting analysis focuses on the relationship between these two developments. Chapters cover the familiar liberal topics of international law (Caspar Sylvest, Jennifer Pitts), free trade (Anthony Howe), and liberal internationalism and cosmopolitanism (David Weinstein). But they succeed admirably in bringing out the richness and complexity of liberal thought. Thus, Howe traces how the move away from free trade interacted with the move toward empire: “Rather than empire being fatal to free trade, empire now seemed necessary to free trade. But empire was fatal to economic internationalism” (p. 41). Nineteenth-century social thought involved new understandings about history and civilizational change. For Sylvest, legal evolution, closely tied to the concept of civilization, is central to an understanding of the balance between naturalism and positivism in nineteenth-century British international law. For Pitts, universalism was tied to a narrative of civilizational progress that justified both European empire and the exclusion of the non-European world from what was increasingly seen as a European-based system of international law. For Den Otter, the confident belief that England could take to India the blessings of a rational legal code was challenged by the actual experience of empire. As a result, universalism was reconfigured, again in ways that reinforced the hierarchy of civilizations. More sharply still, Karuna Mantena analyzes the crisis of liberal imperialism, again through the prism of law. In the period following the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, “ethical justifications of empire were displaced as new sociological understandings of colonial societies began to function as de facto explanations for imperial rule” (p. 113).

The nineteenth century also witnessed much debate on the changing scale of economic and political organization. Tocqueville famously spoke of the future rise of America and Russia. Both anti-imperial liberals, such as Richard Cobden, and committed imperialists, such as John Robert Seeley, were also deeply concerned by the degree to which Russia and America “would be on an altogether higher scale of magnitude” (to quote Seeley in Bell, p. 147). As was characteristic of the time, however, material changes were almost always connected to notions of moral and civilizational progress, as Goergios Varouxakis shows very well in his chapter on “‘Great’ versus ‘Small’ Nations.” Garath Stedman Jones provides a beautifully clear overview of the shift in conceptions of the extra-European world in the period from 1750 to 1850, and also makes a series of important arguments about the development of Marx's own position. If many of the early chapters contribute to our understanding of empire and of the liberal case for empire, later chapters underscore the move away from these positions: liberal disillusion with the problems of exporting civilization and growing awareness of the internal tensions within liberal imperialism (Mantena); the emergence of a more forceful liberal critique of Disraelian imperialism (Peter Cain); and the growth of far stronger and more coherent radical critiques of empire (Gregory Claeys).

The chapters on international law perhaps give too much stress to the exclusion of the non-European world and to debates as to whether the Ottoman Empire should be allowed “entry” into European international society. While both are important (and both continue to resonate within contemporary international society), such a focus risks diverting attention away from broader patterns of stratification in cases where the non-European world was clearly not excluded from international law (such as the Americas), and it also underplays the role of law in the operation of informal empire, about which more might have been said, especially in relation to China. There is also a relative neglect of race. Race appears in many places, but its importance for notions of global order and for civilizational hierarchy is insufficiently emphasized and elaborated. Finally, changes in understandings of the “global” side of “global order” are often only implicit, whether in terms of the emergence of a much more integrated global economy in the high age of economic internationalism in the midcentury or in the idea of international relations taking place increasingly on a single global stage. It is true that Sir Halford John Mackinder comes only at the end of the period covered in the book, but his work both illustrates the more social Darwinian side of late-nineteenth-century imperial rivalry and introduces a new and far more explicitly global dimension to geopolitical thought in a way that is to prove so influential and so destructive in the course of the following century.

Ultimately, the richness and success of any collection of this kind can be measured both by the quality of the actual contributions and by the number of areas that emerge for further research and analysis. On both measures, this volume scores highly and should be widely read.