Barry Buzan’s Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras is a big and an ambitious book. In this volume he tells us the story of 50,000 years of humankind by constructing a “world history” (p. xi) with the social structure of humankind as its object of study. In doing so, Buzan has undertaken two main tasks. First, he adopts an approach rooted in the global society perspective based on the English School to tell this story. More specifically, by social structure he means what the English School refers to as the primary institutions. Buzan divides the past fifty millennia into three eras – of the hunter-gatherer bands (HGBs), of the conglomerate agrarian/pastoralist empires (CAPE), and of modernity – and provides a magnificent grand theory by explaining the changes in material conditions, in the social structure, and in environmental/ecological factors across time.
Buzan’s ambition is to replace the traditional English School triad of key concepts – international system, international society, and world society – with his idea of three domains: interpolity, transnational, and interhuman domains. For Buzan, the social structure of humankind operates along these three domains. The social structure of humankind is “normally located across, and embedded within, not just one, but two or three [of these] domains” (p. 11). Indeed, he traces the rise and fall, and the transformation and replacement of the social structure across the three eras along these three domains to explain how an integrated world society gave way to our global society in the era of modernity. He specifically notes that “Global society means planetary in scale” (p. 33). In the final page of his magisterial book, he also calls for the English School to drop its “parochial-sounding and misleading label” and proposes that we call it the Global Society Approach (p. 426).
Second, and relatedly, Buzan’s quest is a larger one still, for he sees the Global Society Approach as an “invitation” to International Relations (IR) “to become Global IR” (p. 422). It is well-known that alongside Amitav Acharya, Buzan is one of the main scholars who have criticized the Eurocentric nature of IR theory while calling for a truly global discipline. In fact, Buzan also sees his Global Society Approach as linking IR with the related fields of Global Historical Sociology (GHS) and Global/World History (p. xiii). Not only does he incorporate the insights from the literature on International Political Economy (IPE) to his Global Society Approach given that the English School has generally tended to ignore IPE, but he also argues that the Global Society Approach is an “invitation” to build bridges with both GHS and Global History for they are engaged in complementary ways of thinking about the world (p. 421). Given his social and historical approach, Buzan is of the opinion that IR should aim towards the “macro-end of all the social sciences and History” (p. 426). In fact, he even argues that the ultimate goal should be “the making of an Earth System Social Science” (p. 426).
There is little doubt that this is a wonderful and thought-provoking book. Notably, Buzan’s hope is that the book has the potential to “open up a substantial research agenda” (p. 425) along the lines specified above. In line with these thoughts, I raise three points that call for the Global Society Approach to engage with Global History to widen its research agenda. Some of my points have to do with the larger themes of the book mentioned above, while others are relatively smaller issues in the sense that they are related to Buzan’s assertions and interpretations on specific issues/themes.
In the spirit of these sentiments, and as a scholar who has learned much from Buzan’s work, my first point is that the contours of the “world(s)” that existed during the CAPE era of Buzan’s integrated world societies (p. 149) are not really clear. For example, he notes that not until the end of the CAPE era “did the scale of these networks and connections become global, so this was a world with several ‘worlds’ that were either thinly and loosely connected (China and Europe), or not connected in any direct and sustained way at all (both China and Europe in relation to the Americas and Australia)” (p. 74). He also makes passing references to “the Silk Roads” and “the Indian Ocean trading system,” (for example, on p. 103), thereby seemingly implying that some of the “worlds” were perhaps larger than China and Europe. However, elsewhere he notes that his approach “does not aim at comparative civilizations within eras, but at comparative eras in their own right” (p. 42). This seems to imply that the “world(s)” and “societies” that Buzan is referring to are indeed broadly defined “civilizations” such as China and Europe (p. 71).
However, this is problematic at two levels, one conceptual and the other empirical. At the conceptual level, this creates difficulties for a full conversation with Global History. In Global History, the global is not planetary in scale as defined by Buzan and noted above. According to Drayton and Motadel, Global History is a conceptual approach to the study of the past that can be pursued through the comparative approach that “seeks to understand events in one place through examining their similarities with and differences from how things happened elsewhere,” or through the connective approach “that elucidates how history is made through the interactions of geographically (or temporally) separate communities.” In other words, connections and comparisons across different parts of the world are a part and parcel of the enterprise of Global History even if the scale is not truly planetary. By contrast, Buzan emphasizes cross-temporal comparisons as his goal is to show the emergence of the truly planetary global.
This focus on civilizations as the ‘world’ or ‘society’ under analysis also creates a significant empirical issue: it essentializes entire societies. For example, Buzan argues that the “caste system of Hinduism” rendered “the state somewhat marginal”, and consequently, India had “a rather ephemeral system of states, which became, like war, mainly the sport of kings” (p. 129) during the CAPE era. (For Buzan, “Much the same was true of Islam” too (p. 129)). There are too many generalizations and essentializations in these statements such as the equation of India with Hinduism, and that of Hinduism with caste. More problematically, “India” or the subcontinent is seen as a timeless region for the emergence (or not) of a “system of states”. But as argued by Subrahmanyam, the Global Historian (and historian of connections), India is best conceived of as a “crossroads”.
Elsewhere, I have argued that “South Asia” or “India” emerged as a “region” under the Mughal Empire (~1500—1750), for pre-Mughal Indian sub-regions were oriented towards different parts of Eurasia and the Indian Ocean for a millennium. In fact, a regional society re-emerged in South Asia after a millennium under the Mughals, and that Mughal South Asia was just one region of the Islamicate international system. (This is also important because Buzan (p. 367) is of the opinion that there were no “regions” in the CAPE era). Prior to that, in the ‘classical’ Hindu-Buddhist period (~600 BCE—300 CE), a dynamic and decentered Indian states system existed for centuries that was held together by ideas related to the management of power asymmetry in a culturally plural subcontinent. This classical India was itself a part of the South-West Eurasian international system that was deeply connected with the Iranian, Hellenistic, and Central Asian worlds. In the intermediate period between the classical and Mughal eras, there were states in the subcontinent that lasted for centuries and were consequently, hardly ephemeral. To put it crudely, while Buzan is interested in the connections and transformations across his three domains noted above, history is also full of connections across the taken-for-granted timeless worlds/societies (or civilizations) of his analysis. For what was “Indian” in these different time periods was emergent from such interactions. The same is also true for other world civilizations. Similarly, war cannot be simply dismissed as a “sport” in classical or Mughal India. The norms of classical India required the victor to reinstate the monarch of the vanquished as a subordinate ruler instead of territorially or institutionally incorporating the subordinate state. Similarly, the aim of Mughal warfare was not the destruction of the enemy, but their incorporation through “endless rounds of negotiations.”
The study and theorization of connections is an important subject matter of much of Global History. Furthermore, such connections were (trans)formative for many societies which leads me to my second point. For Buzan, unevenness is one of the main characteristics of the post-CAPE period of the transition to modernity (p. 300). Although not explicitly discussed or explained, Buzan himself implies that unevenness was also a characteristic of the CAPE era. Buzan notes that “Europe was a latecomer to the top table of Eurasian civilizations” (p. 225, emphasis added). Later, he refers to Europe as “a latecomer to development” (p. 265) again, and as a society that was “in many political, economic, and social respects, a backwater that was becoming more like the rest of the CAPE world” (p. 417, emphasis added). For Buzan, what enabled Europe to overcome its backwardness was its connections with other parts of the world, especially “the CAPE era trading and financing traditions and practices [picked up] from the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world” (p. 265).
In other words, there is an implicit comparison between different parts of the world even before the onset of global modernity in Buzan’s analysis that is not limited only to cross-era comparisons. While this obviously calls for more engagement with Global History, the larger point is that unevenness was also a feature of the CAPE era. How the ‘backward’ CAPE era societies like Europe overcame this unevenness may yet have a lot to teach us, especially if this unevenness is a “more durable” and “even permanent” condition of modernity (p. 301). What does the contemporary rise of Asia vis-à-vis the West mean for “the Rest” that are not rising due to this unevenness?
It should be noted that unevenness was also a feature of other times and of other places during the CAPE era. For example, state-like structures emerged in most of classical Southeast Asia through interactions with India across the Indian Ocean. Similarly, state-like structures emerged in Korea and Japan centuries after the emergence of such polities in China, and that they emerged through interactions with China. The different strategies and motives for overcoming unevenness may lead to the formation of different types of “societies” or orders across these connected spaces. This feature of history deserves more attention as it may provide us with insights to understand the causes and consequences of ‘the Rest’ catching-up (or not) with Asia and ‘the West’ as the core-periphery global society of the early phase of modernity transitions into deep pluralism.
My third and final point also has to do with issues of interpretation when the Global History perspective is not taken into consideration. For example, Buzan treats science as a primary institution or as a part of the social structure. Buzan argues that “the efflorescence” associated with this mode of knowledge “began to emerge in Europe” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 278), and that science was “carried worldwide by Western imperialism” (p. 280). However, according to Raj, who has called for a Global Historical approach to the history of science, “Europe’s unique role in the emergence of modern science” in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries is “a Cold War invention.” Instead of science being “carried” from Europe to elsewhere, science itself emerged in the relational context of “trade, diplomacy, wars and conquests, especially in the early modern world of increasing global interaction.”
The general thrust of my three points mentioned above do not undermine any of the core findings of Buzan’s work let alone his ambitions of building bridges with other fields. This is a marvelous book of breathtaking scope that will certainly attract other scholars to build upon Buzan’s insights. I also find myself in agreement with Buzan’s larger point that the world is moving towards “a more decentered international order” (p. 399). Furthermore, I am persuaded by Buzan’s claim that modernity will not be durable enough until it is ecologically stable (pp. 418-419). My basic argument is simply that the Global Society Approach needs Global History to fulfill its promise and potential.
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