Before the West

Ayşe Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the editor of the prize-winning Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

• 1. What Is the East?; Part I. Cihannüma: 2. Making the East: Chinggisid World Orders; 3. Dividing the East: Post-Chinggisid World Orders; 4. Expanding the East: Post-Timurid World Orders; 5. How the East made the world: Eurasia and beyond; Part II. Lessons of History: 6. Rise and fall of Eastern World Orders; 7. Uses and abuses of macro-history in international relations.

'Zarakol's Before the West successfully challenges Eurocentrism not by running into its opposite, Sinocentrism, but by examining Asia and its interconnectedness to the rest of Eurasia. Against Sinocentric works that treat Mongols as 'barbarians', the author puts the Mongol empire at the center of analysis and underscores the high degree of centralization in the Chinggisid sovereignty model. Zarakol vividly demonstrates how 'Asia was first made whole' by Genghis Khan's world conquest. She makes the provocative argument that the supposedly Chinese Ming emperors who overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty were in fact 'Chinggisid sovereigns', along with the contemporary Timurids in West Asia. This book is a gem in the genre of Global IR and macro-historical comparison.' Victoria Hui, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame