The World Imagined

Hendrik Spruyt is Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations at Northwestern University, Illinois. Among his publications are: The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (1994), winner of the J. David Greenstone Award; Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (2005); and, with Alexander Cooley, Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations (2009).

• Part I. Beyond the Westphalian Gaze: 1. Introduction; 2. The Historical-Sociological Approach to Understanding Order in International Systems; 3. Collective Beliefs and Visions of Order; Part II. The East Asian Sino-Centric Order: 4. Gathering All Under Heaven: East Asian Collective Beliefs and International Society; 5. The East Asian Inter-State Society and the Westphalian System; Part III. The Islamic Cultural-Historical Community: 6. Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires and the Islamic Ecumene; 7. Collective Imagination and the Conduct of Inter-Polity Relations; Part IV. Collective Imagination among the Polities of Southeast Asia: 8. The Galactic Polities of Southeast Asia; 9. Inter-State Relations and the Encounter with the Colonial Powers; 10. Conclusion: Viewing the World in One's own Image.

'The World Imagined is a path-breaking book of immense stature. It opens with a highly sophisticated tour d'horizon of the fields of anthropology, history, IR and sociology. Through this inter-discipliary dialogue, Spruyt builds a persuasive case for why we need a deeply interpretive approach to understanding historic international societies. He then provides the pay-off with three detailed studies of non-western international societies (East Asian tributary system; Southeast Asian kingdoms; Islamic empires): in each case, shared beliefs about authority and legitimacy defined the membership of the society and inscribed its boundaries. A worthy successor to Spruyt's earlier, and equally brilliant book, The Sovereign State and its Competitors.' Tim Dunne, Professor of International Relations and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, The University of Queensland