Explaining Durable Diversity in International Systems: State, Company, and Empire in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

International Relations theories generally hold that increased interaction between units in an international system produces convergence in their forms through military competition, institutional emulation, or normative socialization. In contrast, we argue that diverse international systems can endure despite increasing interaction. The early modern Indian Ocean international system hosted a variety of statist, corporate, and imperial polities. Diversity endured for three reasons. First, powerful foreign and local actors held differing maritime and land‐oriented preferences for conquest, which created the potential for coexistence between unlike polities. Second, congruent European and Asian ideas of heteronomy facilitated durable polity diversity. Third, strategies of localization enhanced enmeshment. Convergence on common polity forms failed to occur despite the presence of a statist model during this period. Subsequently, a reconfigured form of diversity under colonial empires succeeded this order. Greater attention to past diverse systems coheres with recent calls to study history to better understand not only contemporary instances of international hierarchy, but also unbundled and shared sovereignty regimes.

Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance

“…Land without centralized political authority is sometimes termed terra nulliusthat is, land without a sovereign (the Antarctic land-mass is a rare current example); its maritime parallel, as noted, is 'the high seas' (on the contrasting political dynamics of land and sea, see SCHMITT, 1997;DERMAN, 2011;MÜNKLER, 2007;PHILLIPS and SHARMAN, 2015). This raw material shapes claims to sovereignty (contrast, for example, continental and archipelagic states), underpins different kinds of territorial organization and political imaginaries and strategies (on the social construction of the ocean, see STEINBERG, 2010), prompts different kinds of territorial dispute (e.g., navigation rights through straits), influences the variegated forms of land-based and maritime empires, and shapes the evolution of international law (MOUNTZ, 2013(MOUNTZ, , 2015.…”

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

“…European powers had to sometimes accept positions of inferiority. Philips and Sharman (2015b: 439) have shown how Europeans merged into indigenous hierarchies by ‘alternating as vassals, partners, or suzerains, depending on local contexts’. IR is often guilty of reading the 19th century dominance of western powers back onto earlier periods in time.…”

Between Eurocentrism and Babel: A Framework for the Analysis of States, State Systems, and International Orders

“…A relatively new wave of international-studies scholarship focuses on non-western and pre-modern systems (Hui 2005, Kang 2010, Ringmar 2012, Yongjin and Buzan 2012, Besley and Reynal-Querol 2014, Kwan 2016, Phillips and Sharman 2015aand 2015b. We welcome this shift of the pendulum, but worry that it lacks a consistent vocabulary for defining states and related terms like hierarchy, anarchy, and empire.…”

“…Recent scholarship has shown a growing interest in the study of non-Western and premodern state systems and regional orders (Bull 1977, Watson 1992, Herbst 2000, Buzan and Little 2000, Centeno 2003, Hui 2005, Nexon 2009, Kang 2010, Phillips 2011, Ringmar 2012, Donnelly 2012b, Branch 2014, Besley and Reynal-Querol 2014, Møller 2014, Phillips and Sharman 2015a, Phillips and Sharman 2015b, Kwan 2016. This interest follows partly from a belief that past research relied too heavily on the European experience of political development and neglected other areas of the world.…”