International Relations, Historical Sociology and the Eurocentrism Debate

Year 2016, Volume: 8 Issue: 1, 6 - 20, 01.06.2016

Eren Duzgun

Abstract

At the forefront of the bourgeoning field of International Historical Sociology has been
the effort to overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history. This review article
reconsiders the issue of Eurocentrism by critically engaging with Alex Anievas and Kerem
Nı̇şancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule, which is the most recent and arguably one of
the most sophisticated contributions to the anti-Eurocentric turn in International
Relations. How the West Came to Rule provides a critique of Eurocentrism through a
systematic inquiry into the question of the origin of capitalism. Despite its originality, I
argue that the book remains hamstrung by a number of methodological issues, which
ultimately undermine the authors’ effort to go beyond the existing literature on
Eurocentrism and provide a truly non-hierarchical international historical sociology. A
clear specification of these problems, which haunt most anti-Eurocentric approaches to
IR, provides us with the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric approach
to world history.

Keywords

Eurocentricism, Historical Sociology, International Politics

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