Why read The World Imagined?

Book cover of The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies

Book description

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The World Imagined as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Andrei P. Tsygankov

Author

The most important development in the world concerns the reconstitution of the world along post-Western lines. The value of Spryut’s book is that it reintroduces an imperial perspective to the discipline of international relations.

The book describes how imperial international relations functioned in the Middle East, northern and southern Asia. The author focuses on their collective beliefs, demonstrating how much these beliefs and resulting outcomes differed from those in the West and its Westphalia-based state system.

The book reminds us of what the world was like when the West was less powerful and what may be about to become now…

From Andrei's 3 favorite reads in 2023.