Description
International History and International Relations By Andrew j. Williams, Amelia, Hadfi eld and J. Simon Rofe. This is a book that originated as a result of ‘customer demand’, but also one that we consider is genuinely required by students of IR who generally (and rightly) complain that our discipline has become too ahistorical, too self-referential, and generally lacking in ‘roots’. It emerged from an eponymous module at the University of Kent that was taught by Andrew Williams (who now teaches at the University of St Andrews), Simon Rofe (who now teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), and Amelia Hadfi eld (who now teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels). It was a very successful module in terms of the number of students who were taught – over three hundred a year for a good half-dozen years. Many of the ideas were generated by the feedback we received from those students. What we have tried to do, therefore, is to take a very different approach to most authors who have written books for IR novices who ‘need some history’. This is not history evénémentiel – i.e. we have not provided a date-based encyclical or indeed told many stories. What we have tried to do instead is to write interpretative essays arranged in thematic chapters that gather together the rich literature in several key areas. This literature includes both classic and contemporary texts and articles by both historians and IR scholars that we consider take the historical method seriously enough to pass muster. We had lively discussions about which themes needed to be so treated, and the fi nal choice (given the tremendous range available) was inevitably somewhat arbitrary. We hope that those themes are chosen – war, peace, sovereignty, empire, international organization and identity – are suffi ciently all-embracing as to give plenty of food for thought.
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