Research & Writing

Global Historical International Relations

Studying Historical International Orders Through System Encounters (conditionally accepted at the Review of International Studies)

How can we explain interactions between historical international orders? Despite growing interest in the margins of international orders and the role of interactions in their historical evolution, scholars struggle to explicitly link international order to interactions and vice versa. I argue that conflicts in system encounters can be explained as manifestations of a process through which international orders and the differences between them are constituted and negotiated. International orders and their differences exist in concrete instantiations only in the context of system encounters. Building on a practice-relational approach to international order, I propose that system encounters are characterized by a series of crises that challenge the taken-for-granted nature of established practices, prompting actors to articulate the relevant differences between them. I illustrate this process in the context of the Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and show how the relevant differences between the East Asian and European international orders can be reconstructed from these interactions. This paper advances study of historical international orders and interactions between them and has important implications for how we think about conflicts in system encounters.

System Encounters: Diplomatic Practice and International Order in Early Modern Sino-European Relations (book manuscript, in progress)

How do actors embedded in distinct international orders manage their differences? My book manuscript (based on my dissertation) examines Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as encounters between distinct international orders in East Asia and Europe—system encounters. Drawing on historiography and published collections of primary sources in multiple languages, I use qualitative text-based analysis to reconstruct the meaning and social effects of diplomatic practices in interactions between the Chinese imperial court and European envoys, and demonstrate how differences in those practices shaped the dynamics and outcomes of encounters. I argue that encounters between diplomatic practices create space for agency by presenting actors with specific manifestations of their differences to which actors respond pragmatically by creating conditions under which challenges can be resolved without significantly altering established practices. My findings present relevant context for Sino-European relations in the nineteenth century and have important implications for our understanding of the role of system encounters in the evolution of a globalizing international order. I am working on an additional chapter that explores the implications of my findings for negotiating between competing visions of international order in U.S.-China relations today.

I gratefully acknowledge financial support for my research on this project up to this point from the U.S.-Asia Grand Strategy Program at the University of Southern California (2023-2024), the United States Institute of Peace (2023-2024), and the International Studies Association (2023).

System Encounters: Sino-Russian Relations, 1618-1689 (draft available upon request)

Scholars of historical international relations have focused nearly exclusively on the analysis of specific international orders or their comparative study. Where interactions between distinct international orders are considered, the interaction process and/or international order are inadequately theorized. Building on a conception of international order as relational configurations produced and reproduced through diplomatic practice, this paper outlines a practice-relational approach to studying encounters between polities embedded in distinct international orders. I propose that established diplomatic practices inform the behavior of actors in system encounters, and how actors make sense of their own actions as well as those of their counterparts. As such, encounters constitute actors as belonging to distinct international orders and explicate their relevant differences. Finally, actors respond pragmatically to specific manifestations of differences between diplomatic practices. This paper uses evidence from the onset of Sino-Russian relations in the seventeenth century, a previously neglected case in the study of European expansion and Sino-European relations, to illustrate this argument. Analyzing historiography and published collections of primary documents detailing interactions between officials of the Chinese imperial court and Russian envoys, I find that the Treaty of Nerchinsk, a territorial settlement concluded between the Qing and the Tsardom of Russia in 1689, allowed the two empires to manage their affairs through the multivocal interpretation of divergent diplomatic practices. This paper contributes to scholarship on historical international orders by using a previously neglected case to propose a new argument about the dynamics of pre-modern system encounters.

An earlier draft of this paper was shortlisted for the Barbara W. Tuchman Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper by the Historical International Relations Section of the International Studies Association (2021).