DOI: 10.1111/johs.

12159

REVIEW ESSAY

The Global Transformation: Critical reflections on

the historical sociology of the long nineteenth
century
Luke Cooper*

Anglia Ruskin University, England, UK

Correspondence
Luke Cooper, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Anglia
Ruskin University, England, UK
Email: luke.cooper@anglia.ac.uk
Abstract
George Lawson and Barry Buzan's The Global Transformation
advances the claim that International Relations (IR) has mistakenly
overlooked the Long Nineteenth Century as a transformative era.
They argue this period saw a shift in the mode of power, i.e. how
power was utilised and expressed, and not merely a change in
how it was distributed amongst competing political entities. The fol-
lowing offers a sympathetic critique of their theoretical claims.
Highlighting the role of geopolitics and the societal changes of the
public sphere, the article argues that the historical sociological
method utilised by these authors is neither realist nor liberal
enough.

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

The great strength of Barry Buzan and George Lawson's The Global Transformation lies in their recognition of the
significance of the ideologies of progress to the historical sociology of the modern world system. In some ways, this
blind spot is a feature of International Relations (IR) alone, because the claim that a series of ideational transformations
in the Long Nineteenth Century reconstituted the basis for state power is not unusual within the wider milieu of the
Humanities (White, 1975), Sociology (Habermas, 1991) and Cultural Studies (Eley, 1993). Consider how the American
literary critic Irving Howe, reflecting on the cultural transformations of the modern world, once remarked that, God
died in the nineteenth century, utopia died in the twentieth (Howe, 1984, p. 351). Implicitly sharing in this analysis
of the rise and fall of the political imaginary of modernity, Buzan and Lawson trace the origins of the contemporary
world system through a series of cultural and ideological shifts. They draw out with considerable clarity how the hope
that human reason, scientific exploration and political action could dismantle, or at least reinvent, traditional society
for the collective good, spread feverishly in the nineteenth century, animating a whole series of practical projects
and grand schemas for social change. This created considerable downstream consequences (Buzan & Lawson,
2013, p. 620) for the following century. It is common place to think of the twentieth century as the period in which

*Dr Luke Cooper lectures in Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He is a historical sociologist working in the disciplines of Politics and
International Relations and has a particular interest in the role of nationalism, national identity, and geopolitics in social and political
transformation. He is currently writing a monograph on the Long Nineteenth Century.

J Hist Sociol. 2017;114. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1
2 COOPER

titanic struggles about ideology dominated world politics, argue the authors but it is less common to trace these
ideologies back to their (mainly) nineteenth century origins (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 36) In other words, it was
the very enthusiasm with which subjects pursued the ideologies of progress of the post1789 world that tragically
meant the twentieth century would be characterised by bitter and violent clashes between them.
There is more, however, to The Global Transformation than a historical claim about the origins of this age of
extremes (E. J. Hobsbawm, 1994b), because the two authors also make a powerful intervention into debates on
the historical sociology of the modern world system. They argue that modernist ideologies were one component of
a shift in the very nature of power seen with the advent of modernity (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). This naturally
lays the basis for a critical intervention into IR theory, whose realist mainstream has generally failed to ascribe any
causal power to the construction and spread of mass ideology in the workings of the international system. While this,
in part, reflects a backlash against the normativity of liberal theory (HydePrice, 2006), the preoccupation of realism
with anarchic many state systems, geopolitical competition, and power balancing has created a tendency for
empirical enquiries to find in historical events only affirmation of the view that there exists an international system
populated by states that have to help themselves (Waltz, 2000). Although Hans Morgenthau recognised cultural
conventions shaped how international politics was undertaken, he insisted this did not affect the innermost interests
of states, which exclusively concerned their own survival (Morgenthau, 1947, pp. 151168). In contrast, Buzan and
Lawson treat historical processes as a source of transformative social change, potentially requiring a rethinking of
cornerstone concepts. Positively, within their conception of social and political transformation forms of conscious-
ness are ascribed a central role.1
Buzan and Lawson argue that in the nineteenth century the ideational changes in how subjects thought about
their communities, values and ideal futures intersected with industrialization, in the economic sphere, and a turn to
rational statebuilding, in the political sphere, to generate a new basis for how power was constituted, organised
and expressed (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). This new mode of power essentially, the penumbra of political,
social, economic and cultural changes characteristic of rapid industrial modernisation dramatically empowered
those states able to harness it, consequently leading to the displacement of the polycentric world with no dominant
centre by a coreperiphery order (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 1). Their challenge to realists whose theories still
dominate IR is therefore that they need to think more about the mode of power and not just its distribution
(Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 327). While the text situates itself in the disciplinary mainstream the influence of critical
approaches is evident throughout. The theory of uneven and combined development, which has been widely
debated amongst historical sociologists in IR in recent years (Allinson & Anievas, 2009; Anievas, 2012; Anievas &
Nisancioglu, 2013, 2015; Cooper, 2013, 2014; Matin, 2013a, 2013b; Rosenberg, 2006, 2010), provides a framing
device for their discussion of the uneven developmental consequences elicited by the intensification of interaction
amongst societies (combination), itself arising from a dramatic expansion in the wealth and technical capacities of
leading states (Buzan & Lawson, 2015b). Worldsystems theory likewise influences the vocabulary used to describe
the unequal power relations between the core and periphery generated by the new mode of power. Meanwhile,
postcolonial scholars will welcome, indeed some have already welcomed (Mulich, 2015), the highly critical appraisal
of the role played by colonialism in the construction of modern international society. As Buzan and Lawson put it,
no system in world history so united the planet, while simultaneously wrenching it apart (Buzan & Lawson,
2015a, p. 35).
Buzan and Lawson demonstrate, with a thorough survey of fortyeight introductory textbooks and key readings
generally utilised on Introduction to IR courses, that the idea the nineteenth century was a period of dramatic
change has gained little hearing in the subject (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 54). They found only five of these books
involved a significant level of engagement with the nineteenth century, and these texts only analysed it in terms of
the interstate relations of the post1815 era of collective hegemony, rather than the social changes of the period
(Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. ibid). Buzan and Lawson argue persuasively that the reason for this lies in the fact the
foundational story of IR emerges out of the First World War, with a consequential focus on war and peace that
has occluded other perspectives and issues (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 61). In short, the discipline developed a
COOPER 3

fixation on the problmatique of warpeaceorder, which has come at the expense of studying the anterior
processes of social and cultural transformation that are central to international relations (Buzan & Lawson,
2015a, p. 62). By correcting this, the book fulfils a welcome doublefunction. Firstly, it reinserts the Long
Nineteenth Century into the subject matter of IR as an epoch of hugely significant change requiring empirical study.
Secondly, it contributes to the task of bringing historical sociology, with its methodological concern for
understanding processes of social change, into the mainstream of a subject that is still far too preoccupied with
a statecentric concern for power politics.
Somewhat predictably, however, this review article will focus on the areas of disagreement. I begin, firstly, by
demonstrating how Buzan and Lawson tend to avoid the kind of explicit explanatory statements that might make clear
their view on why the global transformation occurred. This reflects an inherent ambiguity present in their concept of
the mode of power, because it is far from clear whether is seen as a product or cause of the acceleration in global
development between 1750 and 1850. Problematically, the concept is used as a catchall term, combining all the
cultural, economic, and political facets of industrial society. Secondly, I show how Buzan and Lawson are wrong to
downplay the importance of the distribution of power to the causes of industrialisation, rooting this in an application
of the theory of uneven and combined development that departs from their usage of the concept. Thirdly, I offer a
critique of how Buzan and Lawson treat the ideologies of progress they correctly highlight as central to the nature
of the nineteenth century. By beginning their analysis with broad definitions of these ideological phenomena social-
ism, liberalism, nationalism and scientific racism they do not discuss the sociological changes necessary for the
emergence of such mass discourses. Taking these two criticisms together, I argue that Buzan and Lawson's analysis
of the Long Nineteenth Century is simultaneously not realist enough for it downplays the causal significance of
geopolitical conflicts and not liberal enough, because it fails to locate the ideational shifts of the period in the
emergence of a public society. While these arguments might appear at first to be contradictory, each element of
critique, the geopolitical and the sociologicalideational, can, I argue, be integrated into a causal use of the theory
of uneven and combined development.

2 | W H Y ? A CL A S S I C C I R C U L A R I T Y P R O B L E M

A welcome synergy, arising from Buzan and Lawson's focus on the midmodern (c. 17501850) epoch as the decisive
era of social and political transformation, lies in its amenability to noneurocentric accounts of modernity.
Noneurocentric authors argue that the great divergence in development between the West and Asia lies not in
the internationalisation of European maritime trade after 1500, but only some three centuries later, c. 1800, as Britain
at first, followed afterwards by its European rivals, pursued a policy of industrial modernization (Hobson, 2004;
Pomeranz, 2000). As Buzan and Lawson put it:

Up to around 1800 the principal points of wealth differentiation were within rather than between
societies There were not major differences in living standards amongst the most developed parts of the
world: in the eighteenth century, GDP per capita levels in the Yangtze River Delta of China were around
10 per cent lower than the wealthiest parts of Europe, less than the differences in the contemporary
world between most of the EU and the US (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 26).

In contrast, the Long Nineteenth Century saw a dramatic increase in the wealth of the industrialising Western
states. And this, coupled with the use of colonialism to develop and retain their competitive advantage through the
subjugation of Southern and Eastern societies, either formally or informally, gave rise to the coreperiphery world
order. There is little that can be objected to in the factual account of this process that Buzan and Lawson outline,
which synthesises a range of literature from noneurocentric historical sociology, macroeconomic history, and IR.
Even their claim that the global transformation is equivalent in its significance to the shift from huntergatherer to
4 COOPER

settled agricultural societies, which began around 10,000 BC, is well supported by their arguments and evidence
(Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 1718, 23). However, while their treatment of the how (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp.
3742) and when (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 3237) is highly persuasive, their discussion of the why (Buzan &
Lawson, 2015a, pp. 2832) is, unfortunately, much less so. Buzan and Lawson list out what they see as the four prin-
cipal positions on why the great divergence occurred: those that stress (a) economic advantages flowing either from
institutions or capitalist class relations; (b) those that emphasise the political, either in the form that European state
formation assumed or the nature of the continent's geopolitics; (c) those that, in one way or another, see
ideological processes, such as modernist rationality, as key; and, finally, (d) those that concentrate on geographical,
demographic or technological advantages (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 2829). They then summarise their own case
that global modernity arose from a configuration of industrialization, rational statebuilding and ideologies of
progress (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 30) but do so without commenting critically on the other paradigms surveyed.
This leaves the reader none the wiser as to whether Buzan and Lawson believe one or other of the existing literatures
complements their own approach. Moreover, they also add three antecedent intersocietal processes of particular
significance to generating the new mode of power that allowed European states to dominate the Long Nineteenth
Century: (a) the creation of imperial circulatory systems at the apex of which were European colonial powers, (b)
the, often coercively won, control of international trade; and (c) the utilization of nonEuropean ideas and technolo-
gies for development purposes (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 3031). The incorporation of these factors creates a
tension between their own tripartite explanation of a new mode of power constituted by mass ideology, the rational
state and industrialization. It is one that is difficult for the scholars to resolve, because the mode depicts the point of
arrival the outcome of a power gap between the global north and south and not the point of departure, i.e., why
this great divergence occurred. Indeed, each aspect of the mode of power groups together a series of different
economic (industrialisation), ideationally (ideologies of progress) and political (statebuilding) changes across the
nineteenth century. But they do not in themselves or taken together as a configuration constitute an explanation
as to why these transformations occurred.

3 | N O T REALI ST E N O U G H ?

Buzan and Lawson appear to hedge their bets on the most contested conceptual questions concerning the historical
causes of the great divergence in development levels between north western European states and their rivals in Asia.
However, insofar as they offer a distinctive account based on their understanding of the mode of power, the three
additional factors imperialism, control of maritime trade, and appropriation of ideas and technology they incorpo-
rate into their account of why this occurred pose questions for their wider analysis. Recall that for Buzan and Lawson
it is the social mode of power and not the distribution of material capabilities, as realists maintain, which was the
source of a power gap that was both unusually big and unusually difficult to close (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p.
307). Yet these arguments appear in tension to the additional causal factors they introduce in their discussion of
why the great transformation occurs, which lays particular stress on imperialism. Indeed, one cannot separate the
unequal exchange that took place within the Europeandominated maritime trading system i.e. Buzan and Lawson's
second intersocietal factor from the leading European states' propensity for imperialism (their first). Arguably, then,
they are denoting a single factor: European colonialmerchant capitalism. The latter represents a form of domination that
is only possible where material capabilities are distributed unevenly. And, indeed each factor they highlight European
imperialism, dominance of maritime trade, and utilisation of Asian technologies arguably all occurred due to the
competitive pressures arising from a geopolitical milieu with an uneven distribution of power. In other words, Buzan and
Lawson appear to acknowledge an empirical analysis, which strongly implies a theoretical position they want to reject.
This becomes clearer still if we follow some of the concrete examples Buzan and Lawson use to elaborate their
account of why the global transformation occurred. To illustrate the role of imperialism, they discuss East India
Company taxation regimes in Bengal, the compulsory cultivation of opium and its export to China backed up by force
COOPER 5

of arms (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 30). Likewise, to highlight the role of European control of maritime trade they note
the unequal economic relations Britain was able to impose on a sovereign Argentina and a colonised India, which in both
cases privileged British producers (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 31). And they also credit migration, specifically the Euro-
pean settler revolution, with providing the channels for the emulation and fusion of nonEuropean ideas and technol-
ogies (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 31). There is obviously a common theme present in each of these examples. They are
all impossible to disentangle from a single factor: European imperialism. If power had not been distributed unevenly
across a fragmented geopolitical milieu then European colonialism would not have imposed its dominance. Naturally,
Buzan and Lawson would reply that this was only possible due to the mode of power European states drew on. Conse-
quently, this brings us back to the question of the causal explanation for the development of the new mode of power.
To develop this one needs to deepen the stress on early to mid modern European imperialism that is already
present in The Global Transformation. Indeed, a strong case can be made that it was the intense nature of European
geopolitics (Arrighi, 2009, pp. 2331, 2007, pp. 211249; Braudel, 1992) which established the incentive structure
for industrial modernisation. Crucially, this context was favourable to sidelining the vested interests hostile to it within
the domestic sphere, as the imperative of the security of the realm was used to push aside conservative objections to
modernisation. While when reviewing the literature Buzan and Lawson note some of the scholars who have argued
this (Bobbitt, 2003, p. 74; Howard, 2009; Kennedy, 1989; Mann, 2012, pp. 2426; Tilly, 1992, pp. 1416), the extent
to which they accept their analysis is unclear. If they do, it remains curiously understated in the text. They do not, for
instance, discuss the seventeenth and eighteenth century world economy as the age of mercantilism for European
states as they vied with one another in the militarycommercial sphere to secure the rewards a strong position in
maritime trade promised. This has a crucial significance to the formation of the new mode of power with the onset
of British industrialisation. As Patrick OBrien puts it:

For a European economy to thrive in a mercantilist economic order riven with dynastic and imperial
rivalries, an island state needed to allocate considerable resources to preclude invasion, preserve internal
stability and retain advantages over equally violent competitors in armed struggles related to global
commerce and colonization. Geopolitical conditions formed inescapable parameters within which state
formation institution building and macroeconomic growth occurred (O'Brien, 2010, p. 29).

A key advantage the English and, later, British realm enjoyed was its longterm investment in the Royal Navy,
which grew out of the basic security needs of the island state, but gave the kingdom a competitive edge as the
economic importance of maritime trade grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This geographically
conditioned but sustained commitment to a naval strategy for the defence of the realm had unintended but
important consequences for the development of a leading maritime publiccumprivate sector of the British economy
over time (O'Brien, 2010, p. 28). The militarised state apparatus provided internal and external security, creating a
system of protected property rights for wealthy elites that proved favourable to capital investment, both domestically
and in the expanding opportunities afforded by Britain's overseas territories. Propertied classes were willing to pay for
the protections a militarised state ensured. Between 1670 and 1815, total revenues from taxes rose by a factor of
around seventeen, substantially outpacing growth in the national income which increased by a multiplier of three
(O'Brien, 2010, p. 29). As a result of this strong coercive basis for state power, the potentially destabilising
consequences of industrial urbanisation were mitigated by the capacity of the realm to secure the peace.
Emphasising the significance of European geopolitics and English/British state formation in the construction of a
new mode of power does not mean departing from the type of multicausal analysis Buzan and Lawson evidently
favour. But the importance of highlighting the central role played by the international geopolitical context is due to
the part it plays as a key proximate cause. The interlocking conflicts that the militarybureaucracies of the European
Ancien Rgimes were enmeshed provided a series of immediate imperatives for reform. Longmaturing causal factors,
such as the transformation of the social property relations of English agriculture from the late sixteenth century
onwards (Brenner, 1977, 1997; Wood, 2002), or the diffusion of technologies from the hitherto more developed
6 COOPER

polities of the wider Eurasian land mass (Hobson, 2004, 2011), clearly played a role in opening the door, i.e. creating
the possibility, for rapid industrial change. However, neither explains why the British realm was the first to walk
through it and why they did so at the conjuncture of the mid eighteenth century. Answering this requires recognising
the aggressive nature of British colonial policy. The warmaking propensity of the British state, which was almost
permanently involved in major overseas and naval conflicts across the eighteenth century, had a series of direct
payoffs for its development. War tended to have a multiplier effect on the domestic economy, with ironsmelting,
coal mining, building, engineering, as well as horse rearing, sails, ropes, cannons, guns all experiencing the benefits
of warinduced demand, investment, and, often, technical change (Hudson, 2014, p. 56). Not only did success in
war open new markets, boosting exports and thus encouraging private sector investment, but there was a also a direct
link between military spending and industrial innovation. Consider, for instance, how the War of Austrian Succession
stimulated a new ironsmelting technique or how the iron railroad emerged in the Seven Years' War, giving a
significant boost to iron exports thereafter (Hudson, 2014, pp. 5657). In short, there is ample evidence in the rise
of British power that the conflicts typifying a European state system riven with geopolitical rivalries one of war
and preparation for war as Tilly put it (Tilly, 1992, p. 14) spurred on industrial development.
To a certain extent, the explanatory ambiguity of The Global Transformation appears to be a matter of conscious
design on the part of the authors, presumably reflecting a desire for their synthesis to retain amenability to a number
of different conceptual positions. The way Buzan and Lawson use the theory of uneven and combined development
strongly suggests this is the case. Trotsky's theory stressed the role of geopolitical competition in spurring industrial
modernisation (what he called the whip of external necessity) (Trotsky, 1967, p. 23). An application of this conception
of geopolitically combined development to the great divergence debate would thus insert European mercantilism explic-
itly into an account of why a new mode of power emerged in the late eighteenth century. In a reply to a roundtable
discussing the book, Buzan and Lawson offer an intriguing but questionbegging explanation of why they demurred from
drawing on the more sociological and causal aspects of the theory of uneven and combined development:

Our use of UCD is analytical heuristic rather than causalexplanatory. Using UCD as a framing device
allows us to construct a relatively simple account of macrohistorical periodization: during the early phases
of the global transformation, development became both more uneven and more combined; in recent years,
there has been a (partial) reduction of the former and a (powerful) intensification of the latter. We resist
deploying causal dynamics often associated with UCD: the privilege of historical backwardness, the
whip of external necessity, etc. Nor, more importantly, do we deploy a subterranean historical
materialism in which industrialization serves as the basis of our analysis. The book is premised on the
interplay between the three dynamics we see as constituting the global transformation it is the whole
package rather than any hierarchical relationship between them that fostered the modern mode of
power (Buzan & Lawson, 2015b).

This formulation of their approach is instructive. The simple story of macrohistorical periodization, which they
use uneven and combined development to tell, is essentially a descriptive summation of how the differential spread
of the new mode of power resulted in a dramatic power gap between the core and periphery. To explain why this
was the case, however, we have to factor in the distribution of power between polities and, specifically, the ability
of those in the South and East to resist and, creatively adapt to, the threat of European colonialism (or not). Where
the power gap became greatest, for instance with the Asian giants of India and China, the lack of a fully functional
and unified sovereign state capable of resisting imperial predation was arguably the critical factor supressing develop-
ment capacity. The whip of external necessity, was experienced negatively within these polities, because, while the
pressure to catchup existed, a state with a strong institutional base capable of responding to it did not. Only a small
number of states experienced what Trotsky called a privilege of historical backwardness (Trotsky, 1967, p. 22) i.e.
successfully appropriated techniques and social forms from the most advanced states to rapidly catchup. The extent
to which these polities' combined development was hindered by colonialism was thus the critical variable. As we can
see, these aspects of the theory elicit a causal story about the nineteenth century in which geopolitical conflicts play a
COOPER 7

critical role in both the formation and spread of the configurative new mode of power Buzan and Lawson highlight,
giving impetus to the changes producing it and determining its uneven expansion. In short, given the significance of
geopolitical conflict to this transformations occurring across this epoch, one could even put the point rather strongly:
no uneven distribution of power, no new mode of power.

4 | NOT LIBERAL ENOUGH?

The second track of the argument I will present here the need to locate the changes of modernity within the histor-
ical formation of the public sphere may appear to move in an entirely different direction from the hitherto
established critique. However, geopolitical conditions, and the associated power struggles they entailed, provided
an everpresent causal context that proved highly significant to shaping the forms of social consciousness associated
with the modern public sphere. Indeed, a focus on the geopolitics of it all has often been seen as the natural means by
which IR scholars have intervened into debates on the sociological transformations modernity entailed (Rosenberg,
1994; Teschke, 2003). Interestingly, this is not the approach that Buzan and Lawson favour, because their principal
theoretical claim on the importance of the social mode of power visvis the distribution of power across states
seeks to challenge the realist propensity of IR scholarship to focus on geopolitical conflict above all else. As we have
seen in the foregoing, they strongly imply that the new mode of power is predicated on European colonialism, without
going so far as to say so categorically. But, additionally, they include within the instantiation of this mode, both a
series of ideological trends within European societies and the formation of urbanindustrial society. Unfortunately,
this leaves the concept as little more than a catchall term to describe the enmeshed series of transformations
cultural, social, and economic associated with industrialisation from the mid to late eighteenth century onwards.
While the vocabulary they use implies the presence of an explanatory intervention, they do not actually make a causal
claim about the sociological changes, which fostered these revolutions in human consciousness and society. By
emphasising the role of European colonialism in triggering the emergence of a new mode of power, they pose the
question, which goes unanswered, of whether it was equally necessary for its perpetuation, or, if not, what exactly
replaced this order. Indeed, the Global Transformation devotes almost as much space to the postnineteenth century
world as it does to the origins of this historical change (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. chapters 7, 8 and 9). Consequently,
the text raises a series of question about the relationship between the colonial century of the nineteenth and the
liberal century of the twentieth that they inevitably occlude with their stress on the transformative nature of the
former visvis the continuity they see in the latter.
Ultimately, however, these problems are matters of theoretical design, rather than empirical scope, because they
arise from an ambiguity over what specific historical processes the mode of power refers to. Buzan and Lawson clearly
want to avoid the pitfall of a crude materialism, which they seem to associate with an emphasis on industrialisation as
the primus movens of modernity (Buzan & Lawson, 2015b). They are therefore at pains to stress how they give equal
weight to both the material and ideational elements in the formation of the mode of power, seeing each dimension
as generative of both actors and the ways in which power is exercised (Buzan & Lawson, 2015b). But such formulas
are, surely, too abstract to be useful. In their attempt to demonstrate, correctly, the intermeshed nature of cultural,
economic and political changes of the post 1750 world order, they have ended up grouping together a diverse set
of processes under the rubric of a social, rather than merely geopolitical, conception of power politics. But, in doing
so, they appear to have accepted conventional demarcations of what constitutes the political and the economic,
or the ideational and material, and so on, with industrialisation firmly seen as part of the latter, and ideologies equally
as part of the former. A social conception of industrialisation, in contrast, would not consider the shift in scientific
techniques and the social organisation of labour c. 1800 as merely economic or material processes, which mechan-
ically produced a series of cultural changes in human societies. But, rather, would treat the formation of industrial society
as a process in which cultural transformation in human activity was a necessary condition for realising rapid growth in pro-
duction. The problem is not, therefore, that Buzan and Lawson are wrong to see the processes as enmeshed together, or
8 COOPER

to exhibit caution over making a prioritised claim for one cause alone, but, rather concerns how exactly these multiple
causes interconnect with one another. It is debateable whether simply referring to them collectively as a change in the
mode of power is a sufficiently precise way of grasping the nature of this dramatic sociological transformation.
The section of the book dealing with what they call the ideologies of progress illustrates this wider problem in
the text as a whole and poses questions about how the rise of a mass, political society, or the public sphere, should
be incorporated into an IRbased account of the Long Nineteenth Century. Curiously, this chapter hinges the entire
discussion on the concept of progress, which is arguably only one expression of a deeper ideational rupture seen in
this period. For Buzan and Lawson the sense that social change was becoming normal rather than exceptional (Buzan
& Lawson, 2015a, p. 97) was the central ideological feature of the global transformation. As they put it:

These ideologies [liberalism, socialism, nationalism, scientificracism] expressed an important, novel feature
of modernity that progress was necessary for modern societies. Without this sense of forward
momentum, it was politically difficult to justify the inequalities generated by industrial capitalism (Buzan
& Lawson, 2015a, p. 100).

This claim to novelty is, however, a highly debatable one. Firstly, if one defines it simply as a sense of forward
momentum within which social change is valued for its own sake, then the idea of progress clearly stretches back
several millennia (Nisbet, 1980). Secondly, hinging the entire discussion on the concept of progress badly understates
the importance of traditional imaginaries to the ideational construction of modern communities. Buzan and Lawson
recognise in their discussion of nationalism, for example, that it has the paradoxical quality of being deeply rooted in
modernity, on the one hand, while appealing to older understandings of community on the other (Buzan & Lawson,
2015a, p. 115). But such desires for the reestablishment of a past sense of order, and concern about the implications
of rapid urbanindustrial change for social stability, went far beyond the sphere of national identity. Indeed, conserva-
tism was a cornerstone feature of the ideational landscape of the Long Nineteenth Century. For there was just as
great a backlash against narratives of progress, as there was belief in them. Much of this was based on the perceived
danger revolutions posed to the order and stability of European society. For example, consider how Ioannis
Capodistrias, the founder of independent Greece and a liberal nationalist whose mindset typified that of the
stabilitycraving European elite after the Napoleonic Wars, warned rebellions which unfold from day to day, enclose
the seeds of a long future, and perhaps of a future which, even in the most civilized parts of the world, will not allow us
to return to the former allures of diplomacy or the charm of social relations (Cited in Grimsted, 1968, p. 178). For
Capodistrias it was Napoleon and the French Revolution that epitomised the threat of popular despotism (cited in
Grimsted, 1968, p. 179), a remark that serves as a reminder of the far from amenable relationship between democracy
and propertyorientated classical liberalism in this period. But, of course, even Napoleon Bonaparte himself exhibited
all of the contradictions of being modern in the early nineteenth century. While he was ferociously anticlerical, a
pioneer of agrarian and state administrative reform, and a believer in the body politic, he also established the House
of Bonaparte as a new dynastic order, distributed a series of monarchical titles on the basis of kinship, sought
legitimacy for these endeavours by marrying the daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor, and openly drew on the
aesthetic of the Roman imperial tradition (Roberts & Westad, 2007, pp. 20402058).
As this testifies, a sketch of the ideational landscape of the nineteenth century reveals a series of complex
ideological amalgams that developed within and among the ideologies of progress Buzan and Lawson emphasise.
But the role of historical sociologists should be to explain these contradictory juxtapositions by analysing the nature
of the social transformation underway in these societies. One needs therefore to dig deeper than the surface
appearance of the ideological claims. Buzan and Lawson suggest what this might entail when they argue that collec-
tively liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and scientificracism constituted an assault on dynasticism and religion, and
the link between these two in the dynastic claim to rule by divine right (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 100).
However, they do not pursue this observation to its conclusion by highlighting the societal process causing dynastic
and clerically based political orders to unravel. For these ideas, distinctive as they often were, could nonetheless be
COOPER 9

welded to dynastic and religious claims. It was, rather, the societal transformation underway with the emergence of the
body politic or public sphere that was unseating the old Europe of aristocratic titles, kinship and fixed social rank. Both
the ideologies of progress, and those of tradition, were compelled by force of circumstance to reconcile themselves to
the emergence of a mass society, and looked for ways to bind its subjects together with common values, goals and aims.
The transformation of BritishToryism in the second half of the nineteenth century represents a consummate example of
how even the most conservative, traditionalist ideologies also had to be rearticulated in a mass political form. This pop-
ulist turn thus reflected the emergence of a public society in which politicians were required to define and mobilise their
audiences, and to cultivate adaptively crossclass support (Windscheffel, 2007, p. 24).
An account of the global transformation, which is sensitive to the role played by ideational factors, needs therefore
to locate them within a radically changing societal context. Buzan and Lawson's discussion of each of the ideologies of
progress is lacking in this regard, as they tend to focus on cornerstone political science definitions, and empirical exam-
ples which illustrate the ideological trends they stress, rather than discuss the changing architecture of global develop-
ment that produced these new forms of social consciousness. Consider, by way of example, their discussion of the
emergence of liberalism. This section focuses narrowly on the development of a selfconsciously liberal political ideol-
ogy, allowing the authors to argue that it only emerged in this form during the early years of the nineteenth century,
when it was used to refer to the curtailment of arbitrary monarchical power through a constitution (Buzan & Lawson,
2015a, p. 102). This permits them, in turn, to stress the second half of the nineteenth century as representing the critical
moment for the lift off of liberalism as a dominating political ideology. There is, however, a tension between this argu-
ment and the parallel claim they make that following the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century liberalism became closely associated with principles of individual rights, popular sovereignty and self
determination (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 104). This poses the question of how to understand the relationship
between the subjective emergence of liberalism as a selfconscious doctrine, on the one hand, and the socialcultural
changes that were necessary conditions for mass liberal politics, on the other. Implicitly, Buzan and Lawson appear to
recognise that deep changes encompassing how the relationships between individuals, society and the state were
understood represented vital antecedent conditions for the formalisation of a liberalist politics. However, they do
not explore the nature and modalities of these sociological shifts.
An engagement with the literature on the public sphere, or associated theoretical discussion on the origins of
national identity, would have enriched the book greatly, and put their stress on the emergence of mass political
ideology as a constitutive dimension to the new mode of power on firmer explanatory grounds. Indeed, this need for
a strong sociological grounding is particularly posed by the strength of the epochal claim Buzan and Lawson wish to make
about the change European societies witnessed at the close of the eighteenth century. To do this while also avoiding
reductionism and emphasising the ideational moment as a key dimension of this radical shift, then these mass ideologies
need to be located within an account of the genesis of a public society.2 It was this, and not the idea of progress as Buzan
and Lawson imply, that imparted genuine historical novel to statesociety relations in the early nineteenth century.
Jurgen Habermas, while arguably giving too great a degree of normativity to this historical transformation (Cooper, forth-
coming) nonetheless captured the change ably in terms of a societal shift from representative publicness to the public
sphere. The former described a specific condition of European feudalism in which publicness (or publicity) of representa-
tion was not constituted as a social realm but instead formed the status attribute of the manorial lord (Habermas, 1991,
p. 7). He displayed himself, presented himself, wrote Habermas, as an embodiment of some sort of higher power
(Habermas, 1991, p. 7). This representative publicness should, he argued, be sharply distinguished from modern forms
of representation, such as when the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his cli-
ents, because it was inseparable from the lord's concrete existence, that, as an aura, surrounded and endowed his
authority (Habermas, 1991, p. 7). In contrast, to this feudal form of publicity, the creation of a body politic in the eigh-
teenth century provided the essential societal foundation for the ideologies of progress, each of which were attempting
to shape the preferences of the public opinion brought into being by this anterior, sociological transformation.
Habermas' understanding of the public sphere has parallels with Benedict Anderson's theorisation of the origins of
national identity (Anderson, 2006) insofar as both see the expansion of the printmedia as a vital element in the
10 COOPER

formation of a sphere capable of transcending the web of local and statusbased identities characteristic of feudalism.
These ideas are also potentially amenable to Buzan and Lawson's discussion of how changes in technological and social
interaction capacity shaped global modernity, but their focus is on the nineteenth century breakthroughs, the steam-
ship, railways, telegraph, radio, etc., and the parallel growth in international organisations (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp.
6796). While this draws out the significant downstream consequences of these developments for the twentieth
century in a persuasive fashion, the authors neglect the anterior changes in social interaction capacity that triggered
a shift in concepts of community, identity and politics with the formation of the public sphere. As Habermas explains:

Just as one could speak of mail only when the regular opportunity for letter dispatch became accessible
to the general public, so there existed a press in the strict sense only once the regular supply of news
became public, that is, again, accessible to the general public. But this occurred only at the end of the
seventeenth century. Until then the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of
representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere
whose decisive mark was the published word (Habermas, 1991, p. 16).

One might, of course, debate the temporal claim that Habermas makes here. There is evidence of a public society
existing in an embryonic form with the rise of the pamphleteers during the English Civil War, for example (Raymond,
2006; Zaret, 1999). But clearly such societal transformations take place across the longue dure and not in a big bang.
While this is a point Buzan and Lawson also make explicitly (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 36), the problem remains that
they do not make theoretically grounded arguments about the changes that intersected across the longer span of
time, which led to the global transformation they, rightly, emphasise. By excluding the formation and extension of
the body politic from their account of the emergence of the ideologies of progress, they have lost sight of a sociolog-
ical dimension on which these popularly adhered to ideas were conditional.
Had Buzan and Lawson addressed the ideational element of their analysis in these terms, they could also have
reflected on how an IRbased perspective might modify the central assumptions of the classical literature on the
public sphere. They would, of course, not have been bereft of IR literature if they wished to move in this direction.
Many IR scholars have highlighted the dynamic relationship between the internal and external dimensions of order
in the construction of sovereign territorial states (Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). As John Ruggie argued the chief
characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the consolidation of all parcelized and personalized authority
into one public realm (Ruggie, 1993, p. 151). Undertaking this process, he argued, entailed two fundamental spatial
demarcations: between public and private realms and between internal and external realms (Ruggie, 1993, p. 151).
In other words, the creation of a public power to secure privately held property rights was a process that had to take
place within a defined spatial context. As such, two outcomes appeared in tandem with one another: the emergence
of the public, capitalist state power and nationally bounded territorial communities, together superseding the Europe
of percelized dynastic realms (Wood, 1981). Buzan and Lawson's sidestepping of the issue is disappointing given their
take up of the theory of uneven and combined development, which highlights the role of the international as a key
element in the shift from a realmbased to a nationstatebased world order (Anievas & Nisancioglu, 2015). The highly
combined, fractious nature of European geopolitics was thus a key causal factor for the drive to modernise, the
establishment of a strong state power and the crystallisation of national identities.

5 | T HE C O M B I N E D D E V E LO P M E N T ( S ) OF T H E G L O B A L
T R A N S F O RM A T I O N

By expanding the conception of the international beyond the narrow confines of interstate relations, uneven and
combined development can offer a creative synthesis of the two critical interventions made in the foregoing on the
sociological causes of the global transformation. While recognising the uneven power distribution amongst states is
COOPER 11

a key factor in the competitive pressures (the whip of external necessity) eliciting industrial modernisation, this is cast
as only one dimension of the geopolitical and social combination of eighteenth and nineteenth century European
politics. A further dimension in addition to the integrative impact of modern economic development more
frequently highlighted can be found in the manner in which intersocietal conditions shaped the evolving social
struggles that each contested the form the public sphere would assume across the Long Nineteenth Century. These
struggles over the ideologies of progress took place within and between the fragmented geopolitics of Europe, and
their internal social/class and external political/economic conflicts proved highly amenable to pushing the most
powerful polities on a trajectory towards nationalism and imperialism. This is, surely, one of the key stories of the
nineteenth century: that the modes of violence employed by the formation of a public state power to establish
security for private, marketbased accumulation strategies were extended globally through the use of colonialism.
Consequently, the formal distinction between liberal and imperialist ideology disguises a clear symmetry in the power
relations they gave legitimacy to. This is not to reduce the ideational to the economic or structural, but, rather, simply
to point to the tensionridden yet reciprocal connections between culture, ideas and societal change. In other words,
one needs to locate the genesis of new ideologies within the uneven and combined development of capitalist
geopolitics in the nineteenth century.
A grasp of these interconnections may also be able to elicit a clearer sense of the particular importance of one of
the nineteenth century ideologies of progress: the lift off of nationalism and its significance in the evolution of a
distinctively capitalist world system. Indeed, the rise of the nationally conscious polity was a rupture in conceptions
of community and statehood the significance of which was not lost on the more perceptive contemporaries of the
age. Paul Samuel Reinsch, an American political scientist, whose text World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth
Century was first published in 1900, arguably captured a wider set of sentiments3 in his musings on the century's
close. Reinsch argued the century was chiefly characterised by a decline in hope for the realisability of humanistic,
cooperative visions of social and political development. There has been a complete change of ideals during the past
hundred years (Reinsch, 1900, p. 7), he wrote. The century opened with a broad humanitarianism, with a belief in
the saving power of general culture, he added, further stating that the main characteristic of the time was a
rationalistic optimism which saw in reason the guiding influence in human affairs (Reinsch, 1900, p. 7). For Reinsch
this age of reason had, across the nineteenth century, been displaced by the age of force, with the defeat of the
1848 revolutions the decisive blow against humanistic governance in favour of one based on the blind and passion-
ate forces of the will (Reinsch, 1900, pp. 78). Reinsch may be guilty of romanticising Enlightenment philosophy, but
the remarks bring to light the struggles that took place over the establishment of the nationstate system. In doing
so, he captured some of the complexity of the Napoleonic empire. The latter echoed the classical Roman vision, in
which orbis terrarun and imperium were almost interchangeable (Reinsch, 1900, p. 13), because the world that
mattered was in the orbit of the citycentred civilisation, and legitimacy for the imperial order was bestowed by
the way of life that empire offered geographically dispersed elites. However, these aspirations for a global empire
were negated from within, by the French nationalism integral to Bonaparte's domestic authority, as much as they
were from without by the rise of other nationalisms in Europe. One might ask the question therefore of why, given
other types of political entity were envisaged by Napoleon and others, did the national form prove so hegemonic in
this period? While this is a complex issue, the theory of uneven and combined development points towards an
answer rooted in Europe's societal multiplicity. This meant that the new public sphere made possible by advances
in interaction capacity came into being unevenly across multiple polities and led to stratified ethnic and social iden-
tities being displaced by homogenous national identities, which were defined in territorial terms.
A stress on nationalism and imperialism as distinctively predominant qualities of nineteenth century civilisation also
poses questions for Buzan and Lawson's wider analysis, in particular of how to understand the ideational, economic and
political shifts the world witnessed after the close of the Long Nineteenth Century. Indeed, a tension exists in the
analysis between their claim that a global transformation emerged during the Long Nineteenth Century and is still
unfolding (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 274), on the one hand, and the way that they, on the other hand, categorise this
span of time into three distinct periods of Westerncolonial international society (to c. 1945), Westernglobal
12 COOPER

international society (to c. 2000 2010), and decentred globalism (post2010) (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 273
274). While Buzan and Lawson attempt to sidestep the debates over the assertion of historical turning points, cumula-
tive vs. disjunctural changes, and the nature of temporality itself (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 36), their analysis remains
question begging regarding the nature of the continuity and discontinuity from the Industrial Revolution to the present.
These two scholars wish to treat ideational transformations as partly constitutive of the new mode of power, which they
also see as having elicited change in how polities and peoples related to each other (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p. 37). But
their failure to locate these processes within a sociological account of the emergence of a multiplicity of public societies
weakens their analysis. In the twentieth century the national public sphere has become more universal, a fact that
expresses the outcome of political struggles, which were antagonistic to the colonial power relations previously
established. Although it took a different form, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on igniting national sentiments within
Europe did create a precedent that would be repeated in the struggles against colonialism in the periphery.
This suggests an intimate relationship exists between the dynamics of capitalist industrialisation and geopolitical
antagonisms over the distribution of power amongst societies. While formal colonialism has, thankfully, been
consigned to history,4 struggles over the distribution of power amongst states remain firmly part of the
international order. But the concept of the mode of power is arguably too vague a formulation to capture these trans-
formed power relations. Contrastingly, seeing the posteighteenth century mode of power as geopolitically driven
(and, as such, uneven and combined) capitalist development arguably expresses these interconnections between state
formation and industrialisation more clearly. Buzan and Lawson's analysis, on the other hand, makes potentially incon-
sistent claims on the continuities and discontinuities the world has seen across the longer span of time. For example,
they argue socialism and scientific racism were two of the key ideologies of progress which partially constituted the
new mode of power, and, further argue, that the transformation entailed by this mode are still on going today. But
they also recognise the influence of both these ideologies has greatly diminished (Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, p.
281). Naturally, this poses a question of why national identity and political nationalism have remained of enduring
importance as these other ideologies have declined, i.e. what sociological processes explain the stickiness of one
set of ideas and the decline of another? If Buzan and Lawson had situated their analysis of this consciousness within
the sociology of the nationalpublic sphere, then this could have provided the basis for an account of why national
identity and the nationstate has remained of paramount importance to today's world order and how this contrasts
to the numerous historical problems transnational political experiments have encountered. A causal use of uneven
and combined development explains the latter difficulties in terms of the antagonistic effects of political multiplicity.
The immense scope in terms of the temporal range of the study, the theories addressed, and evidence assessed
is undoubtedly both the ultimate strength and weakness of The Global Transformation. Several of the criticisms made
in the foregoing could be seen as complaints that some issues were not engaged in sufficient theoretical depth. But it
is also a tribute to the scholarly rigour of the text that theorists across intellectual traditions will find in the work ample
material with which to frame complementary and critical interventions alike. As a result, the work is very likely to
spark a longoverdue interest in the nineteenth century as an epoch of social transformation, and, in doing so, recast
many core assumptions of both IR and Historical Sociology.

ENDNOTES
1
As such, they arguably occupy a novel position visvis the various theoretical debates of IR because they appear to argue
that ideational processes are necessary for the constitution of power without accepting the wider epistemological claims of
the constructivists commonly associated with this position (Ashley, 1984; Wendt, 1992).
2
There is some limited discussion of the rise of mass politics empirically, but not conceptually and sociologically. (see Buzan
& Lawson, 2015a, pp. 139141).
3
Reinsch's text, while critical of the turn to nationalimperialism, also repeatedly conflates race and nation and appears to
see the former as the basis for the latter. This is a confusion that clearly reflected the assumptions of the age. It thus
appears to confirm Eric Hobsbawm's point that many felt the allure of national chauvinism, but no doubt almost all were
deeply imbued with the fundamental racism of nineteenth century civilisation. (see E. Hobsbawm, 1994a, p. 160).
4
Buzan and Lawson lay out the reasons for this very well. (see Buzan & Lawson, 2015a, pp. 240270).
COOPER 13

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How to cite this article: Cooper L. The Global Transformation: Critical reflections on the historical sociology of
the long nineteenth century. J Hist Sociol. 2017;114. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12159