Original citation

international society.
As we will see later, this view of international history has much to 
recommend it. However, we need to be sensitive to the fact that other 
forms of interaction and exchange existed between all sorts of political, 
social and economic groups – tribes, clans, ethnic groups and cities – 
long before the fifteenth century and well outside the boundaries of 
Europe. Complex systems of interacting groups developed as far apart 
geographically as imperial China (a civilisation stretching back 5,000 
years), the Middle East (whose civilisations stretch back even further), 
and Africa (the most likely cradle of our species). If we accept orthodox 
wisdom that homo sapiens came ‘out of Africa’ more than 100,000 years 
ago, we might argue that something loosely defined as IR developed 
between small human bands when our ancestors first decided to migrate 
across Africa, Eurasia and, subsequently, the planet.
International relations did not emerge, fully-grown, with the birth of the 
modern European state system around in the sixteenth century. States – as 
we shall argue throughout this course – are crucial to explaining much of 
what has happened in world politics for the last 500 years. However, world 
history clearly shows that, for many centuries, it was not sovereign states 
that engaged in diplomacy, warfare and economic exchange. Rather, this 
role was often filled by great empires like the Egyptian, the Persian, the 
Roman, the Mongol, and even the Mayan and the Aztec. In fact, the more 
we discover about these empires’ complex histories, the more we notice 
how late in the day states actually emerged as serious players on the world 
stage. Moreover, when states did finally emerge out of the shadow of these 
empires, they did so with the help of those who had gone before; not just 
from the Greeks and the Romans, but also from many parts of the non-
Christian world. Islam, in particular, has played a crucial role in the rise of 
Europe’s state system – both negatively by threatening it and positively by 
preserving and translating the learning of the ancient world that formed 
the basis for the European Renaissance following the medieval period.