Original citation

Stop and read sections 2 and 3 of Chapter 2, pp.37–41
Activity
Each of the international societies described in these readings – Greek, Indian, 
Chinese, Roman, Christian and Islamic – include a set of institutions that define who 
can act legitimately in international society and how these actors are supposed to 
behave. Follow the example as you complete the table below to keep track of these 
societies’ different international institutions. Make a special note of institutions that 
develop in a number of different international societies.

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11 Introduction to international relations
32
International society
Institutions of international society
Greek
Who? City-states, Oracles
How? Arbitration, Diplomacy (proxenia), Rules of War, 
Sanctity of Treaties
Indian
Chinese
Roman
Christian
Islamic
European expansion 
We should be more than a little critical of the ways in which some writers 
have traditionally thought about IR: largely through European eyes, and 
mainly as something that only became seriously interesting when states 
emerged as the main actor in world affairs. IR does not begin and end with 
the rise of European states. Students of world politics must nevertheless 
confront an incontrovertible fact: that at some point between the late 
fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europe – initially around the 
Mediterranean and later in states bordering the Atlantic (Portugal, Spain, 
the UK, Holland and France) – began to evolve in ways that changed the 
course of European and world history. In a very important sense, there was 
no such thing as a truly interconnected world before 1500. Only after the 
period of European exploration and expansion beginning at the turn of the 
sixteenth century can we begin to conceive of such an entity emerging. As 
one of the great historians of world history, J.M. Roberts, has argued, the 
age of a true world history – and by implication the history of global IR 
– starts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continues for another 
400 years, by which time European domination of the globe was complete.
The sources of this dynamic expansion have been hotly debated. Some 
explanations are technical: from Europe’s medieval agricultural revolution, 
to the advances made in learning during the Renaissance, to technological 
improvements that made oceanic shipping safer and their captains better 
able to navigate. Some have suggested a more economic reason: the 
rise of capitalism. According to this thesis, it was no coincidence that 
as