I often listen to the radio when following laundry, and today was no exception. Our local NPR affiliate was playing the TED Radio Hour. Remember when TED was kind of neat and exciting… before it revealed itself for what it is: a cliché-ridden academic variant of “business book summaries for executives”? Anyway, the program featured Andrew McAfee‘s TED talk, “Are Droids Taking Our Jobs.” In the course of an otherwise lucid talk, McAfee described the industrial revolution as the ‘only thing that really bent the curve’ of human prosperity and development — the only development that has radically transformed human life and livelihood in our species’ history.
The underlying sentiment here is sound: the 19th century — and its downstream effects — materially, socially, and culturally altered human existence in ways not seen for millennia before. This is a point made well in a forthcoming International Studies Quarterly piece by Barry Buzan and George Lawson, and which PM and I respond to (generally favorably) in a short reply. But it commits a classic error of techno-presentism. It misses the critical prehistoric technological innovations without which none of the oft-mentioned transformative developments in human history — writing, steam power, electricity, computers, or whatever — would have been possible. This line of argument ignores agriculture. Agriculture made it possible for a strata of society to specialize in activities other than procuring food. Everything that’s come since has been a working out of the possibilities opened up by agriculture and husbandry.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
Just glanced at the Buzan and Lawson piece (haven’t read your and PM’s reply yet). The premise — that IR mostly ignores the 19th cent. — seems somewhat questionable. Going through a bunch of textbooks etc and examining their treatments of the 19thc is not definitive evidence. (Some) IR types have spent a fair amount of time debating the causes of WW1; that often (not always, depending on the approach) entails talking about the 19th cent. (Also, B&L should have referred to the treaties of Westphalia or the Peace of Westphalia instead of “the Treaty [sic] of Westphalia.”) However I will reserve judgment until having read the article (always a good idea ;)).
Btw/fwiw, there is a piece in Intl Studies Review 14:1 — Hannes Lacher and Julian Germann, “Before Hegemony: Britain, Free Trade, and 19th Century World Order Revisited.”
Also, e.g., David Rowe et al, “Binding Prometheus: How the 19th Cent. Expansion of Trade Impeded Britain’s Ability to Raise an Army,” ISQ, Dec. 2002
Their claim is much more specific. They agree that the 19th century has been mined as data for building theories. But they argue that it hasn’t been treated as a period of fundamental transformation in world politics. This isn’t the case for world-systems theory, obviously, but I’d say that it is largely true of what “mainstream” international-relations scholarship.
OK, that claim sounds more plausible.
Seeing as much of my research is focused on the early nineteenth century, greater attention to that period in IR would definitely be a much welcomed development. That said, I’m a little weary of strict periodizations and especially of the search for definitive ‘historical turning points.’ The significance of prior innovations in agriculture that you point out here is a great example undermining the notion that industrialization was the “only thing that really bent the curve.” Others might be the expansion of long-distance trade, the bureaucratization of power, and the far-ranging projection of political spheres of influence, all of which arguably began (at least) a few centuries before 1800.
I’m looking forward to reading both the Buzan/Lawson piece and your response.
Dan, thanks for highlighting both of these pieces – very thought-provoking reading.