In Becoming International, Jens Bartelson, among the most deeply erudite scholars in the field of international studies and political science today, tells us how the “international” world came to be. What distinguishes this book from other recent contributions to this topic is its exploration of the “conceptualization” of the international, and “how such conceptualizations have taken hold of our political imagination” (5). In other words, it is a study of how “internationality” became a social fact through global sociological processes larger than the actors or any one era involved.

Chapter 1 explores the globalization of the international, arguing that its emergence was more complex than the conventional notion of a historical movement from empires to nation-states. Chapter 2 explores the use of Roman and medieval concepts of imperium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the sovereignty claims of nascent states. Chapter 3 explores the age of revolution, 1776–1825, not as the beginning of the end of empire but its reconfiguration. Chapter 4 explores the rise of nationalism, how it was both reconciled with empire and rallied in its anti-imperial form against empire. Chapter 5 continues this story into the twentieth century's era of decolonization, in which the hostilities of the Cold Wa