The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations The Joseph Fletcher Prize Forum

The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations offers the most comprehensive and conceptually ambitious contribution to International Relations (IR) theory and history to date. At 752 pages and 49 chapters, it combines encyclopaedic breadth with thematic focus. Organized around ‘ modernity ’ and ‘ granularity ’ , the editors seek to capture the ‘ multiple origins, understandings, and deployments of the international (and the global) ’ (724). The Handbook offers a sharp challenge to Eurocentrism: the presumption of the uniqueness and superiority of Western modernity (68, 70, 126) and its diffusion from Europe to the rest of the world (85, 87, 411, 415, 614, 617, 619, 570, 730). 1 The volume is highly successful in problematizing the West, but is uneven in applying the same critiques to non-Western cases.