'This hugely ambitious and engaging book should immediately establish itself as a foundational text for the study of international relations. Whatever scholarly debates may arise regarding matters of emphasis, interpretation, omission and commission, Buzan and Lawson have achieved a grand synthesis that would have been impossible in less capable hands. Their work presents the nineteenth century as a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding our contemporary world, and we are emphatically reminded that modernity has not yet released us from its grip.' Mlada Bukovansky, Smith College, Massachusetts 'In this ambitious work, Buzan and Lawson do nothing less than tell us how our global modernity came to be. But they also tell us why the discipline of international relations has failed to understand this transformation before, and how we should analyse and theorize global modernity in the first place. Partly a concise history of modern global power, partly a sustained critique of...