| Scholars of international relations and the public at large assume that the international system is fundamentally 'Darwinian' in nature. In this view, international politics is reduced to raw power relations governed by a 'survival of the fittest' logic. As a consequence, much of the study of behavior in international relations is crudely mechanistic, with much attention lavished on the matrices of coercion and power. These dynamics are implicitly and explicitly held to be universal features of international politics. The historical record does not sustain such conclusions. My dissertation shows that far from being an anarchical world governed by conquest and coercion, international politics in late medieval and early modern Europe was grounded in social institutions, including, property, kinship, lordship and military organization. Simple rules of property, kinship and lordship go much further towards explaining the observed patterns of behavior than do traditional political science variables like balance of power, hegemony or sovereignty. These institutions also go far in explaining the ways in which contingency and chance impacted the operation of international relations. |
