Studying historical international orders through system encounters

Abstract How can we explain interactions between historical international orders? Despite growing interest in the role of marginal interactions in the evolution of international orders, scholars struggle to account for their contingency. Enduring commitments to substantialist approaches limit our ability to theorize the link between micro-level interactions in system encounters and macro-level international order, and vice versa. I argue that conflicts in system encounters can be explained as manifestations of a process through which international orders and their differences are constituted and negotiated. International orders and their differences exist in concrete instantiations only in the context of system encounters. Building on a practice-relational approach to international order, I propose that system encounters are characterized by a series of crises that challenge the taken-for-granted nature of established practices, prompting actors to articulate the relevant differences between them. I illustrate this process in the context of the Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and show how the relevant differences between the East Asian and European international orders can be reconstructed from those interactions. This paper advances the study of historical international orders and has important implications for how we think about conflicts in system encounters.