ABSTRACT
This is a book that originated as a result of ‘customer demand’, but also one that we consider is genuinely required by students of IR who generally (and rightly) complain that our discipline has become too ahistorical, too self-referential and generally lacking in ‘roots’. It emerged from an eponymous module at the University of Kent that was taught by Andrew Williams (who now teaches at the University of St Andrews), Simon Rofe (who now teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and Amelia Hadfi eld (who now teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels). It was a very successful module in terms of the numbers of students who were taught – over three hundred a year for a good half-dozen years. Many of the ideas generated by the feedback we received from those students.
