Reviews for The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain and the Late-Industrializing World since 1815

The average rating for The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain and the Late-Industrializing World since 1815 based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-10 00:00:00 Paul Refakis Well-written not only for a work in the IR theory canon but for any work of historical analysis. Hinsley competently, informatively, and lucidly develops a consistent thesis that insists on the balance of power among Great States as the key to international stability. He marks the emergence of this system of global (or Western) politics to the eighteenth century but examines traces of it to the decline of the medieval period. He also analyzes various schemes of international organization advanced for varying motives that have contested the balance-of-power system, seeing in them the antecedents of the League of Nations and United Nations that appeared in response to the catastrophic world wars of the twentieth century. Hinsley regards these attempts at international organization as misguided and ineffectual insofar as they sought to usurp the fundamental dynamic of the balance of power that characterized the relations among states. My own instincts recoil at such assertive "realism" (in the IR usage of the term), with its unrelenting assertion of the primacy of the state and zero-sum calculations in inter-state relations, etc., but Hinsley presents his case with a mastery of knowledge and a masterful analysis. I don't have to agree with it to admire it. Plus, he gives serious attention--with only occasionally a faint hint of condescension, if you're really looking for it--to the proposals for structuring the international system to preserve peace (Sully, Saint-Pierre, Kant, etc.), along with the peace movements and advocacy campaigns for arbitration and international law that grew in prominence through the nineteenth century. If he rejects the bases of their arguments and efforts, he nevertheless recognized them as worth commentary at a time (1962) when most serious scholars of history and international relations ignored them.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-14 00:00:00 Renee Ramos This is a good collection of texts of different kinds, from a variety of fields. At first I thought it had a broader scope, but essentially it primarily focuses on WW2 with an emphasis on the Holocaust. Still, there are some essays that reach beyond, i.e. the population exchange between Greece and Turkey and the Italian anti-fascist intelligentsia. At the beginning there were passing mentions on the Armenian diaspora as well, but there is no text that elaborates upon it. Also, the main migratory setting is the US.