Foundations of Modern International Thought is the third in a loose trilogy of works in international intellectual history. When the first, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, was published in 2000, the field had neither a local habitation nor a name. It had no common agenda, no coherent body of scholarship and no self-identifying practitioners; it therefore occupied no territory on the broader map of contemporary historiography. The very term ‘international intellectual history’ had hardly ever been used in print, let alone deployed to define a field of academic study. By the time the second instalment, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, appeared in 2007, international intellectual history had already begun to emerge as a self-conscious area of inquiry pursued by intellectual historians with international interests and by international historians with inclinations towards intellectual and cultural history. In the half-decade since then, it has become an identifiable field, with an expanding canon of works, a burgeoning set of questions and a fertile agenda for research. I hope this volume might stand as a partial record of its recent development as well as an inspiration for international intellectual historians in the future.

The chapters collected here represent the fruits of over a decade’s work on the intellectual history of conceptions of international relations and international law, mostly in the period before those two modes of interaction and negotiation had acquired their current names, disciplinary boundaries and contemporary canons of authorities and ancestors. The selection of subjects is inevitably arbitrary but it was not random. They mostly sprang from invitations to extend my earlier work on the intellectual history of the anglophone Atlantic world into broader contexts and to cover novel themes. But they did so in light of an ongoing effort to reassess historically some of the myths – in the sense of meaningful narratives, not necessarily delusive falsehoods – that had informed international studies in disciplines outside history. This effort directed my attention, as an intellectual historian, to the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. It also turned my thoughts, as an international historian, to the salience of states and empires, oceanic histories and global connections, over the longue durée as settings for the arguments anatomised in other chapters.