This book aims to reset the way we think about where we are in the unfolding process of modern history. It challenges the set of benchmark dates widely used in both public debates and the discipline of International Relations (IR) to periodize modern international history. That set of dates – 1648, (sometimes 1815), 1919, 1945 and 1989 – rests largely on big wars featuring mainly Western great powers, and sometimes Russia and Japan. Its key idea is that the outcomes of such wars remake world order. But the world order under discussion is the Western one.

This set of dates is enormously influential in the way that contemporary history and international relations are conceptualized, written about and taught. Without giving much thought to either its conceptual foundations or its cultural and political bias, it has embedded an unbalanced, West-centric approach to understanding the modern world. The centrality this orthodoxy gives to great power war and the Western world order excludes both too big a portion of humankind, and too many important economic, societal and environmental variables that should also count in how we formulate periodization.

Any subdivision of history presupposes a pattern of continuities and ruptures or transitions. It is up to the periodizer to specify ‘the working hypothesis and the conceptual premises behind it’ (Guillaume, 2021: 565–6; see also Epple, 2021: 49).