Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of “transboundary entanglements” – patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from sociology to international relations, and including subfields from postcolonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call “global methodological relationalism” and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a “global historical sociology” oriented around “global methodological relationalism” can assess the significance of “transboundary entanglements.”

Advocates of global international relations (IR) present IR as a Eurocentric discipline that should now diversify its theoretical and empirical focus to the non-west. This paper turns this argument on its head, arguing that IR was ‘global at birth’. Concentrating in particular on the implications that global IR debate has for our understanding of the historical development of disciplinary knowledge, the article argues that both conventional and critical stances within this debate tend to express a substantialist conception of knowledge formations, one which encourages diffusionist ideas of the spread of knowledge from an origin to a destination, and essentialist representations of specific geographies of knowledge. In order to address this, the paper proposes a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge that offers a more historically grounded understanding of the ongoing, provisional, connected, and configurational nature of knowledge construction, without losing sight of the hierarchies that inflect this. The article applies this framework to archival work on the intellectual history of international thought in India, offering an approach that allows a global account of the development of disciplinary IR that operates within and beyond imperial frames, encompassing the entangled histories of colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial lineages of what became known as ‘International Relations’ in the 20th century.

Global international relations (IR) generates space for theoretical expressions drawn from outside the experiences of the modern West. Alongside these demands for theoretical pluralism can be found a concern for widening IR's historical frames of reference. Yet, to date, the relationship between global IR and history is the least developed part of the project's agenda. This article suggests two ways in which this relationship can be strengthened. One draws from global history, shows how transboundary connections and relational dynamics forge the units used by advocates of global IR in their analysis: West and non-West, core and periphery, metropole and colony. The other draws from global historical sociology as it advances the role of power asymmetries for understanding the patterns and entanglements in transboundary connections. Connecting global IR to global history and global historical sociology can help produce a fuller understanding of the interactive connections and asymmetrical entanglements between peoples, places, ideas, and institutions that drive historical development. We illustrate this potential through a brief analysis of the rise of the West. This, in turn, demonstrates the ways in which three visions of the global – global IR, global history, and global historical sociology – can be mutually beneficial.