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Introduction; Part I. Conceptual Framework: 1. What are international orders?; 2. Accounting for the transformation of international orders; Part II. The Historical Transformation of International Orders: 3. The origins, constitution and decay of Latin Christendom; 4. The collapse of Latin Christendom; 5. Anarchy without society: Europe after Christendom and before sovereignty; 6. The origins, constitution and decay of the sinosphere; 7. Heavenly kingdom, imperial nemesis: barbarians, martyrs and the collapse of the sinosphere; 8. Into the abyss: civilization, barbarism and the end of the sinosphere; 9. The great disorder and the birth of the East Asian sovereign state system; Part III. Contemporary Challenges and Future Trajectories of World Order: 10. The Jihadist terrorist challenge to the global state system; Conclusion

What are international orders, how are they destroyed, and how can they be defended in the face of violent challenges? Advancing an innovative realist-constructivist account of international order, Andrew Phillips addresses each of these questions in War, Religion and Empire. Phillips argues that international orders rely equally on shared visions of the good and accepted practices of organized violence to cultivate cooperation and manage conflict between political communities. Considering medieval Christendom's collapse and the East Asian Sinosphere's destruction as primary cases, he further argues that international orders are destroyed as a result of legitimation crises punctuated by the disintegration of prevailing social imaginaries, the break-up of empires, and the rise of disruptive military innovations. He concludes by considering contemporary threats to world order, and the responses that must be taken in the coming decades if a broadly liberal international order is to survive

Since 1919, world leaders have sought to uphold and advance international order by sponsoring a succession of global security hierarchies, understood as authoritative arrangements that are global in scope and dedicated to mitigating international security challenges. These hierarchies have progressively broadened in the inclusivity of their security referents. Explicitly racist and civilizational answers to the question 'security for whom' have given way to more cosmopolitan visions of security hierarchy. The scope of the challenges these hierarchies have aimed to mitigate ('security from what') has also broadened, alongside the intrusiveness of the measures ('security through which means') licenced to manage them. The progression towards more inclusive, ambitious and intrusive global security hierarchies has nevertheless evolved in tension with the parallel globalization of both nationalism and the sovereign state system. These countervailing influences – in conjunction with the recent worldwide resurgence of illiberal forces – now threaten the prospective longevity of today's United Nation (UN)-centric cosmopolitan global security hierarchy.

International Relations scholars have turned to China's tributary system to broaden our understanding of international systems beyond the 'states-under-anarchy' model derived from European history. This scholarship forms the inspiration and foil for this article, which refines International Relations scholars' conceptualizations of how international hierarchy arose and endured in East Asia during the Manchu Qing Dynasty — China's last and most territorially expansive imperial dynasty. I argue that existing conceptions of East Asian hierarchy overstate the importance of mutual identification between the region's Confucian monarchies in sustaining Chinese hegemony. Instead, we can understand Qing China's dominance only once we recognize the Manchus as a 'barbarian' dynasty, which faced unique challenges legitimating its rule domestically and internationally. As 'barbarian' conquerors, Manchus did not secure their rule by simply conforming to pre-existing Sinic cultural norms. Instead, like other contemporary Eurasian empires, they maintained dominance through strategies of heterogeneous contracting. Domestically, they developed customized legitimacy scripts tailored to win the allegiance of the empire's diverse communities. Internationally, meanwhile, the Manchus strategically appropriated existing Confucian norms and practices of tributary diplomacy in ways that mitigated — but did not eliminate — Confucian vassals' resentment of 'barbarian' domination. East Asian hierarchy may have been more peaceful than Westphalian anarchy, but the absence of war masks a more coercive reality where the appearance of Confucian conformity obscured more fractious relations between Qing China and even its ostensibly most loyal vassals.

International Relations scholars have turned to China's tributary system to broaden our understanding of international systems beyond the 'states-under-anarchy' model derived from European history. This scholarship forms the inspiration and foil for this article, which refines International Relations scholars' conceptualizations of how international hierarchy arose and endured in East Asia during the Manchu Qing Dynasty — China's last and most territorially expansive imperial dynasty. I argue that existing conceptions of East Asian hierarchy overstate the importance of mutual identification between the region's Confucian monarchies in sustaining Chinese hegemony. Instead, we can understand Qing China's dominance only once we recognize the Manchus as a 'barbarian' dynasty, which faced unique challenges legitimating its rule domestically and internationally. As 'barbarian' conquerors, Manchus did not secure their rule by simply conforming to pre-existing Sinic cultural norms. Instead, like other contemporary Eurasian empires, they maintained dominance through strategies of heterogeneous contracting. Domestically, they developed customized legitimacy scripts tailored to win the allegiance of the empire's diverse communities. Internationally, meanwhile, the Manchus strategically appropriated existing Confucian norms and practices of tributary diplomacy in ways that mitigated — but did not eliminate — Confucian vassals' resentment of 'barbarian' domination. East Asian hierarchy may have been more peaceful than Westphalian anarchy, but the absence of war masks a more coercive reality where the appearance of Confucian conformity obscured more fractious relations between Qing China and even its ostensibly most loyal vassals.

This article critically engages the Global Transformation thesis through the lens of multiple early modernities. The 19th century undeniably saw a profound shift in the global mode of power, driven by industrialization, rational state-building, and the rise of ideologies of progress. But this triad impacted on regions that had already been reconfigured by an early modern Eurasian Transformation, centered on an 'industrious revolution', absolutist state-building, and the spread of 'civilizing processes'. This Eurasian Transformation yielded distinct early modernities and regional orders, which fundamentally conditioned the nature, extent, impact, and legacy of later Western expansion. Acknowledging the diversity of these early modern orders enhances our understanding of the variance in patterns of order reconfiguration that attended the Global Transformation. Equally, it strengthens the case for reconceptualizing international systems change as encompassing reconfiguration as much as revolutionary transformation. This cautions against thinking of 'great transformations' in world politics as constituting radically discontinuous breaks with the past.