Hegemonic orders and the idea of history

Abstract This article makes the case that the literature of hegemonic orders and debates on the crisis of US hegemony have been shaped and up to a point intellectually confined by a tradition or idea of world history understood as a series of hegemonic powers. This tradition of history as a succession of hegemonic powers is traced from ancient to modern sources, later reconstituted as a theoretical discourse. In drawing attention to the historical traditions underpinning this literature, these findings contribute to advancing the historiography of International Relations and to studying the role of multiple contemporaneous histories in the emerging international order.