Much like the dissolving international order confronting us, the concept of an international order is neither easily graspable nor predetermined, but it has provoked a range of theories and methods often depending on the international disciplines – law, politics, history. That said, while international relations scholars – whose own craft can be traced back to 1919 – became the proponents of its importance, historians in general have tended to avoid the term ‘international order’. Why have historians not directly and systematically engaged with the past of international order, or even the idea that it has a past? This afterword considers this question in the context of the significance of historical understanding of more commonly (and implicitly) studied national orders, and how historical interest in the international has significantly shifted over the last century.

This chapter draws on work by historians, international relations scholars, and international lawyers to demonstrate the significance of the Paris peace settlements after the First World War in accounts of international order. Building on recent historiographical debates, the chapter argues that Paris in 1919 was a site of remarkable innovations in the reinvention of international order. A wide range of actors set out new ways of thinking about international politics, established innovative institutions and transformed the conduct of international relations.

Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at Cambridge working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’ This chapter offers the first close reading of the text itself and of its major influences and context, challenging the (gendered) distinction between international and internationalist thought. Indeed, it argues that it was interwar internationalist international thought that inspired some contemporary IR academics to write for broader audiences, and women to engage with international politics. Overall, the essay both makes a case for including a range of genres in histories of international thought, whether work that had a primarily pedagogic or political rather than scholarly function.

Economic developments have long shaped what we think of as the main themes of global as well as national history, from the story of capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the age of empires-cum-nations. Yet peacemaking at the end of the Napoleonic wars brought onto the international scene financiers, rentiers, and bankers, funding the future of Europe. Their presence was indicative of the emergence of a new capitalist economic order shaped by industrialisation and imperialism. This chapter uses a focus on this rising class as a lens through which to survey the social and ideological influence of shifting economic relations, practices and identities on the politics of peacemaking and on political agendas, from their impact on foreign policies and questions of ‘security’, to the proposals for political consideration brought to the peacemakers by Benjamin Constant, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen.