Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science, has co-written a new book, Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2025).

The book, written with Charles R. Butcher, challenges the Eurocentric view of the world by offering a comparative analysis of non-Western state systems in the 19th century, supported by an original dataset. The authors investigate the rise and fall of numerous states impacted by colonial expansion, focusing on regions like East and South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Africa. Their research highlights shared patterns in state development and governance, contributing fresh insights into debates about centralization and colonial rule.

Griffiths specializes in secession, sovereignty, state systems and international order. Most recently, Griffiths wrote The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations (Cornell University Press, 2021), which won the 2021 IEA Best Book Award. Griffiths has also taught at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Sydney, where he received both a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Small Grant Award and a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

He is currently the research co-director for International and Intra-State Conflict and a senior research associate for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

From the publisher:

Prior to European colonization, the world was thickly populated with hundreds of independent states and vibrant regional state systems. Yet these states are typically excluded from traditional international relations scholarship, which has mostly focused on the European experience.

This book provides a groundbreaking comparative analysis of non-Western states and state systems in the nineteenth century. Using an original data set on independent states during this period, Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths answer fundamental questions such as how many states there were, when they arose, and when they died, documenting the large number of states that were extinguished as a consequence of European colonialism. They explore the structure of nineteenth-century state systems in East Asia, South Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, and West Africa, examining the effects of war, trade, and interaction capacity. Through these case studies, Butcher and Griffiths provide novel perspectives on longstanding debates over state centralization and the choice between indirect and direct forms of rule.

Shedding new light on the dynamics of non-Western interstate relations during the nineteenth century, Before Colonization reveals striking similarities between state systems across diverse historical settings.