International Relations of the Middle East has long acknowledged the importance of Ottoman legacies in shaping the modern Middle Eastern state-system. Indeed, scholars often diagnose the region’s recurring crises as symptoms of a deeper structural dislocation that began with the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and culminated in colonial partition post-WWI. In this paper, I argue that this conventional narrative inadequately identifies how nineteenth century dynamics reshaped the social bases of power in the region. To offer greater insight, I turn to IR scholars Barry Buzan and George Lawson, whose book 'The Global Transformation: History, Modernity, and the Making of International Relations' (2015) argues that social processes unleashed during the long nineteenth century not only fundamentally transformed the nature of the international system, but continue to shape the dynamics underlying contemporary international politics. A non-Eurocentric revision of Buzan and Lawson's argument, I suggest, can offer productive insights for conceptualizing today’s most vital political developments, from state crisis and fragmentation to civil war. To move ahead with our analysis of the Middle East in the twenty-first century, we must first return to the nineteenth. Or, to put it a different way: International Relations of the Middle East must go back to the future.