Part I

The Noble Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

Political scientists in early twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to British theorist and statesman George Cornwall Lewis (1806–1863).¹ His best-known work is Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprised of three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.”² Modern writers, he said, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

Government of Dependencies was first reprinted fifty years later, a moment when modern writers—that is social scientists—were finally taking up Lewis’s challenge by founding a new American Political Science Association that would marshal the country’s burgeoning intellectual resources in support of the expanded empire. The central challenge that defined the new field called international relations was how to ensure the efficient political administration and race development of subject peoples, from the domestic dependencies and backward races at home to the complex race formations found in the new overseas territories and dependencies. What these generally younger, socialist-leaning, progressive political scientists saw as a bright new dawn for the discipline, the Anglo-Saxon race, and civilization, other social scientists saw instead as a dark and ignoble end of their own 20-year-long effort to bring “the searching light of reason to bear” upon problems of politics.³

The early decades of international relations in the United States is a story about empire. We know its outlines mainly due to the work of two historical-oriented specialists in international relations, David Long and Brian Schmidt.⁴ The historians of empire and of imperial anthropology have shown us that empire wasn’t easily pried apart from race in turn-of-the-century America, so the new disciplinary historians have gotten one important part of the account wrong. The problem is the current understanding of turn-of-the-century the place of race in the thought of social scientists of the era. The strand that still resonates in our own time about empire, states, and the like is considered to be the real scientific or theoretical core of the scholars’ work, while the strand that involves now-repudiated racial constructs is treated instead as mere “language,” “metaphors,” and “prejudices” of the era. To undo this error and recover in full the ideas of early international relations theorists it is necessary, as John Hobson has shown, to bring the work of historians of conservative and reform Darwinism to bear on the first specialists and foundational texts.

We will also need to loosen the hold a particular idea has over our contemporary imaginations—that the subject matter of international relations has forever been found on one side of a geographic border between the “domestic” and the “foreign”—because the scholars who wrote the first articles, papers, treatises, and textbooks in international relations all included the “Negro problem” in the South within the new field of study. Political scientists imagined two fundamentally different logics and processes at work and thus different rules that applied across the boundary dividing Anglo-Saxons or Teutons and the inferior races found in Indian Territory, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Here was the original and signal contribution of U.S. international relations to the theory and practice of hierarchy, a theory that W. E. B. Du Bois challenged in his continuing arguments about the global color line.

For those who studied fundamental problems of world order at the turn of the century, it was innovations in communications and transportation technologies combined with the unprecedented expansion of capital that had increased contact and thus the potential for conflict between the world’s superior and inferior races. Strategies for managing conflict or arresting the natural tendency toward war depended on a correct understanding of the way biology and environment determined and limited the prospects for civilizing the child races. Against the varieties of evolutionary theory offered up as explanation and justification for hierarchy, anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Du Bois both began in the late 1890s to explain hierarchy instead as the outcome of history, specifically, of colonial and mercantile capitalist expansion and of the transatlantic slave trade that secured the dominance of the West. Boas’s role in challenging the idea that hierarchy was natural and biologically rooted is well known. Du Bois’s parallel explications are both less well known and misunderstood.