Race and Empire: The Origins of InternationalRelations

REVIEW BY DUNCAN BELL

Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations. Edited byDavid Long and Brian Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 212pp., $65.00 (ISBN 0-7914-6323-0).

The intellectual history of international relations (IR)Fthe history, that is, of theway in which the patterns of global politics have been theorized, both inside andoutside the academyFwas for many years analyzed, if at all, in a whiggish mannerthat sought to provide ideological support for positions in contemporary theoreticaldebates. This led to the tendency to view the interwar period as a time duringwhich naıve (‘‘utopian’’ or ‘‘idealist’’) advocates of international organization andworld peace proliferated, only to be defeated by the emergent generation of hard-headed ‘‘realists.’’ This foundational narrative, owing much to the rhetorical bril-liance of E. H. Carr, was internalized as one of the founding myths of internationalrelations; reiterated in textbooks, lecture courses, and scholarly articles. In recentyears, this pernicious form of ahistoricism has come under sustained attack, and anumber of scholars have started to take seriously the intellectual history of the field.The interwar period, among others, has been reassessed, and its rich diversityexcavated (Long and Wilson 1995; Schmidt 1998; Wilson 1998; Sylvest 2004,2005). Despite this, many IR scholars continue to peddle obsolete accounts of thefield’s past (see, for example, Mearsheimer 2005). In so doing, they demonstratethe very problem that the ‘‘historical turn’’ has sought to expose.

Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, edited byDavid Long and Brian Schmidt, is a useful addition to the intellectual history of IR.The book comprises an introduction and seven chapters, covering a variety ofindividuals and theoretical positions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryinternational political thought. David Clinton analyzes the contribution of the Ger-man emigre scholar Francis Lieber; Schmidt examines the political thought of PaulReinsch; Long explores the paternalistic aspects of J. A. Hobson’s conceptions ofinternational government and imperial organization; Jeanne Morefield delves intothe philosophical idealism molding Alfred Zimmern’s visions of nationality andinternational commonwealth; and Peter Wilson outlines Leonard Woolf ’s Fabianradicalism, in particular his ideas about the economics of empire. The last twochapters analyze wider patterns of thought. Jan-Stefan Fritz examines turn of thecentury uses of ‘‘science’’ in theorizing international cooperation, looking especiallyat Woolf, Mitrany, Hobson, and Reinsch, while Robert Vitalis argues that racismand in particular ‘‘white supremacism’’ played (and continues to play) a key role inthe institutional and intellectual development of IR. He notes, for example, that thefield’s first professional journal was the Journal of Race Development (1910), whichwas later renamed the Journal of International Relations (1919), until finally settlingon its present name: Foreign Affairs (1922).

Overall, Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relationsseeks to provide a ‘‘revisionist account’’ of the origins of IR (p. 1). The revisionism

r 2005 International Studies Review.PublishedbyBlackwellPublishing,350MainStreet,Malden,MA02148,USA,and9600GarsingtonRoad,OxfordOX42DQ,UK.

International Studies Review (2005) 7, 633–635

lies in locating questions of empire and internationalism, and the fluid relationshipbetween the two, as formative ‘‘constituent issues’’ (p. 2). In their helpful intro-duction, Long and Schmidt argue convincingly that ‘‘imperialism and internation-alism, not idealism and realism, were the dominant themes when internationalrelations first began to take on the characteristics of a professional field of inquiry’’(p. 9). The book challenges what Vitalis labels the ‘‘wilful forgetting’’ of (in his case)US political science (p. 160). It is this type of forgetting that leads many standard IRnarratives to claim that imperialism never figured significantly on the intellectualagenda of the field (see, for example, Doyle 1986:11). As each of the chaptersdemonstrates, imperialism was a central concern, both in the academy and in thewider public sphere. Long and Schmidt also seek to show that ‘‘systematic inter-national relations scholarship predates World War I’’ (p. 6). Although the former ofthese ‘‘revisionist’’ claims is convincing, and illustrated by the compatible analyses inthe chapters, the systematic analysis of international politics reaches much furtherback than the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Indeed, it can be found throughoutthe modern period.

As in most collections of this kind, the quality of the chapters varies. At their best,including those by Morefield and Wilson, they highlight the intellectual scaffoldingunderpinning individual political visions as well as illustrate the dissonances inparticular renderings of the world. Some of the other essays are beset by a problemcommon to much intellectual history: overgeneralization. Long, for example, fol-lows the unfortunate postcolonial habit of interpreting liberalism in a one-dimen-sional manner. As such, he claims that empire has always been ‘‘integral to theliberal intellectual project’’ (p. 72). This would have been news to Richard Cobden,Herbert Spencer, and many of their disciples (see also Bell 2006). Vitalis’ otherwiseexcellent chapter would likewise have benefitted from a more subtle interpretationof the various meanings of the term ‘‘race’’ as it has evolved, both over time and indifferent national settings. Perhaps the main problem with Imperialism and Interna-tionalism in the Discipline of International Relations concerns its scope. There is littlesense of the boundaries of a ‘‘discipline.’’ In the introduction, Long and Schmidtspeak of a ‘‘conversation’’ among all those writing systematically about IR (p. 1). Atother times, however, the book points toward a more strictly defined understandingof a discipline, as an institutionalized academic enterprise. At least three categoriesof thinkers fall within the disciplinary embrace. First, there are those who werecentrally involved in the creation of a subfield of political science focusing on theanalysis of world politics. This would include, for example, Zimmern, who was thefirst occupant of a chair in IR in the English speaking world, at the University ofWales, Aberystwyth. The second category includes those who studied at least sometopics in international politics and were involved in the professional organization ofUS political science. This includes both Lieber and Reinsch. And finally, there arethose who made important contributions to the study of world politics but did sofrom outside academia. This includes Hobson and Woolf, neither of whom everheld an academic post. Their relationship to ‘‘disciplinary history’’ is far from clear.

In general, though, Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of InternationalRelations makes a valuable contribution to understanding the origins and evolutionof theorizing world politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

References

BELL, DUNCAN. (2006) Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought. TheHistorical Journal (forthcoming).

DOYLE, MICHAEL. (1986) Empires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.LONG, DAVID, AND PETER WILSON, EDS. (1995) Thinkers of the Twenty Year’ Crisis: Interwar Idealism

Reassessed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Race and Empire: The Origins of International Relations634

MEARSHEIMER, JOHN. (2005) E. H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On. International Relations19:139–152.

SCHMIDT, BRIAN. (1998) The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations.Albany: State University of New York Press.

SYLVEST, CASPER. (2004) Interwar Internationalism, The British Labour Party, and the Historiographyof International Relations. International Studies Quarterly 48:409–443.

SYLVEST, CASPER. (2005) Continuity and Change in British Liberal Internationalism, ca. 1900–1930.Review of International Studies 31:263–283.

WILSON, PETER. (1998) The Myth of the ‘‘First Great Debate.’’ Review of International Studies 24:1–15.

DUNCAN BELL 635