Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863).Footnote ⁴ His best-known work is An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising 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.”Footnote ⁵ Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

The Essay was first reprinted fifty years later, at a moment when modern writers—that is, social scientists—were finally taking up Lewis’ challenge, founding a new American Political Science Association (APSA) that would marshal the country's burgeoning intellectual resources in support of the expanded empire. The central challenge defining the new field of “imperial relations” was the efficient political administration and race development of subject peoples, from the domestic dependencies and backward races to the complex race formations found in the new overseas territories and dependencies. Where these generally younger, socialist-leaning, progressive political scientists saw a bright new dawn for the discipline, the Anglo-Saxon race, and civilization, other social scientists saw a dark and ignoble end of their own twenty-year-long effort to bring “the searching light of reason to bear” upon problems of politics.Footnote ⁶

The “birth of the discipline” of international relations is, not surprisingly—save to those graduate students still initiated into its myths—a story about empire. We know its outlines mainly due to the work of two historical-oriented specialists in international relations, David Long and, especially, Brian Schmidt, and it is an account that historians of the other, not-yet-easily differentiated social sciences, as well as historians of American empire, ought to know better.Footnote ⁷

The historians of empire and of imperial anthropology have shown us that empire is not easily pried apart from race in turn-of-the-century America, and so the new historians of international relations have gotten one important part of the account wrong. The objective of this article is to offer a more compelling understanding of the foundations of early international relations theory in not just international law and historical sociology but also in evolutionary biology and racial anthropology. The problem is the current understanding of race's place 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 the real scientific or theoretical core in the scholars’ work, while the strand that involves now-repudiated racial constructs is treated as mere “language,” “metaphors,” and “prejudices” of the era. To undo this error and recover the ideas of early theorists it is necessary to bring the work of historians of conservative and reform Darwinism to bear on the first specialists and foundational texts.

In the science of imperial relations, the world's biological boundaries mattered much more to theory-building than did territorial boundaries, but the territorial division that mattered most was that between the so-called tropic and temperate zones of the world economy. These boundaries dictated the path of race development, in the past through colonization by Anglo-Saxons, and in the future through control over and enhancement of the labor power of the semi-civilized races using techniques of uplift. The international lawyers might have regarded the boundaries between (the small set of) states (to which the law of nations applied) as essential to their art, but the political scientists defined themselves above all by their difference from the lawyers, and in building a science of imperial administration they turned, not to Hugo Grotius, but to Herbert Spencer, August Comte, William Graham Sumner, Benjamin Kidd, and John Wesley Powell.

We will need to loosen the hold that 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 boundary (“beyond the water's edge”). That is problematic 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 biological 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 an American discipline's original contribution 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 century's turn, it was innovations in communications and transportation technologies together 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 “race war” depended on a correct understanding of the way in which 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, the anthropologist Franz Boas and the 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 Western people's dominance. Boas’ role in challenging the idea that hierarchy was natural and biologically rooted is well known. Du Bois’ parallel explications are both less well known and misunderstood.

IN THE BEGINNING

In 1906, the traveler-turned-expert Alleyne Ireland (1871–1951) read a paper at the third annual meeting of the APSA in Providence on the growing interest in the theory of colonial administration, a subject once treated as a “curious by-product rather than as a vital part of Political Science.” Amateurs crowded the field who had failed “to approach the colonial problem in that scientific spirit which in other departments of study is alone held to justify a public expression of opinion.”Footnote ⁸ Ireland earned his reputation as a pioneer in what he called the “science of imperial administration” after publishing Tropical Colonization: An Introduction to the Study of the Subject (1899).Footnote ⁹ In 1901, Ireland was appointed colonial commissioner of the University of Chicago, a post that bought him two years of research for an ambitious eight-volume study, never completed, on colonialism in all the Asian possessions of the United States, France, Britain, and the Netherlands.

The development in political science that Ireland trumpeted is obvious in retrospect. The professors had turned to the question of administration of empire even before founding the APSA in 1903. To be precise, the two private, eastern university-based political science academies had taken the lead in a series of conferences and in the pages of their respective journals. The American Academy of Political and Social Science, founded in Philadelphia in 1889, launched a bi-monthly journal, the Annals, in 1890, and Harry Huntington Powers, a professor of romance languages-turned-economist wrote the lead article in the September 1898 number, “The War as a Suggestion of Manifest Destiny.” Powers explained the war with Spain as the playing out of an irrepressible struggle for “race supremacy” that was leading rapidly to the necessary subjugation of the world's dependent, weak, and uncivilized nations. Within “two centuries, perhaps in one,” only the Slav and Saxons would be left as major powers and locked in a struggle to rule the world.

The Academy followed this initial think piece with the first of its special topics “supplements” ever to focus on American Foreign Policy, a thick volume issued in May 1899 that began with a series of articles on “The Government of Dependencies.” By 1901, the Academy had added a special “department” focused on Colonies and Colonial Government, and at the fifth annual meeting in April, its best attended to date, the speakers came to grips with the fact that the annexation of new territories had multiplied what were now “America's race problems.”Footnote ¹⁰

It was hardly necessary for W.E.B. Du Bois, up from Atlanta for the conference, to defend the claim he had made in his address to the American Negro Academy in March the year before, where he argued that the color line was “the world problem of the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹¹ The transnational connections were clear, if not in the way that Du Bois had envisioned, to the assembly in Philadelphia, and to those who gave papers on the races in the Pacific, the natives of Hawai`i, the races and semi-civilized tribes of the Philippines, and the Latin and African races in Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as on the Negro question in the American South. In the latter, the proven unfitness of African Americans for the ballot was a key reason for believing that all the other less-civilized races that were now American dependents would likewise be unable to govern themselves.Footnote ¹²

As congressman and one-time secretary of the navy Hilary Herbert lamented, “political science played no part” in the reconstruction acts, lamentable since the Negro was unfit to participate in government but Congress had passed them anyway. Herbert was there to introduce the papers by George Winston, the president of North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, and by Du Bois, and he ended his introduction with a quote as famous in some circles as Du Bois’ is about the color line in the twentieth century: “The granting of universal suffrage to the Negro was the mistake of the nineteenth century.”Footnote ¹³

The Illinois-born, Berlin- and Johns Hopkins-trained sociologist Edward Ross (1866–1951) gave the keynote address. He was the best-known scholar at the meeting, a cause célèbre, and a future president of the American Sociological Association who used the occasion to elaborate a new theory of the sources of white racial superiority. This work is misrepresented on the ASA website now, one hundred years later, as a critique of racism. There were those, Ross said, under the sway of Darwin, who exaggerated the fixed race factor in difference, which was as grave an error as those who believed in the “fallacy of equality” or “the power of intercourse and school instruction to lift up a backward folk to the level of the rest.” The sources of difference were subtler. Three factors made the Anglo-Saxon superior: energy, which varied inversely with distance from hot climates, self-reliance, and education.

Americans scored high on “tests of superiority,” save in the South because of the presence there “of several millions of an inferior race.” What would sustain their superiority was “pride of blood” and “an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races,” which secured white men of North America freedom “from the ball and chain of hybridism” that had trapped the Spanish in America and the Portuguese in Brazil and East Africa. “Asiatics” posed the real challenge. They might arrive in the country, enjoy the equal opportunity afforded them, and reproduce at a vastly faster rate than whites, in which case Ross predicted one of three outcomes: Americans might degrade themselves by multiplying more indiscriminately, or Asians might adopt the norms of whites (which he judged unlikely), or whites would silently commit “race suicide” as the “farm hand, mechanic, and operative … whither away.” Much hinged, then, on meeting the challenge to white supremacy posed by immigration. Stem the tide, and the white man's capacity and efficiency, free institutions, and universal education promised “that in the century to come he is destined to play a brilliant and leading role on the stage of history.”

What was left for Du Bois (1868–1963), then still a mostly unknown sociologist but the one true giant in the Philadelphia Manufacturers’ Club that weekend, was to cut through all the cant in defense of hierarchy. The world was witnessing a new phase in European civilization's contact with “undeveloped peoples.” “Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination and debauchery—this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law.”Footnote ¹⁴ Du Bois presented the South as a case of the world phenomenon of race contact in order to challenge the propositions that passed for knowledge in a field “which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about.”Footnote ¹⁵

He analyzed Jim Crow's spatial segregation both as a purposeful project and one with a class dimension, similar to most other features of life in the Black Belt. The primary economic problem for African Americans was not one of turning ex-slaves into efficient workers. The problem was rather one of overcoming slavery's deleterious impact on generations and recognizing the structural disadvantages that both black and white workers faced in the post-feudal, unregulated economy. Racism worsened the effects on black working life, leaving little hope of organizing cross-race associations. What was most needed, therefore, was an expanded set of organizations founded by an expanded cadre of leaders in defense of community interests. The primary tool in this endeavor was the ballot. Without political power black people would continue to suffer at the hands of the police and courts and continue to be starved of the public resources necessary for advancement, beginning with decent schools. Over the long term, better education combined with improved political leadership would make his people better citizens.

There were, thus, not just the two competing theories of world interracial relations in the United States at the turn of the century that Cleland Boyd McAfee laid out in the Journal of the Royal African Society just a few years later, but three. One insisted that black inferiority was real and ineradicable. Equality of any sort was logically impossible. Efforts by blacks to pursue the fantasy of equal rights would lead to increased conflict. The second theory recognized black inferiority as real but not “fundamental.” The dominant race would continue to dictate terms to the subordinate one but the fact of subordination need not end in conflict. It was possible to imagine forms of uplift that might make possible “some points of political, economic, and social equality available for some to-day and for the developed race ultimately.” McAfee cited the example of Du Bois to show the principle in action: “first-fruits of the new race, now inferior, ultimately not inferior to us though always different from us.”Footnote ¹⁶

Du Bois challenged both schools with his sustained critique of international hierarchy and of the racialism that the West used to buttress it. The key pieces of this antiracist and internationalist perspective were in place in the essay published in the Annals in 1901. He showed that the modern history of civilization building was undeniably brutal and exploitative, however much those who benefited from empire denied it. He linked the argument, not to a defense of the racial purity of the republic, following the white conservative social scientists backing the Anti-Imperialist League, but to the principle that the darker peoples of the world had the same rights of political self-determination as the white races. It was the same claim that he had put forward nine months earlier in his declaration “To the Nations of the World” at the first Pan-African Congress in London, one that most others thought absurd.Footnote ¹⁷ He acknowledges “that it is possible and sometimes best that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight the world's battles alone,” but this is a frank recognition that sovereignty would be difficult to secure against rival imperial complexes, now a piece of common historical sense. Most crucially, he avoids any notion of inferiority. By contrast, the liberal anti-imperialist theorist John Hobson, writing roughly at the same time, would argue for an international regime—a “federation”—that would prevent the bleeding of dependencies and instead rationally guide processes of “racial or national selection” in a more efficient and progressive direction.Footnote ¹⁸ Above all, Du Bois was pursuing the idea that the world was thinking wrong about race.Footnote ¹⁹

THE LONELIEST POLITICAL SCIENTIST IN NEW YORK

The New York Academy of Political Science, which published the oldest political science journal in the country, Political Science Quarterly, was just behind Philadelphia's American Academy in responding to the war with Spain. Franklin Giddings (1855–1931) contributed the lead article in its December 1898 issue, titled, “Imperialism?” Giddings was one of the founding editors of the Annals while at Bryn Mawr, but he moved in 1894 to accept a chair at Columbia, where he rose to prominence as a theorist of social evolution with Principles of Sociology (1896), which others would later describe as a kind of progressive or reformist Darwinism. Even while laws of competition and survival of the fittest operated among higher and lower races and classes, he said, state intervention was often warranted, minimally, to avoid the kinds of social conflict that were then on the upsurge in the United States and that if unchecked would end in the race's decline rather than its progress.Footnote ²⁰

“Imperialism?” begins with an apology “to men whose opinions I have long held in deep respect,” because “their ambition to perfect the ethical ideals of the race” leads them to “neglect the humbler task of forecasting social probabilities.”Footnote ²¹ Giddings argued that opposition to the war was futile, a conclusion that follows the opponents’ own routine assessments of the inexorable forces propelling it forward (the “jingoes and yellow journals … the American population … eager to engage in blood-letting … the Morgans, the Cabot Lodges … war to develop American character, war to afford an outlet to American energies and genius”). The opponents’ continuing opposition to territorial expansion and especially to the retention of the Philippines left them unable to deal realistically with outcomes and the main problem they posed: “How can the American people best adapt themselves to their new responsibilities.”Footnote ²² Giddings foresaw an eventual expansion of trade with the new tropic possessions “under the more intelligent direction of the white races.” The biggest challenge would be to develop methods for governing inferior races from a distance else be forced to abandon all hope of the civilized world “continuing its economic conquest of the natural resources of the globe.”Footnote ²³ All these tendencies led in the same direction: moral evolution and the perfecting of American government through empire building, a necessary step in the continued domination of world politics “by English-speaking people, in the interest of an English civilization.”Footnote ²⁴

Giddings’ opponents go unnamed, but they likely included Yale's William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), a follower of Spencer, a conservative defender of laissez faire economics on evolutionary grounds, and the only social scientist to take a leading role in the American Anti-Imperialist League. Sumner famously foretold a long war in the Philippines if the United States attempted to substitute for Spanish rule, as one more of those modern conquering states that claimed to be “spreading freedom and truth.” He called the latter “manifestations of national vanity” that every nation routinely laughs at when observing them in others. Sumner also shared the conviction of virtually all other social scientists at the time that the differences between civilized and uncivilized or semi-civilized people made their incorporation as citizens impossible. Non-whites should instead govern themselves. He suggested a range of possibilities if this course were followed, regarding places ranging from Haiti with its dismal conditions after a century of freedom to the more promising case of Mexico.Footnote ²⁵

Another of Giddings’ unnamed opponents was undoubtedly his colleague John W. Burgess (1844–1931), the most influential political scientist in the country, the founding dean of Columbia's School of Political Science, and editor of Political Science Quarterly. Burgess called the war and its aftermath a “great crisis” in the country's history. Two decades later, in his Reminiscences, he called the war the “first great shock which I had experienced” in the eighteen years since his move from Northampton to New York.Footnote ²⁶ His was a viewpoint sharply at odds with those political scientists eager to demonstrate the practical value of their expertise, which goes far to explain why Political Science Quarterly alone among the professional publications published criticisms of the McKinley administration's imperial turn. Burgess’ stature made this dissent all the more significant.

What is perhaps most significant about Burgess’ opposition is the puzzle it poses, because his reputation was built on the magisterial two-volume Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (1890), which argued that only the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race had mastered the art of political organization in the form of the national state. It was this “fact of Teutonic political genius” that “authorizes them, in the economy of the world, to assume the leadership in the establishment and administration of states.”Footnote ²⁷ The Teutonic nations (“the English, French, Lombards, Scandinavians, Germans, and North Americans”) had two obligations: to never surrender power to non-Teutonic elements, which meant at points excluding others from participation in political power, and to “carry the political civilization of the modern world into those parts of the world inhabited by unpolitical and barbaric races; i.e., they must have a colonial policy.” He added the injunction to civilize the uncivilized and semi-civilized “by any means necessary.”Footnote ²⁸ Three generations of historiography on American empire have, on the basis of this 1891 essay, credited Burgess with an influence second only to Admiral Alfred Mahan for providing the intellectual scaffolding in support of the Spanish-American War, while ignoring Burgess’ writings for the rest of the decade and his unequivocal opposition to the new imperialism.Footnote ²⁹

In Ideal of the American Commonwealth, his 1893 address at the World Columbian Exposition, the same series in which Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous thesis on the closing of the American frontier, and Congress debated the question of annexation of Hawai`i, Burgess shifted ground, from an argument for a proactive colonial policy to one wherein the American nation as a “cosmopolitan state” needed to do nothing more than continue to serve as an example to others. All the prior pieces of the argument remained the same: only the Aryan race—the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons—founded and developed “great states of the world, in a modern sense…. We must conclude from these facts that American Indians, Asiatics and Africans cannot properly form any active, directive part of the political population which shall be able to produce modern political institutions and ideals. They have no element of political civilization to contribute. They can only receive, learn, follow the Aryan example.”Footnote ³⁰

Since the other Aryan stocks had suffered decline through race mixing, he declared that “the prime mission” of the American commonwealth is “the perfection of the Aryan genius for political civilization upon the basis of a predominantly Teutonic nationality,” which would serve as the model “political organization of the world.” The key would be to prevent the dilution of the race, “sins against American civilization” that some had attempted in the past but, “thanks to an all-wise Providence, have failed.” With the crime of reconstruction reversed, the black electorate disfranchised, and immigration restrictions in place, the main threats to realization of the ideal democracy, built on principles of liberty and self-government, were socialism (in part through the corruption of young American students who studied political economy in Germany), and the growth of the power of the government during the Civil War. Hence the importance of the system of checks and balances and in particular of the judiciary.Footnote ³¹ This fear of unchecked executive power explains his opposition to the course of foreign policy in the mid-1880s.

Consider in this light his commentary on the Cleveland Administration's threat in 1896 to intervene if Great Britain did not follow its dictates in a boundary dispute between Venezuela and the British colony of Guiana. Historians have since come to see Britain's bowing in the Venezuela dispute as the moment in which the United States announced its “arrival as a great power on the diplomatic world stage.”Footnote ³² Burgess and others in Political Science Quarterly challenged the administration and the jingoists for what he derided as “The Recent Pseudo-Monroeism.”Footnote ³³ The version of the Monroe doctrine trotted out in the recent conflict was the “slaveholders” version, first invented in the 1850s in the failed effort to expand the southern plantation system into “Mexico and Central America and even Cuba,” and to “making the Gulf the Mediterranean of a slave empire.”Footnote ³⁴ In the 1890s, there was no longer reason to fear European states intervening in the domestic affairs of the Latin American republics. Rather, it was the United States that now seemed poised to extend a protectorate system over the region.

Burgess warned of the responsibilities as well as of the rights of doing so, and of the unreasonable costs of raising the military necessary for it. “Grand prospect! Plenty of offices, plenty of government contracts, large profits, abundance of work, high prices, and endless sensations! But it must all be paid for in the end in mountains of treasure, certainly, and in rivers of blood and centuries of misery probably.”Footnote ³⁵ Most important, any such “course of conquest” requires an ethical principle for its justification, and the right of self-defense could not be stretched to accommodate empire. Nor ought the duty of “civilized states to carry civilization into the abodes of barbarism” serve as a mask for other ends, nor was this in fact applicable to the countries of the hemisphere, which either were “working out” their “own civilization” or else were already governed by other civilized powers.Footnote ³⁶ He concluded with a review of the prejudices—from badly written school textbooks with their misguided views of the British Empire to the courting of the Irish-American vote—that lay behind the talk of going to war with Great Britain. As for war talk, once the spirit is excited, it “is very difficult for the government to hold its own footing at all against it. It is the most dangerous weapon in all our arsenal of popular prejudices.”Footnote ³⁷

That same month the chief jingoist and future chief conspirator in the 1898 war, Theodore Roosevelt, who Cleveland had made police commissioner of New York, rebutted Burgess in Bachelor of Arts magazine: “The Monroe Doctrine should not be considered from any purely academic standpoint … but by the needs of the nation and the true interests of Western civilization.”Footnote ³⁸ Those who attacked the president and his secretary of state and who took the “anti-American side” were not patriots who loved their country but instead promiscuous lovers of other places, as adulterers are of other women, in the thrall of “a kind of milk-and-water cosmopolitanism,” which was a doctrine never attractive to “men of robust character or of imposing personality.”Footnote ³⁹ The same weak, unmanly, and unpatriotic scholars trembled before a false vision of the future. The United States had in fact no interest in establishing a protectorate over the Americas. Colonies of any kind were “unnatural,” Roosevelt asserted, and “the only hope for a colony that wishes to attain full moral and mental growth is to become an independent State, or part of an independent State.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Most important, given the course of conquest in 1898 that he is so famously associated with, Roosevelt said that the worst situation from the perspective of development was where “the colonizing race has to do its work by means of other inferior races.” While there might be some prospect for development in the American republics, despite “the mean and bloody” recent history, there was little if any chance for development in the case of the tropics under the ownership of a Northern European race.Footnote ⁴¹

After Giddings’ expansive defense of the imperial turn in Political Science Quarterly, Burgess offered a careful and narrow-framed critique, “How May the United States Govern Its Extra-Continental Territory?”Footnote ⁴² He began by making his own position clear. He opposed venturing out to seize new lands at the present stage of development of the American nation, while the home territory remained under-populated, divided on key policy issues from tariffs to “lynch law,” and had not yet found solutions to the “Indian problem,” the “Mormon problem,” and the “negro problem.”Footnote ⁴³ The grounds of the pending crisis were, thus, not in the fact of territorial conquest but in how the territories were to be governed, given “the principle of political science, that the same fullness of civil liberty, as well as of political liberty, is not appropriate to all conditions of mankind.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Burgess feared any attempt to govern the recently annexed territories extra-constitutionally, which he said would lead “towards absolutism.”Footnote ⁴⁵ No legal precedent existed for doing so. Rather, “all places over which the government of the United States extends constitutes the “States and territories” or the “country” of the United States or the “American empire.” The “limitations placed by the constitution on the powers of the government run with the government into all places … over which the civil government of the United States extends.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The McKinley administration would be wise not to rush to terminate military government. It would take a while to determine the precise capacity of the people for self-government, and he held out the prospect that Americans might still come to their senses and reverse direction. In that case, and assuming elements in the Philippines and the Caribbean show “fair capacity for self-government,” the United States should let the occupied peoples rule themselves and withdraw its military forces. If they do not demonstrate such a capacity and Americans “show in some deliberate and unmistakable way their will to have a colonial empire, we should try territorial rule … under the limitations which the constitution imposes upon the government in behalf of civil liberty.” If such limited government proved impossible, then the constitution would have to be amended “to permit the national government to exercise absolute, or more absolute, civil authority in certain parts of our domain.”Footnote ⁴⁷

It turns out that Burgess got it wrong—spectacularly so. Americans never did come to their senses. Congress had voted to annex Hawai`i, where a white oligarchy already ruled, in July 1898, ostensibly as a war measure, although in the famous six-hour naval battle in Manila two months earlier, Admiral Dewey had destroyed every Spanish warship in the Pacific. It was made a territory in 1900.Footnote ⁴⁸ The potential problem posed by white rule over inferior races meant that the transition to statehood would be dragged out indefinitely, similar to the cases of Arizona and New Mexico. They were incorporated in the 1840s, and had larger populations than some other recently created states of the union, but were still ruled along colonial lines, as was Oklahoma, carved out of the western half of Indian Territory and incorporated in 1890. As for the new so-called “dependencies,” Congress had already recognized Cuban independence in April 1898, prior to the beginning of the war, and the Treaty of Paris concluded with Spain in December put Cuba on its path to becoming a U.S. protectorate. The same treaty turned over the remaining Spanish colonial possessions to the United States, and the commissions dispatched by McKinley to the Philippines and Puerto Rico resolved the question of fitness for rule of the various non-white “alien races” rather quickly, determining that a period of tutelage would be necessary. As for Guam, the absence there of any sign of civilization among the so-called Chamorros, however “friendly” they appeared, meant that a transition from military to civilian rule might not ever be possible.Footnote ⁴⁹

Burgess’ gravest error, though, turns out to have been his belief that the constitution prevented Americans from ruling any place or people autocratically. The Supreme Court decided otherwise in a series of cases that established the principle of hierarchy, or one set of rules for civilized peoples in incorporated territories and another set for the uncivilized in unincorporated territories.Footnote ⁵⁰ The court relied heavily on the theorizing of the Harvard political scientist Albert Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943), the future president of the university who, famously, imposed a color bar in the new Harvard freshman dormitories in 1915.Footnote ⁵¹ Lowell argued that Congress had the power to decide if the constitution ought to rule rather than acquiesce to imposition of its provisions in territories gained through war or through cession. He thus imagined two kinds of territories: incorporated ones, destined for statehood, and unincorporated ones, belonging to the United States but apparently on a different path.Footnote ⁵² The determining factor was the racial make up and thus capacities of the people inhabiting these various places.

Elsewhere, Lowell showed that a parallel system of hierarchy operated even within the incorporated territories themselves, within the continental boundaries of the United States, citing the case of New Mexico, where the inferior Spanish race was “not sufficiently trained in habits of self-government.” He went further. The “theory of universal political equality does not apply to tribal Indians, to Chinese, or to negroes under all conditions.”Footnote ⁵³ Lowell's colleague at Harvard, the historian Albert Bushnell Hart, who would become president of the APSA in 1912, analyzed the then-existing system of hierarchical rule inside and outside of the continental boundaries. “In any other country such governments would be called “colonial.” Indeed, the present government of Oklahoma strikingly resembles the government of New York before the Revolution…. In truth, the territories are and ever have been colonies.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Self-government proved to be an art that few races had mastered, one that required training. And Lowell would become the country's leading advocate for creation of a professional school for colonial administration, along the lines of West Point.

Burgess tried futilely to rescue his account of the republic's constitution from the rising imperial tide. After all, the Supreme Court, he wrote in a 1901 critique of the first of the insular decisions, had once also appeared to uphold slavery in precisely the same way that it now appeared to uphold “colonial bondage,” but the dissenting justices in the first two cases suggested that reason would ultimately prevail.Footnote ⁵⁵ A year later he gave over Political Science Quarterly to none other than John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940), the British economist and Manchester Guardian correspondent during the first year of the Boer War who returned from Africa to publish his critically-acclaimed study, Imperialism (1902). Hobson's piece in the Political Science Quarterly, “The Scientific Basis of Imperialism,” took aim at the various biological accounts of the necessity and inevitability of racial conflict and subjugation, as well as at the impoverished ethics that led whites to think they were advancing human progress by duty through their new imperial conquests. He singled out the Columbia sociologist, Franklin Giddings many times in the article, most crucially for Giddings’ belief that empire somehow completed a democratic nation's project when in fact, Hobson said, it diverted a people from the uncompleted work of developing a rational “national economy.” It encouraged militarism and protectionism rather than the spread of “ideas and arts and institutions” or the “empire of the national mind,” which Hobson called the only “legitimate expansion.” And it stood in the way of the more complex international government that Hobson favored, which would substitute “rational” for “natural” race selection, which might protect “weak but valuable nationalities” and “check the insolent brutality of powerful aggressors.”Footnote ⁵⁶

These criticisms, though, proved beside the point. The war gained McKinley, running with an even more popular vice-presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, a second term in 1900. As Doubleday partner Walter Hines Page insisted in the premier issue of the new quarterly, World's Work, dedicated to the spread of the “evangelical faith” of American democracy across the globe, the reality was “that the mass of men simply do not believe that our liberties are in danger because of our occupation of Porto Rico and the Philippine islands, whatever mistakes we may have committed there.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, while his colleagues turned in earnest to build the new science of imperial administration, Burgess shunned—or was shunned by—the new APSA, home of those “self-styled progressives” that seemed committed in fact to “political retrogression” in the direction of “governmental absolutism of earlier times.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Burgess retired from Columbia in 1912, but he continued to analyze the cataclysmic changes he believed had been ushered in by 1898. It marked the republic's turn toward despotism, bringing about the erosion of civil liberties, the “Democratic Ceasarism” of the second Roosevelt administration of 1904–1908, and such misguided steps as the Eighteenth Amendment. Above all, the unchecked militarism of the imperialists and of the trusts whose interests they served led the country into war again in 1917.Footnote ⁵⁹ His lifelong efforts to introduce a rational science of politics into the post-Civil War United Sates, he said, had come to nothing.

IN EMPIRE'S SERVICE

Burgess thus might have been the first to imagine the early history of political science as tragedy, but the impact of 1898 looks different when we turn to the professional associations that virtually all professors of political science belonged to at the turn of the century, namely the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association. The report of the 1900 annual meeting of the six-year-old American Historical Association noted that the program was “frankly designed to answer those interests which are at present uppermost in the minds of Americans who care for history.” Some of the papers “were not history at all” but, rather, held the idea “that present problems cannot be successfully solved without an attentive study of the experience of the past.” The main proof of the anti-antiquarian turn of the Association was found in the session on “American Colonization.” A year earlier, at the New Haven meeting, the Association had organized a new Committee on the History of Colonies and Dependencies, headed by Henry Bourne, one of the association's unabashed champions of the imperial turn, and Bourne chaired the session in Boston that reported some the committee's main conclusions.Footnote ⁶⁰

Bourne's paper, “Some Difficulties of American Colonization,” saw an American imperial project as facing two particular obstacles, both of which followed from what we have already seen was the tight intertwining of race and empire. The first was Americans’ abiding “antipathy” for nonwhites, which he said was practically “inbred.” Bourne contrasted the United States with the colonies governed by England, France, “and even Spain,” where races typically intermingled much more freely than in the South under Jim Crow. Thus the extreme hatred was a consequence of the ongoing “race conflicts” that so fundamentally constituted American history and identity. The second obstacle was the now familiar one about the difficulty in adapting the century-old American territorial system of expansion to the new possessions.Footnote ⁶¹

By way of a necessary if not sufficient step toward securing effective rule over the new dependencies, Harvard professor of government Albert Lawrence Lowell rehearsed the argument of his forthcoming book on comparative Colonial Civil Service. He recommended that Americans emulate the British or the even more rigorous training of Dutch specialists in what we would now call area studies. The peripatetic Aleyne Ireland attended the Boston meeting's session on colonization as well, where he said the Americans would inevitably turn to the system of contract or indentured labor in use by the British in the West Indies as the most practical solution to governing in the tropics. This did not happen, and so Ireland soon emerged as a leading critic of U.S. policy in the Philippines.

The American Economic Association reacted in similar fashion. In 1899, the Association's executive committee appointed a special committee to produce a set of essays on colonial finance, with members all close to President Roosevelt: J. W. Jenks of Cornell, E. R. A. Seligman of Columbia, Albert Shaw, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, Charles Hamlin, a wealthy lawyer and former Treasury secretary, and Edward Strobel, another lawyer, former assistant secretary of state, and financial advisor to modernizing monarchs in various colonies. The studies, published as Essays in Colonial Finance by Members of the American Economic Association (1900), and funded by private businessmen, “appeared while the U.S. Army was still fighting the insurgent Philippinos.”Footnote ⁶²

We can gauge the rapid advance of the science of imperial administration to the commanding heights of the new discipline-in-formation on the eve of the first meeting of the new APSA by turning to the World's Fair (or Universal Exposition) in St Louis. The Fair's organizers convened a remarkable Congress of Arts and Science that met each day for a week in September 1904, for 250 talks in all, designed to survey each of the branches of twentieth-century knowledge. Politics, Jurisprudence, and Social Science, by which was meant what we today call Sociology, were departments of the division of knowledge designated Social Regulation (one of seven such divisions). The Department of Politics was further broken down into five sections (of 128)—Political Theory, Diplomacy, National Administration, Colonial Administration, and Municipal Administration—representing the state of the discipline to that point in time, and focused on progress in the fields and the most pressing problems of the future.Footnote ⁶³

The sessions on Colonial Administration elevated two more political scientists into the ranks of leading specialists on empire. The first was Bernard Moses (1846–1930), a Heidelberg-trained professor of history and political science who joined the faculty of the University of California in 1875 (where “he taught every course in history and social science” at the new institution) and founded the separate Department of Political Science in 1903, a year before the St Louis Congress.Footnote ⁶⁴ Moses is remembered now primarily as a pioneer of Latin American studies in the United States, through his work on Spanish colonization of the Americas. It was that expertise that gained him his three-year appointment on the original United States Philippine Commission between 1900 and 1902, which in turn led to his paper at St Louis, “Control of Dependencies Inhabited by the Less Developed Races.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The second was Paul Reinsch (1869–1923), a professor at the University of Wisconsin who was a founding member, the first vice-president, and fifteenth president of the new APSA. Reinsch was also the author of the first U.S. textbook on international relations, and a future ambassador to China. He established his expertise in the new science of imperial administration by following his path-breaking World Politics (1900) with Colonial Government (1902). His paper at the Congress, “The Problems of Colonial Administration,” previewed a second, follow-up volume, Colonial Administration (1905). At the first APSA meeting in Chicago three months later, Reinsch delivered another paper based on the book, “Colonial Autonomy, with Special Reference to the Government of the Philippine Islands.” These various writings are now well known thanks to the research of Brian Schmidt. The one key piece that continues to go unnoticed is “The Negro Race and European Civilization,” which also appeared in 1905, in the American Journal of Sociology.Footnote ⁶⁶

A third political scientist, William Franklin Willoughby (1867-?), also made his name at this time and in the same field. Willoughby, who received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, was the twin brother of Westel Willoughby, another Johns Hopkins Ph.D., who was the first to teach political science in a separate department, and one of the founders of the APSA and its tenth president. William Willoughby, too, would serve a term as ASPA president, although he is often described as an economist. Unlike his fellow colonial experts, Reinsch and Moses, William taught mostly as an adjunct while working in a series of administrative positions, first in Washington, and during the 1900s as treasurer and secretary of Puerto Rico (1901–1907) and president of the upper house of the colonial legislature. His major piece of scholarship in the 1900s was Territories and Dependencies of the United States (1905). He is better known today for the position he accepted back in Washington in 1916 as director of the new Institute of Government Relations, which he eventually brought together with the Brookings Graduate School in Economics and Government to create the Brookings Institution.

The agenda of the first annual APSA meeting in 1904, held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, was overwhelmingly given over to problems posed by imperialism. This is hardly surprising given the course of the first years of the century, marked by the short war with Spain and the longer-lasting war of conquest in the Philippines, Britain's second war with the Boer Republics, 1898–1902, and, in 1904, the war between rival Russian and Japanese empires over Manchuria and Korea. The first of three sessions was devoted to war and international law, and the second to imperial administration, with papers by Reinsch and another by Moses. The third session on state and local government included a paper, “The Reorganization of Local Government in Cuba,” given by still another new expert in colonial administration, the University of Pennsylvania's Leo Rowe, an ex-commissioner of Puerto Rico, president of the American Academy, and future director of the Pan-American Union (now known as the Organization of American States).

Little wonder, therefore, that Alleyne Ireland in his 1906 APSA address took note of the rise of the new, applied field of colonial administration, which he also referred to as the science of “race subjection.” Most work up to that point had been historical rather than practical, and most of it had been written by non-specialists—“lawyers, doctors, soldiers, sailors, politicians, presidential candidates, ministers of the gospel, labor leaders, poets, geologists, engineers and professors of subjects as wide apart as ethics and zoology.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Ireland also dismissed most of it as worthless. Instead, dispassionate analysis showed that “the object of colonization” was the establishment of “a profitable commerce” and, thus, the proper focus of systematic, comparative investigation was “the degree to which institutions of colonial governance reflected the principle of “exploitation” or that of “development.”

Ireland was right, judging from the expanding shelf of books by Reinsch and other political scientists and the growing number of meetings and conference proceedings devoted to problems of dependencies, which included some extremely critical views of the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines. The first, exuberant accounts of a wholly new course in benevolent empire being charted across the Pacific and Caribbean for the economic benefit of native peoples gave way to a precocious critique. Ten years on, it proved impossible to distinguish U.S. policies from those of states with longer records of overseas expansion. And, needless to say, by the time of the New Deal the critique had been enshrined as a doctrine of state, in the form of a new “Good Neighbor Policy” against the exploitative orders put in place over the previous three decades. Political scientists were a bit too exuberant, too, in imagining that they had a role to play in designing new and improved political institutions for the tropics, because, in the event, the U.S. occupation authorities reached for the old British-origin “territorial model” of the late eighteenth century to organize center-periphery relations in the newest dependencies at the turn of the new century.

The political scientists were more successful in building new institutions at home, including the world's first journal of international relations, the Journal of Race Development, founded at Clark in 1910 and continued in New York in the 1920s under the new name, Foreign Affairs. The Journal and the conferences that supported it in Worcester and Williamstown served as an important node in an ongoing transatlantic debate about the prospects for uplift of backward peoples from the Sea Islands of Georgia to the Philippine Archipelago.

THE LAWS OF RACE DEVELOPMENT

The white social scientists that offered their expertise to the new imperial state, and the handful of critics of the new expansionist wave, all assumed the following: hierarchy was natural, it was biologically rooted, and it could be made sense of best by such concepts as higher and lower races, natural and historic races, savagery and civilization, and the like. Consider in this light the late modification of the conventional Spencerian three-stage evolutionary sequence by America's most famous anthropologist and explorer, John Wesley Powell. He helped to secure the “Anglo-Saxon branch of the Aryan family” its hegemony across the continent, designed the reservation system for the Utes and neighboring peoples in Utah and Nevada, and built the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C. “to study the tribal peoples it had defeated.” Powell ostensibly proved that man passed through four stages: savagery, barbarism, monarchy, and “republikism.”Footnote ⁶⁸

George Stocking argues that political scientists like Reinsch, sociologists like Ross and Giddings, and others involved in discipline building at home and civilization building abroad “were evolutionists almost to a man.” The ideas about evolution reflected the influence of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), but also an older strain of “natural development-theory” with its evolutionary path from savagery to civilization that Darwin himself drew on, and the influence of American anthropologists working in the 1860s and 1870s. Across those decades, older ideas about superior and savage “peoples” and “nations” reemerged as notions of organic and innate differences among the “races” of mankind.Footnote ⁶⁹

The confluence proved powerfully productive, to judge from the debates, museum exhibits, archeological excavations, and the beginning of Jim Crow that the theorizing licensed. Among its achievements, those social scientists who began working on problems of world politics or international/interracial relations articulated some first principles of what would later come to be called “realism” in arguments about the ceaseless struggle of existence, survival of the fittest, and the aphorism of the era, “might makes right.” Those who challenged this stark reading of world order argued that the expansion of civilization would reduce tendencies toward conflict or race war even as it brought the developed and undeveloped races closer together.

Nonetheless, problems accumulated in the shift from discussing biological traits shared by all humans and evolved from non-human species to theorizing about how society evolved, and specifically about evolutionary differences among races: wrong roads down which American social scientists rushed headlong. One was a belief that races were so different and so unequal in capacities that they had to have evolved from different origins (polygenesis), an argument that was divinely or at least biblically inspired. It was also one that Darwin himself tried to refute in his second book, Descent of Man (1871), even in the face of his own belief in the reality of racial hierarchy. As Carl Degler explains, Darwin rejected the idea of different species of man and the typical markers of race themselves were impossible to explain within his theory of natural selection—that is, “race was outside evolution.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Through this pathway came one of the first laws of international relations theory, namely that the differences in races made acclimation by whites to tropical environments impossible. Stocking considers versions of the theory that, unlike those already referenced by Ireland, Giddings, and Kidd, were not occasioned by the war of 1898. He includes Races and People, the lectures that were published in 1890 by the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Daniel Brinton, who would soon become president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. The boldest or most extreme version of the claim was made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist William Z. Ripley, in Popular Science Monthly in 1896. He argued that no race ever acclimated to a different environment, and thus colonization of the tropics was impossible. Ripley was a leading figure in the American Economic Association, who was famous for his work in both racial taxonomy and railroad regulation. The last article Stocking cites is one that Yale's Ellsworth Huntington published in 1914 in the Journal of Race Development. Huntington, a member of the Journal's editorial board, argued that the Negro “would apparently die out in the northern United States were he not replenished from the South.”Footnote ⁷¹ The theory and its policy implications, however, would continue to preoccupy scholars, research programs, and foundations for another twenty-five years.

A second theoretical question with implications for imperial development policy had emerged: whether or not it was possible for the different races to “amalgamate,” that is, to mate and produce healthy offspring or hybrids. The arguments were more complex and disputes more serious than in the law-like claim about “acclimation.” Ross laid out the basic view in his Annals keynote, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” when he argued that continued hegemony by whites depended on “pride of blood.” Many other examples could be culled from the works of others who were also busy founding APSA, writing in the Annals, the American Journal of Sociology, and so on. The complications come in characterizing support for the claim, between those, for example, who argued that in fact the offspring of such unions tended to infertility (thus proving that the races were indeed different species), and those who recognized that such mongrels might not be sterile but would produce degenerate offspring. Some said the facts of the case might differ depending on the distance between races. There were possibilities for good cross-races, and those who rejected polygenesis, for obvious reasons, sought to demonstrate that new, viable mixed races would emerge through intermarriage.Footnote ⁷² Despite the diversity, we can distill the basic point behind all this social science theorizing: race mixing between whites and non-whites was wrong, a norm that white social scientists clung to long after the scientific scaffolding collapsed.

Most social evolutionist thought rested on a second, even more common assumption about the inheritability of acquired characteristics or behaviors (Lamarkianism). This was the main way in which the races were imagined to have emerged, multiplied, and traveled their different evolutionary pathways, or, for those who imagined a single evolutionary path for all, then the way in which the Anglo-Saxons gained enormous ground as others increasingly lagged behind. Put more plainly still, here was the main engine for creation of hierarchy. Thus one found “warlike, peaceful, nomadic, maritime, hunting, [and] commercial races.”Footnote ⁷³ One also found the Jewish nose, which evolved from its origins as “a habitual expression of indignation.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The new social science disciplines were all infected with the idea, and in tracing the course of the virus, Stocking references virtually every political scientist and sociologist writing on “race formation,” including Burgess, Giddings, Ross, and Reinsch, in a literature spawned, as we have seen, by the new round of imperial expansion.

Consider in this light the pioneering international relations scholar Paul Reinsch's 1905 contribution to the American Journal of Sociology, “The Negro Race and European Civilization,” where he assayed an inferior stock's future in an era of “increasingly intimate contact” among the “peoples that inhabit the globe.” The “puzzle,” as political scientists say now, was that black people were too vigorous a race to go the way of others across the course of time and “fade away.” Survival in the face of slavery proved the race's relative fitness. Solving the puzzle, that is, correctly assessing the race's prospect for progress, required two things. The first was an expanded case set, to cover “their original state in the forests of central Africa: as a mixed race under … Arab and Hamite” race dominance, “living side by side with a white population” and in those “few isolated communities which enjoy rights of self-government based on European models, as in Hayti and the French Antilles.” The second was frank recognition that outmoded ideas of “the absolute unity of human beings” and of “the practical equality of human individuals” had been abandoned in conformity with the scientific truth of the essential differences among “types of humanity.” Reinsch followed these observations with a long account of his understanding of life in Africa, the lack of arts, not least “the marvelous sense for melody” found among blacks in the plantations, where instead in Africa there is only “the rhythm of the tom-tom” with its “almost hypnotic effect,” the absence of anything like patriotism among those so ready to fight against their neighbors, and so forth.Footnote ⁷⁵

For Reinsch, these facts confirmed the idea that black brains were physiologically different from white brains, even in the face of the accumulating evidence against the idea that their sutures closed earlier “and organic development of the faculties seem to cease at puberty.” But he also argued that physiological differences did not foreclose the possibility for race improvement because an even greater source of difference with the white race than average individual capacities was the burden of the inheritance of social, political, and climatic conditions on the inferior race. In fact, if these conditions were to change, that might even lead to changes in black cranial structure over time.Footnote ⁷⁶

Reinsch's main conclusion, based on study of all four black inhabited regions, was that those outside of Sub Saharan Africa had shown some development capacity but only under the tutelage of other races, and he ended his study by advocating a civilizing policy in Africa that would emphasize economic efficiency, infrastructure development, and the introduction of metallic currency. At the same time, he said, native “tribal and social unity” ought to be respected, local institutions kept intact, and property rights respected, lest Africans degenerate morally in ways similar to blacks in the South in slavery's aftermath.Footnote ⁷⁷ The argument amounted to an American variant of what British colonial reformers would come to call the policy of “indirect rule,” inflected, in Reinsch's case, by accounts of the South's experiments with industrial education and the ascent of Booker T. Washington. “The mass of the negroes cannot pattern primarily upon the whites with whom they come in contact, but should have leaders of their own race to look up to.” Yet those “models of leadership” depended on whites showing “negroes of high character and intelligence” the way. Reinsch reassured his readers, too, that nothing in the analysis implied the possibility of blacks ever having “political power over whites” in Africa, or of “social equality” anywhere between the two races.Footnote ⁷⁸

The most important center for research on the psychology and pedagogy of race development was Clark University, which opened in 1889 under the presidency of the psychologist, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924). Clark, like Johns Hopkins, was dedicated exclusively to graduate education, and Hall, awarded the first Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard, under William James, began his career as a professor of psychology and pedagogics at Johns Hopkins in 1882. He would go on to found the Journal of Psychology in 1887, head the new American Psychological Association in 1892, and while at Clark, start four more journals, including the Pedagogical Seminary (now known as the Journal of Genetic Psychology) in 1891, and the Journal of Race Development (now Foreign Affairs) in 1910.

Hall's most famous work, usually referred to today as the “recapitulation hypothesis,” argued that the development of the minds of individuals in their early years repeated stages from the mental history of the human race. A child's mind thus was both like that of its own race's earliest ancestors and of savage adults in the present. Adolescence was a window into evolution, while anthropological studies in the various rainforests and deserts were a window into the world of childhood. It was Hall and his many students that Reinsch and others drew on when they argued that mental development in the lower races stopped at adolescence, due to their cranial sutures fusing earlier than those of white people, or when others insisted that children and savages both acted more out of instinct than intellect. Thus when Hobson, like many other scholars, journalists, and administrators, used the concept of “child race,” the usage reflected the highest stage of social science theorizing rather than inexperience or ignorance. The concept continued in use for another two decades after Hobson's Imperialism. So John H. Harris, writing in the London Spectator on 28 June 1930, and looking forward to creation of a “World ‘Native’ Policy,” built on the Versailles Treaty, argued that Western states had accepted “the principle of ‘Sacred Trust’ as the basis of relationships between the civilized nations and the backward or child races.”Footnote ⁷⁹ A decade later, the once-scientific concept was being denounced as “a patronizing metaphor.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The problem for Hall and all the other race formation and development theorists was that their basic framework was also being dismantled piece by piece in the 1890s and 1900s. Biologists, though by no means all biologists, were pounding on the edifice from one side, having taken Mendelian principles as the basis for a new field of genetics, which could explain an increasingly vast range of hereditary phenomenon.Footnote ⁸¹ Coming at race theory from the other side was Columbia's Franz Boas 1858–1940), the anthropologist who had once worked for Hall at Clark.

Although the summary statement of Boas’ ideas came out as a book, The Mind of Primitive Man, in 1911, all of the key elements that made up the Boasian revolution could be read in his scientific articles of the 1890s. Among them was that no civilization was “the product of the genius of a single people,” but instead ideas had been widely disseminated through cultural contact. He wrote of the geniuses of peoples rather than of “a people,” and, as Stocking explains, “as a critic of racial thought,” Boas sought to define these capacities “in other terms than racial heredity. His answer, ultimately, was the anthropological idea of culture.”Footnote ⁸² Degler, writing two decades after Stocking, stresses Boas’ underlying “critical method” which was “historical and relativistic.” Historical argument substituted for racial determinism. An example is worth quoting at length: “A skeptic might ask why some modern colored peoples seemed unable to absorb the civilization of white Europe to the same extent as others had done earlier. Boas’ response [in 1894] was that disease, competition from European factory-produced goods which drove out native crafts, and the large number of European invaders slowed the assimilation of European culture. In short, history, experience, and circumstances, not race, supplied the answer.”Footnote ⁸³

I draw attention to these points because the same commitment, rare at that time in the American academy, to challenging ideologies of racial hierarchy, is what drove Du Bois. Boas and he shared more than just convictions, however.Footnote ⁸⁴ Du Bois’ work in sociology paralleled Boas’ anthropological investigations, and his famous early article on the “Conservation of the Races,” read side by side with Stocking's and Degler's exegeses of Boas, show Du Bois to be a second thinker pushing on ahead of his time rather than being trapped by it. Du Bois’ historical and empirical investigations of black conditions in the South, including his 1903 Annals piece discussed earlier, resemble those of Boas as well. His 1904 essay, “The Development of a People,” in which he continues to explain current conditions in the black belt in terms of history rather than evolution, is still more striking because the word race does not even appear. Instead, Du Bois speaks of nations, groups, and classes, and, as the title makes clear, of blacks as a people.Footnote ⁸⁵ Finally, it bears repeating, this was a time when most other social scientists shared a different set of convictions about equality and about the evolutionary basis of inferiority.

Certainly, the proliferation of books and articles by the new specialists in imperial administration of the 1900s confirm that the historicist and culturist turn from biological determinism was slow and piecemeal. None of the imperial theorists, certainly, ever admitted to a conversion experience similar to the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Carl Kelsey, the one-time critic of Du Bois’ Souls who, in 1903, had found it impossible to make a precise determination of black people's collective capacities for progress because of all the blood mixing that had gone on in Africa and in the South.Footnote ⁸⁶ By 1907, in pointed commentary on a paper heralding the science of eugenics, Kelsey challenged its basic precepts. “Heredity,” he wrote, “should be used to denote those physical characteristics which come to us through the germ cells of the parents.… We know pretty definitely today that acquired characteristics are not passed on from generation to generation.” Kelsey continued, “This fact … is reacting powerfully upon our social theories.” Ability can be improved among members of any class. “Here lies an argument for universal education that has as yet been scarcely utilized by our educators.” Most important, another “result of our studies is to weaken the belief in superior and inferior races,” which meant there was a need to rethink many matters, including barriers to immigration and the value of educating women.Footnote ⁸⁷

BIRTH-PANGS OF A WORLD

The discipline's new experts on colonial administration and race development tended, instead, to carry on, clinging to the Lamarkian orthodoxy. Others moved on to new projects and new positions during and after World War I, which makes it difficult to gauge changes in their ideas. The one possible exception is Paul Reinsch, who delivered his last paper on inter-race relations during his year in Berlin as the Theodore Roosevelt professor, when he traveled to London to attend the First Universal Races Congress in July 1911. The Congress itself was a remarkable, if now mostly forgotten event in the shaping of modern ideas about racial equality and the right of national self-determination in the years before the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Its first objective was explicit, while the second was articulated on the margins and hardly expected by those Londoners who imagined rebuilding the empire on a sounder basis. It was dedicated to challenging ideologies of race supremacy and promoting “interracial harmony,” and over one thousand attended, representing “fifty races and nations,” as Du Bois put it. Participants included Mohandas Gandhi, Krishna Gokale, who was one of Gandhi's political mentors, Tengo Jabavu, the founder of South Africa's first Bantu newspaper, the heretical Zionist Israel Zangwill, Haiti's ex-president Francois Legitime, and the Filipino nationalist and autonomy advocate Manuel Quezon. They joined with Mexican, Guatemalan, Japanese, European, and American internationalists, peace movement activists, feminists, and socialists, to deliver or hear dozens of papers over four sweltering days inside the University of London's Imperial Institute.Footnote ⁸⁸ Though Reinsch wrote one of the papers circulated before the conference, his biography makes no mention of his participation, which is ironic given his burgeoning interest in what he called “international unions.”

The organizers sought to avoid signs of discord among participants and urged members to avoid debate on political problems specific to the various colonies and dependencies. Reinsch himself one day from the floor protested press reports that exaggerated disharmony at the Congress and the prevalence among participants of anti-patriotic views (“internationalism had never been anti-national,” he insisted).Footnote ⁸⁹ Divisions had nonetheless erupted on some key issues even before the Congress was formally convened, during the preliminary meetings of anthropologists and international lawyers. One concerned the question of the equality of all races and peoples; though the fact of such equality was an organizing principle of the Congress, a few participants said it could not be true. A second minority view emerged that insisted that racial antagonism—what we would now call war—was both natural and the key means for world progress. Again, this flew in the face of an abiding interest of the organizers, to ameliorate conflict and secure cooperation among peoples. A third dispute emerged around dissent from another of the key organizing principles, that the idea of “races” itself was unscientific and in its place terms such as “nations” or even “civilizations” should be substituted.

Reinsch's paper, “Influence of Geographic, Economic, and Political Conditions” for the Congress’ second session, “Conditions of Progress,” would appear to position him closer to the potential “unity of humankind” and farther from the “immutability of hierarchy” end of the spectrum. Certainly he was less interested in explaining differences than in demonstrating the significance of what we now call globalization, that is, the growing unity “of the branches of the human family in all parts of the world” through advances in communication, transportation, and the spread of European and American economic power. He explored differences that hindered or advanced race development and nationalism in Europe, Africa, and Asia, according to the degree to which geography had protected people from climate and from one another. So the absence of fixed boundaries and the “eternal shifting back and forth of population elements has retarded African development.” These rules of geography were coming undone in the twentieth century under the sway of Western “scientific mastery.” The question was the degree to which the kind of national self-consciousness that had proved critical in the cases of Europe and Japan could still emerge elsewhere in an era of interdependence.

Reinsch nonetheless still saw powerful regularities operating between the tropic and temperate zones of the world economy. Modern development had made exploitation of tropical industries increasingly easy. He was also convinced that the world distribution of natural resources would work to limit the spread of industry unnaturally by “artificial and political factors.” The days of protection were over. Nor had the West or the system of civilized states completed its mission on behalf of humanity, and he repeated a line heard earlier in the conference, that “only the fully national can contribute to the cosmo-national.”

This brief 1911 paper reflected both Reinsch's rekindled interest in Eastern countries (“the Orient”) and the growing force of nationalism in the colonies and semi-colonies, from Persia to India to China. It was also the last piece of scholarship he produced, and it drew from his new book on International Unions. Reinsch had dispensed with explicit arguments about physiology and de-emphasized the immutability of radical differences that just a few years ago had made him skeptical of the idea of equality of the world's peoples. The powerful explanatory force he gives to geography or environment is still hard to separate from ideas about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, as we have seen. And he reiterates the new science of international relations’ law of the tropics. What the paper thus would appear to underscore is the degree to which anti-colonial nationalism drove the professors to revise and perhaps refine their ideas of hierarchy in ways that would be institutionalized just a few years later at Versailles, and in the creation of distinct categories of “mandates,” some of which were viewed as moving more or less rapidly toward independence, while others were consigned by their nature to permanent rule by whites.

Since the likelihood is small that self-identified specialists in international relations will seek out an account of the discipline's past in a journal that has no standing in the field, there is little value in discussing its implications for international relations theory today, where problems of racism and international hierarchy have yet to be wrestled with as forthrightly as Du Bois and those who followed him once did. It is striking, however, that historians of American empire, imperial culture, and of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific intellectual currents have all but ignored the disciplines-in-formation that I have explored here. If they had not, much of what I have uncovered here would already be part of the story that postcolonial theory tells. The newest Du Boisians no longer read in a field that Du Bois cared deeply about.

The histories of other parts of the social sciences need rethinking along the lines I have pursued here, and as Julian Go has begun to explore in the case of historical comparative sociology.Footnote ⁹⁰ The obvious cases are the two close cognates of international/interracial relations in the early twentieth century, area and development studies. For Arturo Escobar, among many others, the Truman Doctrine in 1949 marks the start of American development theory and practice, although “important precursors … presaged its appearance in full regalia after World War II.” These still “ill-understood” precursors were, however, a result of challenges to interwar British colonial policy in “the period between 1920–1950,” and the expression of America's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Footnote ⁹¹ The erasures are, again, unselfconscious.

Circuits of new professionalized knowledge and expertise in race development intersected and evolved in tandem rather than in sequence, crisscrossing the Atlantic and the Pacific. The central tendencies are clear enough from the record of the annual gatherings of activists and scholars at Lake Mohonk, New York, beginning in the 1880s, devoted at first to Indian policy and gradually expanding to include “Other Dependent People” of the United States, the Universal Races Congress, and beyond.