Davis Alexander E - The Imperial Discipline

The Imperial Discipline

Race and the Founding
of International Relations

Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur
and Peter Vale

First published 2020 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale 2020

The right of Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4060 9 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4062 3 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0659 8 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0661 1 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0660 4 EPUB eBook

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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

This has been a long-term project between researchers based at various times in South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and India. Such a project is only possible with a great deal of support from multiple institutions. First of all, we would like to thank the University of Johannesburg, where we were all employed concurrently for a short time when much of the research for this book was done, and many of the ideas were thrashed out. We also received great financial and moral support from the University of Western Australia, Institute for History (Leiden University), Gratama Foundation and Leiden University Fund, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Amsterdam), the University of Pretoria, La Trobe University and the University of Adelaide.

We would like to thank Millennium: Journal of International Studies, and its editors Sarah Bertrand, Kerry Goettlich and Christopher Murray, for publishing our initial article from this project, Imperial Mission, Scientific Method: An Alternative Account of the Origins of IR, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46, no. 1 (2017), 323.

We are also grateful to the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies for allowing us to reproduce parts of the article A Communal Affair over International Affairs: The Arrival of IR in Late Colonial India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (2017), 689705.

The staff members at the following libraries and archives were exceedingly helpful in our archival research: Bodleian Library (Oxford), Chatham House Archives (London), the Barr-Smith Library Special Collections Room (University of Adelaide), Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa), the JC Beaglehole Reading Room (Victoria University of Wellington), Archives New Zealand (Wellington), the British Library (London), National Archives of India (New Delhi), Nehru Memorial and Museum Library (New Delhi), Cory Library (Rhodes University, Grahamstown), Wits Historical Papers (Johannesburg), University of Cape Town Archives (Cape Town) and National Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh).

We would like to thank our families and our partners, Petra Mosmann, Melissa Nefdt and Louise Vale for their support over the years it took to write this book.

In particular, thanks to Petra Mosmann for her careful reading of the final draft of the manuscript.

Peter Vale would like to recognise and remember the late John Barratt, who directed the South African Institute of International Affairs for nearly three decades.

Several of our colleagues were especially helpful in putting together the book and performing the research. We are particularly indebted to Ruth Gamble, Rebecca Strating, Estelle Prinsloo, George Barrett, Luisa Calvete, Karen Smith, Ian Patel and Sanchi Rai.

Finally, we would like to thank Jakob Horstmann and everyone at Pluto Press for their support for this project.

AIIA Australian Institute of International Affairs

ANU Australian National University

CIIA Canadian Institute of International Affairs

ICWA Indian Council on World Affairs

IIIA Indian Institute of International Affairs

INC Indian National Congress

IPR Institute of Pacific Relations

IR International Relations

LoN League of Nations

NZIIA New Zealand Institute of International Affairs

PIIA Pakistan Institute of International Affairs

RIIA Royal Institute of International Affairs

SAIIA South African Institute of International Affairs

SAIRR South African Institute of Race Relations

UN United Nations

WWI World War I

WWII World War II

VUW Victoria University of Wellington

At the end of a long and busy day in the frenetic weeks of activity leading up to signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 33 men gathered in the Paris Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919. While the bare bones of the League of Nations (LoN) were being thrashed out and debated in every corner of the city, this gathering of men was invited by a British delegate, Lionel Curtis (1872 1955), to discuss an institution quite different from the League. Focusing solely on an inter-state institution like the League, Curtis reasoned, was no guarantee of peace. The text on pages of treaties was often an unreliable barometer of the state of the world. The mind of the public, not the ink on the pages, shaped the future. Hence, he argued, efforts towards peace would eventually have to be directed towards shaping the minds of the public.

Attending this meeting were members of the American and British delegations. The meeting, presided over by General Tasker H. Bliss (1853 1930), American Plenipotentiary to the Peace Conference, was presented with a memorandum, co-written by Curtis and his one-time student at Oxford but now secretary of the LoN Commission, W.H. Shepardson. The memorandum proposed setting up a joint Institute of International Affairs with a branch each in Britain and America. It argued that the interest of the international society at large ought to become the primary factor in international affairs, an interest that required thinking beyond just the nation or the state. As such, universal interest subsumed and surpassed national interest, and in that spirit the memorandum urged that a joint institute with branches across the Atlantic would demonstrate the possibility of embodying such thinking in concrete institutions.

Curtis had been asked to become part of the British delegation by Robert Cecil, the chief of the LoN section of the British delegation. He was selected because he had published an article titled Windows of Freedom in the journal The Round Table, where he had argued that the prospective LoN must ultimately strive for a world government, and suggested that the British Commonwealth could provide a model. Curtis was no arm-chair academic. In the aftermath of the South African War, he had been recruited by Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner to South Africa, as one of a group of youngsters brought to the-then Transvaal to bring administrative efficiency. In 1907, Curtis, who later became one of the central pillars of this group called Milners Kindergarten, made the case for a federated South Africa in a document titled Selborne Memorandum. For the next two and a half years, along with his Kindergarten group, Curtis devoted his energies towards propagandising the need for a unified state in South Africa through publications and Closer Union societies. When the Union of South Africa was finally declared in 1910, the Kindergarten took credit, and going further, made plans to create a federated global empire. The organisation, The Round Table, of which both Curtis and Cecil, as well as several of those present in this meeting were part, was established in 1910 with the purpose of finding a scheme for the organic union of the British empire. Before, and to some extent during, the war, the Round Table had carried out propaganda for a larger federated organisation of the British empire, which Curtis had notched up further with his proposals for a world government. In this period, Curtis had served as the roving ambassador of the Round Table movement.