The Science of Empire : A Critical Disciplinary History of International Relations, 1868-1931

Rowley, Jude and Geyer, Robert and Germond, Basil (2026) The Science of Empire : A Critical Disciplinary History of International Relations, 1868-1931. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis repositions International Relations (IR) as an historically contingent science of empire, shaped by emergent interactions across imperial frontiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It constructs a critical disciplinary history of IR, drawing on the tradition of Fachgeschichte (discipline-history). By addressing historical silences in conventional narratives of IR’s disciplinary origins, it reframes IR not as the product of a noble pursuit of peace in the aftermath of the Great War, but as a discipline entangled with discourses ofimperial reform and science. To do so, it identifies a scientific-imperial épistémè of IR and outlines the historically contingent nature of the formalised academic discipline. It argues that attempts to co-opt ‘scientific’ discourse and present IR as a science were closely connected with searches for new legitimisations of empire. Though focussed primarily on the development of IR as a science of empire in the British Empire, it explores co-constitutive interconnexions across imperial frontiers with parallel discourses of science, imperialism, and race in the United States and German Empire/Weimar Republic in the same period. By tracing fragments and silences in IR’s disciplinary history, it explores the emergent development of scientific-imperial IR and charts the evolution of elite networks of imperialists embedded in state machinery as a class of ‘citizen scholars’. These same scholars would become the canonical founding figures of the discipline and are inextricably connected to established narratives of discipline foundation in the British Empire, Europe, and the United States. In recentring the focus of IR’s disciplinary history to account for its imperialist interconnectivities, this thesis is directed towards a more introspective history of the discipline. By concluding with a discussion of the disciplinary afterlives these networks left behind long after the period in focus, it demonstrates that much work remains for critical disciplinary historians of IR.