Imperial Historians and the Making of US Policy

In 1917, President Wilson tasked “The Inquiry”—some 150 of America’s “best and the brightest”—with drafting plans for a postwar “new world order” that adhered to Wilson’s ideals about openness in trade and diplomacy, as well as national self-determination. Members of the Inquiry came up with recommendations for governance of nearly all parts of the world without directly consulting the peoples whose lives would be directly impacted by recommendations. Or, for that matter, necessarily having expertise in the areas they were assigned to. They included part-time Columbia University lecturer George Louis Beer, for whom the AHA prize for best book on European history since 1895 is named. Beer had retired from business to research and write books on the British empire and supervised The Inquiry’s recommendations for “the colonial problems” for all of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Beer also proposed an idea of a period of tutelage for peoples under the Ottoman empire—what later became the Mandate System. This paper discusses the lasting legacies of imperial historians like Beer and the international institutes they helped found, notably the Council on Foreign Relations.