US Liberal Historians and the Making of a New Capitalist Imperial World Order

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 proposed an idea of a period of tutelage for peoples under the Ottoman empire and the soon-to-be defeated German empire in Africa and the Pacific. Although South African statesman Jan Smuts has been credited with the idea for the Mandate System, Beer also came up with the notion independently.

This paper discusses the lasting legacies of liberal historians like Beer and Clark University historian George Hubbard Blakeslee through international institutes like the Council on Foreign Relations, which was established in 1922 to continue the work of the Inquiry. Blakeslee was also keenly interested in the “administration of backwards races and undeveloped states.” He was the founding editor of The Journal of Race Development, which became Foreign Affairs under the aegis of the Council on Foreign Relations.