Toward a World Social History of International Relations: Notes on Eileen Power

At the time of her premature death in 1940, Eileen Power was a dominant figure in the historical profession in Britain, one of the most internationally renowned English historians, increasingly known as a writer and thinker on world politics when 'international relations' was not yet fully formed as a separate university subject. She was no more marginal to the study of international relations in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s than numerous and far less important male thinkers whose work is repetitively analysed in international intellectual and disciplinary history.

Eileen Power moved among the figures, in the same Cambridge, LSE and Bloomsbury circles and wrote and taught on the same core international relations subjects and same venues as other figures recognised in IR's intellectual history. She was a recognized expert at IR conferences, including at Institute of Pacific Relations, joining Margaret Cleeve, Barbara Ward, Arnold Toynbee and Charles Webster in Kyoto in 1929 as part of the 'British group'. She lectured at the League of Nations Unions (LNU), the Worker's Educational Association, and had close links with the International Federation of University Women' (IFUW), co-founded by Virginia Gildersleeve and her partner Caroline Spurgeon. She worked for the Girton College branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and was treasurer for the Union of Democratic Control. When the men of the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies were discussing the need for new international relations schoolbooks, Eileen Power was writing them.

She was the best-known medieval historian of the interwar period, as well-known during her lifetime as her contemporaries R.H. Tawney and Marc Bloch. In the 1920s and 1930s, Eileen Power was one of LSE's most prominent and popular lecturers, its second woman Professor, and first to deliver the Oxford Ford lectures. She received honorary degrees, job offers in the United States, and would likely have become Professor in Economic History at Cambridge had she applied. Along with her friend, collaborator, and colleague Tawney, Eileen Power was pioneering in the fields of economic and social history, founding the Economic History Review and co-founding the Economic History Society. She was a public historian and intellectual, committed to writing internationalist textbooks for children and broadcasting regularly for the BBC. At the time of her death, thousands of British children 'knew her voice and loved her lessons' (Jones, 1940). According to her biographer, historian Maxine Berg, 'It is hard to overstate the academic status Eileen Power had achieved at such a young age'; 'there were virtually no precedents for the kind of mainstream recognition she achieved' (1996, 4, 180).

Power's intellectual originality in the context of international thinking was in her combination of social, economic, world, and women's history to analyse medieval and early modern civilisations and their interactions and mutual influence. She was at the forefront of establishing social and economic history, and women's history, as core university subjects, and was a pioneer in collaborations across historical and social science. Social and economic history as practiced by Eileen Power was international and world history, crossing countries, civilizations, and periods. She had a world historical vision that unlike her contemporaries H.G. Well and G.P. Gooch was not rooted in a view of universal progress towards Western modernity, and, unlike Wells, she researched and wrote her own works in his field (c.f. Tonooka, 2021). She wrote comparative and world history focusing on non-European polities and cultures, medieval traders and trade routes, and the so-called 'rising powers' of her day, particularly China. The medieval world she depicted was commercial and international, including details of foreign trade, and accounts of political and financial elites, ordinary people, traders, merchants, and travellers. Influenced by her training in Cambridge, Paris, and London, as well as the internationalist, socialist, pacifist and feminist circles in which she moved, Power's conceptual and theoretical work was underpinned by detailed archival and primary source material and a literary and cultural sensibility. With these tools, Power developed a new theoretical and methodological framework to integrate sociological and economic history into a large-scale analysis of world history and international relations as an alternative to traditional diplomatic history and political theories of the sovereign state.

Eileen Power's world social history was far more developed and sophisticated than her LSE colleague C.A.W Manning's attempt to create a sociological theory of international relations as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations. When Manning was pursuing sociological abstractions, Power was one of the earliest proponents of a genuinely historical sociology of world history. Through the 1930s, Power's lectures on world history were considerably more popular than Manning's on the structure of international society. With Tawney, Power 'easily dominated not just economic history teaching, but teaching in the social sciences generally at the LSE… Students from all subjects at LSE attended; hers and Laski's were known as the lectures to attend' (Berg, 1996, 155). Manning, in contrast, 'held special seminars for hand-picked students, those he deemed would carry on a sort of academic "apostolic succession"… of a "mystery" from the Master to Apprentice' (Porter, 2003: 32). Power's literary gifts, as well as the contemporary relevance of her lectures, were likely more appealing than Manning's 'bizarre' and 'impenetrable' prose (Long, 2005: 77-78). Power was open about the relations between political and scholarly work.  She proposed LSE's Academic Freedom Committee that supported visiting lectureships for Jewish scholars. Manning feigned to separate his scientific studies from his political project of supporting white supremacy in South Africa.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the leading edge of international thinking at LSE was not in the then International Studies Department, but from this social and economic historian in the Department of History. How, then, was Eileen Power erased from histories of international thinking, even at LSE before a separate International Studies department was established in 1927 and during the period when economic history was 'the soul of LSE' (Dahrendorf, 1995: 233; Bauer and Brighi, 2003)? Power's complete absence from IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories cannot be explained by her historical training or her subfields; no one in Britain had an IR PhD in the 1920s and 1930s and most teachers and researchers on the subject were historians. When we consider the degree to which IR scholars have purloined from almost every other discipline and field to fill the gap left by its departure from serious historical scholarship, why has IR never had a 'social and economic history turn'?

By the 1950s, Eileen Power's legacy for the study of international relations was already erased by the creation of IR's post-war founding myth: that to establish IR on a secure institutional footing required breaking away from History to embrace a very particular kind of sociological research. The men wishing to establish international relations as a separate university subject always based their appeal on the claim that historians 'recounted what happened' but were disinterested in the theoretical work needed to understand the fundamental nature of international relations (Goodwin, 1951). Their early caricature of historians as uninterested in sociological theory, laid the groundwork for the erasure of Eileen Power's social and internationalist history of the middle ages, and her attempt to write a world social and economic history that emphasised cross-border trade, merchants, and migrations. She was one of the earliest British historians to take seriously the sociological project, building on her leading expertise in medieval history to experiment with different methodological approaches to theorising world history. Beyond identifying herself as a social and economic historian, Power did not identify with any theoretical 'school', nor did she seek to found one, making it even easier for IR scholars obsessed with schools and isms to ignore her. Nonetheless, Power was one of the leading pioneers of social, economic, and gender history comparable to the first generation of the Annales School in France, particularly the work of Bloch and Febvre (for an excellent discussion see Berg's (1996) unsurpassed biography).

Here - in the earliest decades of the formation of international relations as a separate subject - we find an historian in a social science school making a plea for greater abstraction - for theory - in historical research on world history and contemporary international relations. Like Susan Strange, Eileen Power made her name by founding her own subfield and was an active convenor of scholars across disciplines, including anthropology, economics, sociology, and history. There is some irony, then, that Susan Strange made her name by establishing a field, international political economy, based on overcoming an intellectual and methodological schism created by her male LSE predecessors, that depended on the erasure of the most interesting international thinker at the LSE in the 1920s and 1930s.

References

Berg, Maxine (1996) Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940 (Cambridge)

Dahrendorf, Ralf (1995) LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895-1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Goodwin, Geoffrey L. (1951) 'Teaching of International Relations in Universities in the United Kingdom', in Geoffrey L. Goodwin (ed.), The University Teaching of International Relations (Oxford: Blackwell)

Jones, M.G.  (1940) 'Memories of Eileen Power', Girton Review, 114, pp.3-13

Long, David (2005) 'C. A. W. Manning and the Discipline of International Relations', Round Table, Vol.94, no.378 (2005), pp.77-96.

Porter, Brian (2003) 'A Brief History Continued, 1972-2022' in Harry Bauer and Elisabetta Brighi, International Relations at the LSE: A History of 75 Years (London: Millennium, 2003), pp.29-44

Tonooka, Chika (2021) 'World History's Eurocentric Moment? British Internationalism in the Age of Asian Nationalism, C.1905-1931', Modern Intellectual History 18.1, pp.95-120