{"id":155,"date":"2019-04-10T13:50:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T12:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=155"},"modified":"2019-04-10T13:50:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-10T12:50:30","slug":"on-the-heirs-to-agnes-headlam-morley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/04\/10\/on-the-heirs-to-agnes-headlam-morley\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Heirs to Agnes Headlam-Morley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Professor Patricia Owens<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\ncurrently know very little, and certainly not based on archival work, about the\nhistory of women\u2019s international thought inside the Anglo-American academy, the\ndominant locations of disciplinary IR. Academic women are only one – but an obviously\nimportant – part of the story of how women in the past thought about relations\nbetween peoples, empires, and states. In this blog post, I share some very<\/em> preliminary<\/em>\nfindings, based only on a small portion of the British side of the archival\nwork for this part of the Leverhulme Research Project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First consider a puzzle. In IR\u2019s intellectual and disciplinary history, women appear<\/em> to be less present between the\nlate 1940s and 1980s than at any time in the first half of the 20th<\/sup>\ncentury (Owens,\n2018<\/a>). This is puzzling because we tend to think\nof women\u2019s position as improving through the course of the twentieth-century,\nespecially as their access to higher education increased. So why does their\nposition seem<\/em> to regress in IR?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To illustrate, a very large proportion of\nwhat today we would consider core IR subject matter was taught by women\nscholars from as early as 1904 when Lilian Knowles began teaching imperial and\ngreat power economic history at the LSE. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lilian Knowles <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Women were among the first appointed to the earliest IR departments in\nthe 1920s, such as Lilian Friedlander in Aberystwyth and Lucy Philip Mair,\nagain at the LSE. In the United States, women\u2019s international thought was institutionalised, most\nsignificantly at the Bureau of International\nRelations at Radcliffe College, in existence from 1924 until 1942. While there\nis no British equivalent, women\u2019s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge appointed\nhistorians to teach international relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is remarkable continuity between the\ninterests of very many of these academic women and today\u2019s core IR subject\nmatter. Consider just two\nof the substantive themes and scale of global historical processes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One, of course, was the mutual\nconstitution of international and race relations. Outside the academy, for\n\u2018race women\u2019 activist intellectuals such as Claudia Jones, international meant\nneo-colonial relations. Inside the academy, Merze\nTate<\/a>, partly trained in Oxford, combined analyses of racial\nhierarchy with a quite realist approach to diplomatic history. What I\u2019ve called\n\u2018white women\u2019s IR\u2019 in Britain largely centred on the imperial background of\ndiplomatic history and colonial administration, including works by Lilian\nPenson, Margery Perham, Lucy Philip Mair, Sybil Crowe, Mary Proudfoot, and\nAgatha Ramm. Clearly, their marginalization in IR\u2019s intellectual and\ndisciplinary histories is partly explained by this substantive focus. Imperial-international\nrelations was itself later erased from IR\u2019s disciplinary history (Vitalis,\n2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But another prominent theme that fascinated early academic women makes their absence from IR\u2019s\nintellectual and disciplinary histories much more difficult to explain. This is\nthe centrality of power-political and geopolitical relations between different\nkinds of polities. Early geopolitical thinkers, like Ellen Churchill Semple, economic\nhistorians, like Knowles and Eileen Power, and diplomatic historians like Elizabeth\nWisekmann and Tate, centred their analyses on the role of geopolitical\/international\n(as well as imperial) relations in shaping national polities and economies. So how do we explain their marginalization given the\nsubstantive focus on IR\u2019s core subject of power politics and diplomacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the answer is related to a third\npreliminary finding and to assumptions about the fields and approaches through\nwhich a separate IR discipline should be formed. It is here that we can begin\nto address the puzzle of historical women\u2019s partial\npresence in pre-disciplinary IR and a seemingly greater absence from the late\n1940s to 1980s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vast majority of\nthe IR women we\u2019re finding in university and college archives were trained as\nhistorians engaged in often very practical and always empirically-grounded\nresearch.\nIn contrast, the professionalization of academic IR\ninvolved a conscious break\naway from diplomatic history, especially in Britain. From the 1970s, IR\nlargely organised itself around a set of ideological \u2018isms\u2019 and \u2018Schools\u2019.\nDiplomatic history was caricatured as incapable of advancing \u2018theory\u2019, the\nlevel of abstraction necessary for a distinct theory of the \u2018international\nsystem\u2019. This marginalized all of the women mentioned above. Unsurprisingly\nsince it mirrors what we already know about the history of History and\nSociology, it is starting to look as though the carving out of a distinct IR\ndiscipline was a gendered process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider one of the most disparaged figures\nin the break from diplomatic history, Agnes\nHeadlam-Morley, the first women to become a full Professor at the University of\nOxford. She held the Montagu Burton Chair in International\nRelations between 1948-1971. An historian\nof Anglo-German relations and one-time would-be Tory MP, at Oxford she was a\nfamed salon hostess and College woman.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The consensus among the chroniclers of IR\u2019s history is that she failed to develop the subject because she continued to view IR as a\nsubfield of History. In Ian Hall\u2019s\nwords, Headlam-Morley was \u2018a staunch opponent of the study of\ncontemporary international relations, let alone the use of newfangled social\nscientific methods\u2019 (2012: 53). In any case,\nfor Martin Ceadel, Agnes\u2019s intellectual\ninterests were \u2018inherited\u2019 from her father, James, an historian and\nsenior civil servant who helped draft the Treaty of Versailles (Ceadel, 2014: 189). On this account, IR\u2019s fortunes only revived after Agnes\u2019s retirement in 1971 and the return to Oxford of Hedley\nBull, who held the Montagu Burton Chair between 1977\nand 1985.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Agnes Headlam-Morley painted by
Lutyens, Robert; St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For others, the stakes were even higher than the fate\nand methods of a fledgling discipline. Headlam-Morley appears on the very last\npage of Carroll Quigley\u2019s infamous\nbook, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden<\/em>,on\nthe Anglophone network seeking to establish global racial supremacy through imperial\nfederation. \u2018[T]he great\nidealistic adventure which began with Toynbee and Milner in 1875 had slowly\nground its way to a finish of bitterness and ashes\u2019 when this \u2018middle-aged spinster\u2026\nwith one publication to her credit\u2019 sat in the Oxford chair (1981: 310).\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I focus on Agnes Headlam-Morley not to endorse her international\nthought, a \u2018great man\u2019, \u2018great power\u2019 kind of history, and certainly not her\npolitics. Nor because those dreams of imperial federation have been revived in\nBrexitland with talk of \u2018Global Britain\u2019 and the \u2018Anglosphere\u2019. And it is only\npartly to point to the obvious misogyny in how she is discussed, most clearly by\nQuigley, as well as the\ngendered and constitutive marginalization\nof diplomatic history in the process of making \u2018disciplinary IR\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather it is because the disparagement of Agnes Headlam-Morley, who supervised\nMerze Tate, seems to be more than ironic today.\nFor it is not at all clear that the most significant and interesting\ninternational relations scholarship today is being conducted by the heirs to\nthose who broke from diplomatic history to forge a new discipline of IR.\nIndeed, such work is just, if not more, likely to be pursued by the heirs to\nAgnes Headlam-Morley, and indeed Merze Tate: contemporary practitioners of the\nnew international and global history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historians have long moved away from the study of diplomatic relations,\nnarrowly conceived, towards the historical understanding of international and\nglobal dynamics, working with the many thematic, conceptual and theoretical\nmoves that IR scholars import. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there ever was time that IR could point\nto the outmoded character of diplomatic history\nas the raison <\/em>d\u2019\u00eatr<\/em>e<\/em> for a separate\ndiscipline that time has long past. As IR continues to move beyond and slowly\nrecover from its \u2018grand theory wars\u2019, embracing mixed methods and genuine\ninterdisciplinarity, it could do worse than enter into new and productive\nconversations with earlier generations of women thinkers, such as Headlam-Morley and Tate, who were constitutively marginalized in the process of what\nshould be, but is not yet<\/em>, the\nacademic home of the best international relations scholarship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through this Leverhulme project, it\u2019s been\nan absolute pleasure to work alongside contemporary scholars of the new\ninternational and global history, Headlam-Morley\u2019s other<\/em> heirs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ceadel, Martin (2014) \u2018The Academic Normalization of\nInternational Relations at Oxford, 1920\u20132012: Structures Transcended\u2019 in\nChristopher Hood, Desmond King, and Gillian Peele (eds.) Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of\nthe Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective<\/em>\n(Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.184-202<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hall, Ian (2012) Dilemmas\nof Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945-1975 <\/em>(Berkeley:\nUniversity of California Press)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quigley, Carroll (1981) The\nAnglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden<\/em> (New York: Books in Focus)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vitalis, Robert (2015) White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American\nInternational Relations <\/em>(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Professor Patricia Owens We currently know very little, and certainly not based on archival work, about the history of women\u2019s international thought inside the Anglo-American academy, the dominant locations of disciplinary IR. Academic women are only one – but…<\/span><\/p>\n

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