Ellen Churchill Semple (1863—1932)

Ellen Churchill Semple developed one of the earliest and most comprehensive theories of the geographical shaping of international politics in the twentieth century. Her work is important because it offers insights into the history of international thought on state-building, civilization, race, colonialism, and technology, but also because of its influence across Anglophone geography, IR, history, and political economy in the first half of the twentieth century. Here we set out the originality and significance of Semple’s ideas and demonstrate the gendered reception of her work, which precluded her admittance to IR’s canon.

The geopolitical tradition played a central role in the intellectual development of IR as a distinctive field (Ashworth Reference Ashworth2014). Semple was known for pioneering ideas about geography and international politics, which were a major focus of debates in history and the emerging disciplines of geography, politics, and IR (Koelsch Reference Koelsch2014). Her work is part of a distinctively Lamarckian thread of thinking about human evolution in which spatial environments shape hereditary characteristics. This privileged the role of environment in explaining historical change and human differentiation. Semple’s work is distinguished by the detail and complexity of her account of the environmental factors operating in history and how she drew on this complexity to explain international phenomena including trade, war, and colonialism.

In an early rehearsal of arguments made throughout her work, Semple characterized humans as “shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive” in contrast to the permanence of the geographic environment. In her words,

With explicitly gendered language, Semple explained human diversity and political organization as an outcome of the effects of different geographical factors, which vary from climate to landscape. This was not a simple linear process, but one in which multiple factors crosscut and stimulated different responses in an unpredictable process.

Semple’s arguments disturb straightforward distinctions between “idealist” and “realist” discourses in this period (Ashworth Reference Ashworth2014). On one hand, Semple celebrated historical progress, the globalization of trade, the development of ideals of freedom, and democracy. On the other, she located these developments firmly in the effects of geographical factors on particular “peoples,” and exemplified highly influential evolutionary, racist, and Eurocentric ideas. Not unlike her contemporary, F. Melian Stawell, Semple viewed the Mediterranean region and colonial expansion as the ultimate origin of progressive civilization. Their racism was in accord with most IR scholarship at the time. “All the world is heir of the Mediterranean” (Semple Reference Semple1932, 3). Africa was “a poor mediator, limited in its power either to give or to receive.” Semple commended an earlier tendency to view Egypt as part of Asia; while geographically mistaken, she argued that it was correct on civilizational grounds (Reference Semple1932, 6; Reference Semple Ellen1911, 158).

For Semple, the impetus to colonization was the desire and ability to overcome and escape geographical limitation. War or famine, arising out of overpopulation or lack of resources, drove people to find new settlements; levels of group interaction and the spread of superior cultures then followed. This was not just Semple’s view in relation to the ancient Mediterranean. She was deeply interested in colonization as a source of progress across the world, as crucial to civilizational development. She offered advice to Japan on the colonization of Korea, castigating the government for cramping “the natural and healthy colonizing instincts of the people” (Reference Semple1913, 263–4). Her argument was straightforwardly prescriptive, supporting colonial Japan’s efforts to regenerate the “docile, amiable, lazy, ineffectual” Koreans (Reference Semple1913, 267, 273). Semple congratulated Japanese leaders on their grasp of pacification war on insurgent “savages” in Formosa, of not only seeking to improve health and welfare, but through gathering knowledge of tribal peoples (Semple Reference Semple1913, 273).

Unlike many other women thinkers of her generation, Semple had a professional profile and a series of university positions, including the presidency of the American Geographical Society. She directly experienced gender discrimination, including inequities in pay (Berman Reference Berman1974). Yet in an early 1882 address, she suggested that her field was

While clearly reflecting the gendered stereotypes of Semple’s time, this statement also points to how white, educated middle-class women in the United States could create a permissive space for intellectual work. In Semple’s case, this included extensive fieldwork in which the privileges inherent in being a white middle-class woman in an imperial world order enabled her to research local contexts and populations abroad and to report her findings to an appreciative audience back home (Adams Reference Adams2014).

Unsurprisingly, Semple’s (Reference Semple Ellen1911) major work, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography, was reviewed in the first IR journal, The Journal of Race Development. Although Semple’s ideas were always contested, as were those of other geopolitical thinkers, her works remained required reading on geography curricula until the 1940s, one of the key modes in which IR was studied prior to World War II (Keighren Reference Keighren2010, 119–173). As Bushong notes, “Most of the second generation of modern American professional geographers were her students” (Reference Bushong and Freeman1984, 88). Semple’s disciples populated academic positions and taught in schools across the United States (Keighren Reference Keighren2010, 129). Her ideas were transmitted to IR through her exchanges with contemporary geopolitical thinkers (such as Mackinder), students (such as Whittlesey), and critics (such as Bowman). Her arguments were a constituent part of the geopolitical thinking that influenced international policy in the Anglophone world in the early twentieth century (Black Reference Black2016). She was one of the academic experts in the 1917 “Inquiry,” forerunner of the Council of Foreign Relations, developing proposals for the boundaries of new nations for the Paris Peace negotiations; her resultant briefings were read by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles (Keighren Reference Keighren2010, 139).

Given the originality and influence of Semple’s work on one of IR’s core subjects, why is she excluded from its canon? It cannot be due to the post-1945 expurgation of geopolitics in Anglophone IR given its association with Hitler’s world policy. After all, IR’s canon includes Spykman (Thompson Reference Thompson1982), Mackinder (Luard Reference Luard1992), and Mahan (Luard Reference Luard1992; Wolfers and Martin Reference Wolfers and Martin1956). Typically, Semple’s male predecessors (Ratzel, Mahan), her contemporaries (Mackinder, Haushofer), and her successors (Bowman, Whittlesey) are also more prominent in wider literature on geopolitics (Agnew Reference Agnew2003; Chapman Reference Chapman2011; Dodds Reference Dodds2014; Fettweis Reference Fettweis2015) and histories of international thought (Ashworth Reference Ashworth2010; Reference Ashworth2013; Hobson Reference Hobson2012; Knutsen Reference Knutsen2015). Indeed, this neglect continues in recent work on IR’s history. In McCourt’s account of the relation between the 1917 Inquiry and disciplinary IR, we are told that no women participated at all (Reference McCourt2017, 400). In fact, not only Semple but 28 women are listed in the salary records and personnel returns for the Inquiry in 1918, including area experts, diplomatic historians, economists, and experts on international law (Gelfand Reference Gelfand1963, 337–343). It would be difficult to believe on the basis of Ashworth’s discussion (Reference Ashworth2013, 139–40) that the head of research “urged [Semple] to break any engagement and drop all other work to contribute to the business of the Inquiry” (Keighren Reference Keighren2010, 138).

In wider histories of international thought, if she appears at all, Semple is almost invariably introduced as the student or pupil of the German thinker Friedrich Ratzel, with whom she studied. For Hobson, Semple is Ratzel’s “disciple,” the only use of this marker in a discussion of over one hundred other figures (Reference Hobson2012, 261). Semple either simply channeled Ratzel’s thought for Anglophones or got Ratzel wrong. According to Ashworth (Reference Ashworth2014, 100),

Such claims neglect Semple’s own account of her relation to Ratzel, treat Influences in isolation from her earlier and later work, and misconstrue her relation to environmental determinism. Semple is mistakenly reduced to a more or less effective mediator of Ratzel’s ideas, as opposed to a thinker in her own right. In contrast, Bowman and Whittlesey, both of whom learned from Semple, appear as independent thinkers (Ashworth Reference Ashworth2013; cf. Ashworth Reference Ashworth2011; Reference Ashworth, Steffek and Holthaus2020).

In fact, Semple explicitly rejected Ratzel’s organicist state theory and regarded his approach as underdeveloped in significant ways (Reference Semple Ellen1911, vi). Geographers remain divided about the degree and nature of Semple’s determinism, with some perceiving agency as more significant in her pre-1911 writings (Hawley Reference Hawley1968). Others view her determinism as softening in line with wider intellectual developments after World War I (Koelsch Reference Koelsch2014). As she put it, “The eternal flux of Nature … warns against precipitate or rigid conclusions …. For this reason the writer speaks of geographic factors and influences, shuns the word geographic determinant, and speaks with extreme caution of geographic control” (Reference Semple Ellen1911, vii). Paying attention to Semple in her own right disturbs simple accounts of her “determinism.” It resituates Influences as one important work in a considerable oeuvre, allows consideration of Semple’s own grasp of issues of causation and complexity, and allows her international thought to shift across time.

While we cannot do justice to its full range, Semple’s ideas about territory, colonialism and race were a crucial element of the international thinking that shaped the theory and practice of early-twentieth-century world politics. Her exclusion from IR’s canon is thus particularly surprising, given the degree and range of her influence in the period in which IR traditionally located the proximate roots of its main intellectual traditions. In accounting for her absence, it is not difficult to observe the gendered reception of Semple’s work. We have also seen that in the few brief engagements with Semple in wider intellectual and disciplinary histories, her marginalization is due to a persistent tendency to deny independent meaning to her ideas and to place them as immediately superseded by later generations (for a rare exception see Black Reference Black2016). That women’s intellectual contributions are dismissed as simply echoing those of men is well documented in feminist work (Russ Reference Russ1983; Weiss Reference Weiss2009). Men acknowledging an influence, even of someone who mediates others’ ideas, can still be addressed as significant thinkers. Yet as with Sartre and Beauvoir so with Semple and Ratzel; because she acknowledged his influence, she is not a thinker of independence, importance, and influence, the stated criteria for inclusion in IR’s canon.

Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914)

Like Semple, but to an even greater degree, Bertha von Suttner’s work possessed extraordinary influence during the period in which IR emerged as a distinct field (von Suttner Reference von Suttner1894; Reference von Suttner1910a; Reference von Suttner1910b; Reference von Suttner1914; [1912] Reference von Suttner, May and Cooper2016). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Suttner was a crucial originator and disseminator of liberal pacifist ideas among international activists, practitioners, and the general public, especially in the context of the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions. In 1905, Suttner was the first woman solely awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her arguments were important for the development of international law as an instrument of liberal pacification (Peter Reference Peter, Fassbender and Peters2012, 1142–1145). Suttner prefigured inter-war thinkers such as Salter and Keynes, arguing for the unification of Europe, recognized by the European Union itself (European Economic and Social Committee 2012). Her ideas also fed into strands of feminist pacifism articulated at the 1915 Women’s Conference at The Hague, the origin of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Suttner’s international thought is undoubtedly part of what later IR scholars have defined as liberal internationalism or idealism, and more recently analyzed as an evolutionary, Eurocentric, and civilizational discourse (Hobson Reference Hobson2012; Knutsen Reference Knutsen1992). Unlike Semple, she opposed colonialism. Yet like her, Suttner deployed the language of civilization and barbarism. She thought it was particularly shameful that Europe could still indulge in war at the start of the twentieth century because, unlike other civilizations or regions, Europe should know better. Suttner engaged with environmental and evolutionary texts, such as Buckle’s (Reference Buckle1872) History of Civilization in England, which also influenced Semple. Buckle explained the trend of world history towards European dominance in terms of the moral and intellectual characteristics of the Enlightenment, the triumph of reason over superstition, humanity over nature. Suttner made her argument against war in this context. War was regressive and “barbaric,” a lapse back to a nature out of tune with the humanistic and progressive movement of world history.

However, what makes Suttner’s international thought distinctive is not her pacifism and internationalism, Eurocentrism, or racism but her treatment of war, nationalism, and militarism. Suttner pioneered arguments commonly articulated in the early twentieth century by canonized “idealists” such as Angell (Bliddal, Sylvest, and Wilson Reference Bliddal, Sylvest and Wilson2013; Lebow, Schouten, and Suganami Reference Lebow, Schouten and Suganami2016; Long and Wilson Reference Long and Wilson1995; Luard Reference Luard1992). Modern warfare, she argued, was self-defeating in the light of modern technologies and processes now understood as “globalization.” She was skeptical of the logic of deterrence, saw public opinion as a force that could be mobilized against war, and advocated the potential of legal regulation to replace war in settling disputes. Each of these contributions justifies Suttner’s inclusion in IR’s canon.

In this regard, Suttner’s most original thinking was her attention to the ideologies and micropractices that sustained war. She prefigured much later gender studies work on how children’s toys and books, and masculinity rituals such as dueling, were part of a world in which “To be exposed to murdering and being murdered was simply one of the chivalric and patriotic necessities that life brings to man” (Reference von Suttner1910a, 138). Suttner’s analysis of the complex relations that enabled war made her highly critical of contemporary efforts to “humanize” war—for example, through regulation of weapons or use of defensive, deterrent technologies (Reference von Suttner1910b, 100, 228–9). She was furious when Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, received the Nobel Peace Prize (Reference von Suttner1910b, 292) and when successive peace conferences were hijacked by those seeking to regulate rather than abolish war (Reference von Suttner1910b, 228–9). In her words, “The securing and organizing of peace have nothing to do with the regulation of war … —quite the contrary! …. They are driving in the wedge that shall split the work of peace” (Reference von Suttner1910b, 286). Attempts to ameliorate war simply helped to perpetuate it; war could no more be humanized than slavery or torture (Reference von Suttner1910b, 286–7).

In this respect, Suttner was highly skeptical of claims regarding “clean” weapons or weapons that would never be used. In novels and pamphlets written in the five years before her death, Suttner focused on the dangers of aerial warfare (Reference von Suttner1914; [1912] Reference von Suttner, May and Cooper2016). This followed the failure to ratify the agreement to ban aerial bombardment at the 1907 Hague Conference, demonstrating the limitations of legal regulation. Suttner’s later work lost some of the strong optimism of her 1889 novel Lay Down Your Arms, which diplomatic historian Merze Tate described as “perhaps the greatest peace novel of all times” (Reference Kauppi and Viotti1942, 53). At one level, Suttner remained wedded to the idea that scientific advances were essential to human progress and eventual peace. But she had identified a fundamental paradox; the technologies that enable communication and render borders and distance insignificant, thus part of the march of progress, were always recouped for military purpose (Reference von Suttner1910b, 401; [1912] Reference von Suttner, May and Cooper2016).

Merze Tate’s engagement with Suttner in The Disarmament Illusion (Reference Kauppi and Viotti1942) tells us something of the gendered reception of Suttner’s work in disciplinary IR, as well as the gendered and racialized reception of Tate (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015). Tate’s first book analyzed the early-twentieth-century efforts to reduce armament production and thus necessarily engaged with Suttner. But as Herren has observed, when she “highlighted … the role of the many women’s organizations active at the Hague Peace Conferences” this aspect of her otherwise celebrated work “evoked critical reviews” (Reference Herren, Sluga and James2016, 191). Still, decades later, when Suttner appears in lists of liberal pacifists, it is her male peers who are analyzed. For example, Hobson includes Suttner among the liberal Darwinists and pacifist Eugenicists, but does not discuss her work, subsuming it under categories of colonialism and racism which conceal her active opposition to colonial wars and to Antisemitism. Knutsen cites Roger Chickering’s belittling of the Peace Society that Suttner had established in 1891: “a comical sewing bee composed of sentimental aunts of both sexes” (Reference Knutsen1997, 212).

Suttner was used to being mocked and would not have been surprised by her reception in contemporary IR. As a public intellectual, peace activist, novelist, and woman, her work was constantly ridiculed. For those who approved of Suttner’s international thinking, her gendered identity empowered her critique of war. For those who disapproved, it spoke precisely to her inability to engage rationally with the world of high politics. Crucially, in addition to her gender, Suttner’s use of literary form is another reason to dismiss her significance. The reception of intellectual work is shaped by conceptions about the most appropriate way to express serious ideas: linear arguments that are neutral in tone, not partisan and flowery, that rely on reason, not emotion. Suttner’s writings do not meet this masculinized bar, at least not consistently. Yet these are reasons to take her arguments more not less seriously. Suttner understood the power of fiction, especially autobiographical fiction, as a vehicle for the communication of political ideas. As she wrote,

Suttner leveraged her feminized persona and her class position to gain a platform to make the powerful arguments in Lay Down Your Arms, one of the most important and influential literary works on war in the first half of the twentieth century.

Martha von Tilling, the protagonist of Lay Down Your Arms and its sequel Martha’s Kinder (Reference von Suttner1903), is clearly Suttner’s aristocratic feminine avatar. She is comically hopeless at doing anything constructive in a war zone, unlike the competent nursing nun she accompanies. But war is not something that can be ameliorated by the efforts of heroic nuns. Martha’s incapacity in the face of war’s horrors is the right response because it can only issue in an absolute rejection of war and its conditions of possibility. Her aristocratic uselessness and feminine sensibility combine to enable her to see the absurdity as well as the horror of war but also how militarism is embedded in society as a whole, including in gendered divisions of labor. Lay Down Your Arms exposes how emotional investment in war is manipulated, spiritually elevated through a gendered economy of sacrifice. “Next to the blood which soldiers pour out on the altar of their country, the tears which bereaved mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the soldiers pour on the same altar become a libation hardly less sacred” (Reference von Suttner1894, 40). Martha initially took for granted the tropes of patriotism, the glory of war, and the beauty of sacrifice. But through her own experience of bereavement, motherhood, and self-education, she “recognized too soon that the desire for battle was not a super-human but an infra-human feeling, no mystic revelation from the realms of the morning, but a reminiscence of the realm of the animal, a re-awakening of the brutal” (Reference von Suttner1894, 157).

Although Suttner was a firm supporter of women’s rights and highly conscious of the importance of gender in reproducing war, she identified as a humanist, not a feminist. She was not an academic in the mold of Semple or Cooper. Like many of the liberal intellectuals of her time she worked in the public domain of journalism and propaganda. However, unlike most of these intellectuals, her work was known to an international audience of hundreds of thousands. Her ideas were key to peace organizations across Europe and the United States from the 1880s until her death in 1914. No history of pacifism can be written without reference to her, and yet Suttner is missing from IR’s canon, a field some have argued was conceived precisely to understand and achieve peace (Olson and Groom Reference Olson and Groom1991; cf. Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015).

Comparing Semple and Suttner illustrates how the unstated criteria for inclusion in IR’s canon are operationalized in different ways and vary depending on the degree to which they challenged the canon’s core assumptions. Semple is challenging primarily because she is a woman. She is easy to overlook because women’s academic work is assumed to be derivative. Yet, at the same time, her work is fundamentally consistent with dominant norms about the content and method of international thought. Semple was an academic, her work was Eurocentric and racist, and she was deeply embedded in a community of geopolitical theorists, many of whom were afforded canonic status. If Semple had been included in IR’s canon, perhaps as a token woman, then IR’s self-understanding would not have changed a great deal.

Suttner, in contrast, challenges IR’s canon in different ways. She was doubly excluded through being doubly feminized. First, she could be construed as not “serious”: unsystematic and inconsistent, “comical,” and “sentimental” given her focus on emotions. Such traits, some of which are glossed in treatments of male thinkers like Rousseau, become reasons for her exclusion. Second, she wrote from an explicitly feminized standpoint, in the first person, in genres such as novels. It is not unusual for public intellectuals to work across genres. In her lifetime, Suttner’s novels were taken seriously as international thought, like those of W. E. B. Du Bois or H. G. Wells, but not in the construction of IR’s canon. Figures primarily known for journalistic and fictional work were marginalized, an exclusion that is only now being challenged in IR, to date on behalf of men (Bell Reference Bell2018). Here we see how gendered assumptions bite deeply into not only attitudes towards women scholars but also assumptions about the substance and form of what counts as international thought (Gardner Reference Gardner2003). Compared with Semple, Suttner does more to upset IR’s canon. She challenges what it means to be an international thinker and opens up new categories and possibilities for international thought.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)

Examining Anna Julia Cooper’s work in comparison to Semple and Suttner casts further light on the gendered and racialized assumptions that shape the construction of IR’s canon. In offering a more profound challenge than either Suttner or Semple, Cooper also offers a vision for an alternative account of what IR is and what might count as international thought. Like Semple, Cooper was an academic, an educator, and a systematic thinker. Like Suttner, she saw the analytic and normative potential of women’s “voice.” Like both, she used a language of civilization and progress. But her understanding of the nature of world politics and what it means to think about world politics were radically different.

Concepts of race, civilization, and evolution were central to understanding IR in the early twentieth century. Typically for their time, Semple and Suttner embedded racist and civilizational distinctions and hierarchies into their thinking and took for granted that the location of international relations was the high politics of white elites steering interstate and interimperial relations. Widespread concerns about multiracial states focused on threats to the “health” and productivity of “inferior” peoples. “Race” was understood to be determined by biology, culture, or environment—that is, outside the international arena (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015). In contrast, Cooper analyzed colonialism, imperialism, revolution, and capitalism as produced and sustained by a globally transversal politics of slave-based economies, racialization, and feminization. International orders were produced through racialized and patriarchal property relations ([1925] Reference Cooper1988b).

Cooper understood her own position as thoroughly internationalized. She was a Black, American, Christian, educated woman, who had been born into slavery, part of a transnational African diaspora (Pellow Reference Pellow and Hubbard1997). Consideration of this positionality was the basis for a distinctive standpoint from which Cooper analyzed national and international orders, as well as practiced internationalist, antidiscriminatory politics. For her, IR could not be understood in distinction from national politics because they permeated each other. Both national and international orders were the product of interconnected power structures and relations of caste and property. Cooper repeatedly returned to these claims in her groundbreaking 1925 Sorbonne doctoral thesis, translated as Slavery and the French Revolutionists.

In this work, Cooper analyzed the interaction between identities and interests in her historical analysis of the relations between French revolutionary regimes and ideologies, their slave-holding colonies, and the successive revolts of colonialists and slaves in what became Haiti. Both identities and interests were causally significant in the revolutionary authority’s ambivalence about emancipation, and in the refusal of white plantation owners to give up their property and status. They were equally significant for the actions and reactions of free and enslaved Blacks. Exploring the intersection of economic structures and racialization, Cooper sought to demonstrate how sophisticated racialized distinctions were a form of governance that left deep and counterintuitive legacies. In her words,

These interests and identities are not reducible to the terms of high politics; they cut across existential, parochial, national, and imperial locations.

As Vivian May (Reference May2007, 110) points out, Cooper’s doctoral work preceded by a decade C. L. R. James’s ([1938] Reference James1963) more famous treatment of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, which does not reference Cooper. Here, the significance of gendered as well as racial dynamics in the publication and reception of Cooper’s work come to the fore. Although academically trained, Cooper spent much of her working life teaching in segregated schools. She completed her PhD in her sixties in the teeth of opposition from her employer. She did not have the networks to get an academic press to publish her thesis, nor the time and resources to do it herself. However, in the 1940s she privately published a booklet, “The Third Step,” which included the speech she gave upon receiving her diploma and written versions of oral responses to questions from her oral defense (Lemert and Bhan Reference Lemert and Bhan1998, chaps. 24, 25, 27). She also passed her dissertation for translation and publication to her friend, Alfred Vance Churchill. In the 1940s, Churchill passed on a copy to Leona Gabel, a colleague at Smith College, who worked for many years on a Cooper biography (Gabel Reference Gabel1982). Frances Richardson Keller, a French studies scholar, eventually translated to English and published the dissertation in 1988, more the 60 years after it was defended. Although Cooper scholars recognize the importance of the work, the text remains little known to this day outside this readership (Gabel Reference Gabel1982; May Reference May2007; Pellow Reference Pellow and Hubbard1997; Richardson Keller Reference Richardson Keller1975).

Throughout her life, Cooper’s writing had to fit alongside full-time teaching and administrative posts and caring for several adopted children. She famously complained that the Pan-African conventions were held during teaching term or in places that those with limited funds could not reach. Her personal experiences of intersectional hierarchy were fundamental to her earlier, most famous work, A Voice from the South, originally published in 1892 (Cooper Reference Cooper1988a). This work contains Cooper’s distinctive methodology and account of the intersection of gender, race, class, and international politics from the standpoint of a Black woman. It contains acute analyses of how modes of hierarchical group differentiation become entrenched and reproduced through the interaction of interests and identities. For Cooper, caste distinctions that justify oppression also construct political interests and tools for their advancement. Property owners gain an interest in keeping Black tenants out if the value of their property declines when rented to people of color (251). White feminists gain an interest in stressing their racial superiority as leverage in debates about the franchise, claiming superiority over Indians and Negroes (118, 124); and Black men “seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, [but] when they strike the woman question, they drop back into sixteenth century logic” (75). In this complex of gender, race, class, and inter-national hierarchies, Black women were the group most silenced and excluded, but with much to say.

In speaking from the standpoint of a Black woman, Cooper turned what can be used to stabilize a false sense of superiority into a resource for thought. In her PhD examination, Cooper was asked to respond directly to one of her examiners, Célestin Bouglé, a white supremacist. In ways similar to Semple, Bouglé restricted the capacity for democracy to the “Nordic” peoples, who had the responsibility of ruling other races. Cooper showed how Bouglé’s interests and identity were bound up with his civilizational narrative, offering him simultaneous power and pride. In an unequivocal response to the claim of racial superiority, Cooper responded, “The concept of Equality as it is the genuine product of the idea of inherent value in the individual derived from the essential worth of Humanity must be before all else unquestionably of universal application” ([1925] Reference Cooper Anna, Lemert and Lanham1998, 297; May Reference May2007, 98–100).

Cooper did not conceive of the standpoint of a Black woman as parochial and exclusive but able to grasp the true complexity of relations of domination. It could also expose the self-defeating competitions over different forms and degrees of oppression. For her, if the women’s movement was dedicated to the cause of freedom, then it was entirely contradictory to differentiate women’s freedom from other freedoms. “Why should woman become a plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power?” ([1892] Reference Cooper1988a, 122). Here Cooper prefigured feminism as a transnational political project, ongoing struggles over the category of “women,” and their translation into practices in international policies around gender and development.

Cooper championed individual equality and freedom. But this was not the onward march of triumphant liberalism, in which equality can be interpreted as sameness. Her commitment to the infinite value of the individual was tied to her recognition of the significance of perspective, for our ability to perceive ourselves or others as free and worthy of respect. She recommended a commitment to plurality, in which men and women of all races, classes, and nations could enlighten each other about the meaning of freedom and equality inherent in their experience. “The supremacy of one race—the despotism of a class or the tyranny of an individual—cannot ultimately prevail on a continent held in equilibrium by such conflicting forces and by so many and such strong fibred races as there are struggling on this soil” (Cooper [1892] Reference Cooper1988a, 167). Pluralism was a prerequisite for the achievement of justice in the context of multiplicity and hierarchy, the defining characteristic of international politics. It also reflected Cooper’s view that the “domestic” relations of the United States were as international as were the imperial relations of the French revolutionary regime with its colonial possessions and postcolonial successors.

Cooper was not unknown in her own time. She spoke at the first Pan-African Congress Conference in London in 1900 and was in correspondence with and cited (without being credited) by W. E. B. Du Bois (James Reference James, Gillman and Weinbaum2007; May Reference May2007; Moody-Turner Reference Moody-Turner2009, 7). Nevertheless, even in her own time, Du Bois and C. L. R. James gained greater recognition. Retrospectively she has been identified as a founding figure for Black feminism, Africana, and diaspora studies (Guy-Sheftall Reference Guy-Sheftall2009; Moody-Turner and Stewart Reference Moody-Turner and Stewart2009; Pellow Reference Pellow and Hubbard1997). But she has not been incorporated into the IR canon, even as race and colonialism have become more central to contemporary work in IR (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam Reference Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam2014; Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015). In comparison with Semple and Suttner, Cooper’s work is not even mentioned dismissively in IR’s intellectual histories. Her absolute exclusion reflects hierarchies even within unstated criteria for entry into IR’s canon. Semple fails on very few of the unstated criteria, other than those assuming the derivative status of women’s work. Suttner fails on more, since she challenges assumptions about the genre and substance of international thought. Cooper fails absolutely not only because her work is already known to be less significant than that of her male contemporaries, or because she was not integrated into privileged circles of knowledge production, but because she violated the gendered, civilizational, and Eurocentric assumptions that dominated the emergence of academic IR (May Reference May, Owens and Rietzler2021). For Cooper, the world from perspective of those victimized by classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies was the story of international relations. This could not fit with IR’s account of itself from the mid-twentieth century, where the Peace of Westphalia but not colonialism and slavery, and the actions of great powers and great men, but not of the dispossessed, dictated the content of IR.