Most disciplines in the sciences and social sciences devote significant effort to socializing graduate students, which includes a recitation of the positions held in great debates. The socialization further defines the proper questions to ask and shows how, by what methods and evidence, the questions must be answered.

Many of my generation of IR scholars, and those who followed, were taught that IR was born at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, following World War I, to prevent another Great War. E.H. Carr, who we are told was the first professor of international relations, articulated tensions between realism and utopianism, with the former being the best way to truly grasp the relations of states. The next step in the story is often to recall Hans Morgenthau’s articulation of realist IR just after World War II. Morgenthau argued that nothing much has changed in world politics for thousands of years, that the proper subject of international relations is the struggle for power among states, and that foreign policy decision makers are rational actors. Great powers, and the balancing among them, determines the politics of the age. The work of Kenneth Waltz is often the next station in this journey of disciplinary history, with his emphasis on the socializing power of anarchy and the functional similarity of states that seek to survive in the international system. Students may then learn of competing liberal and constructivist arguments—that cooperation is possible if and when it suits state interests, that normative regimes may arise which discipline behavior, and that anarchy is “what states make of it.” If they are lucky, students may also learn of the English school, with its emphasis on history, international society, and its generally more forgiving attitude to normative concerns.

Robert Vitalis’ book challenges the IR’s genesis story in his retelling of the naissance of the American version of International Relations as a discipline (as distinct from the English School). Vitalis found that the origin story of American International Relations—that the field has its roots in great debates between realism and idealism and is primarily concerned with interstate relations and focused on understanding the causes of war and war prevention—is incomplete and thus nearly completely wrong.

Through meticulous research, Vitalis found that early international relations scholars, working at what would become leading centers of scholarship in international relations centers—e.g. at Yale, Princeton and MIT—and writing in the journal that would become Foreign Affairs, were preoccupied with other matters. Vitalis demonstrates that from the earliest years of the twentieth century the nascent inter-discipline was attending to race relations and empire. These founders were centrally concerned with maintaining imperial relations (or managing the shift to a decolonized world) and racial dominance at home and abroad, which they believed were linked, because they thought those institutions and practices were appropriate. Vitalis argues that the acknowledged fathers of American IR in the twentieth century were bent on ensuring that there would be no race war, which many feared. The founders also provided the knowledge that would support the US in its struggle to find its place and promote its interests in the global order.

Moreover, the practitioners of early international relations at elite schools were themselves often, Vitalis argues, not only concerned to maintain the dominance of the white races in the world, but their dominance in the discipline as it was practiced in the United States.

Specifically, Vitalis argues that among the most knowledgeable early scholars of world politics, understood as the relations among states and peoples, included several African Americans, many based at Howard University in Washington, and Atlanta University, in Georgia. When IR turned to great power politics at the middle of the twentieth century, it turned away from its preoccupation with race relations and empire and then sidelined the African Americans who had pioneered the field by ignoring or underfunding their work and excluding them from professional meetings and journals. These practices starved funding and diminished the publication outlets for the work of these African American scholars—e.g. W.E.B. Dubois and Alain Locke, Merze Tate and even the Nobel Laureate, Ralph Bunche. Eventually this meant that the preoccupations of the early definers of the discipline were vanished from the origin stories, and that their analyses of race, colonialism, decolonization, and inequality were marginalized or erased as well. Vitalis’ description reminds me of the protagonist Winston Smith’s observation in Orwell’s 1984: “all history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as necessary.”

When most disciplines move to distinguish themselves from other areas of inquiry, and are professionalized, they excise as best they can the amateur or unprofessional elements of their art and inquiry, they narrow the scope of their questions, and they identify what it means to have modern “scientific” questions and methods. Potentially and actually embarrassing elements of the field are glossed over and erased by omission and more active means. Disciplining social scientists is also about educating them as professionals. They are not to be naïve. They are no longer beginners, but sophisticated thinkers. They know and can engage in the conversation with the appropriate citations. They are to become experts in their chosen area of specialization.

Vitalis book is thus refreshing because he did something we aren’t generally encouraged to do. Vitalis asked naïve questions. Where did American international relations come from? What are the origins of the field? What happened to the earliest scholars and centers of IR thought, for example at Howard and Atlanta Universities?

Vitalis shows us what is hiding in plain sight: earlier generations of the scholarship of world politics thought about our world very differently than we do now. They ranged freely into anthropology, history, law, sociology and economics. They explicitly theorized race and class as at the center of world politics. And later, they marginalized those concerns and moved to study great power politics, anarchy, and functionally undifferentiated sovereign states, as if that is all they had ever studied and almost as if that were all there were to profitably study.

Why didn’t Vitalis accept the received wisdom? Perhaps he approached the field of International Relations with what Zen Master Suzuki called a beginner’s mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”^{Footnote 1} Vitalis implicitly enjoins us to become beginners when he invites us to participate in a more inclusive and less imperialistic renaissance of the field.

And we have much more to know about how past exclusions narrowed our inquiry and understanding of the world, and still does. What would we find if we continue looking at the origins of the discipline?

• We might find connections between earlier international relations theories and debates over the colonial encounters that began in the 1500s and accelerated with the settlement of the Americas and Africa.

• We might rethink US foreign policy, if it is true that among the first and most urgent questions confronting foreign policy elites, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, was the legitimacy and means of taking lands from Native people in the Americas. Indeed, the disagreement between the colonists and the Crown on this question was a major spark of the American Revolution.

• We might recover the connection between warmaking and statemaking. For example, Stephen Rockwell’s, Indian Affairs in the Administrative State in the 19 ^th Century suggests westward expansion and relations with Indians shaped the American state as we know it.

• We might also rediscover how IR was moved into its own silo in the mid-twentieth century, fracturing its earlier connections to international law, political theory, sociology and history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

• We might recall the disappearance of early women scholars of world politics. For instance, as Craig Murphy of Wellesley College has noted, often left out of our account of early IR is Elisabeth Kimball Kendall who taught “international politics” at Wellesley, in the 1910s and her colleague, the left leaning scholar-activist Emily Greene Balch, who taught immigration and ethnic politics at Wellesley from 1896–1915. Balch co-founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom during World War I, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946—some 27 years after Wellesley appears to have essentially fired her for her peace activism.

Indeed, there has been a long connection between scholarship, activism, and policymaking. There is a way to understand the early arguments in the nascent discipline as being had by practitioner-theorists such as Las Casas and Hugo Grotius but also including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. They too thought a great deal about race, about the justification of conquest, the rights of possession and dispossession, the nature of civilizations and the categorization of people. The solutions the framers and later leaders of the United States arrived at were institutionalized in the settlement of America, Indian removal, and colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Some of these arguments and practices recurred in the conquest and reconfiguration of Germany and Japan, and later in the conquest and reconfiguration of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vitalis’ book deserves a prominent place on the growing shelf of revisionist histories of International Relations by IR theorists and international lawyers who are rediscovering and thus reconceiving international relations, international law and international institutions. The other books include Hayward Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law; Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society; John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760 to 2010; and Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law.

What else is hiding in plain sight? What assumptions of empire, civilization, race, and developmentalism are baked into the ontological starting points of the field? What are the effects of implicit and explicit bias on how we understand the world? How do these lenses and omissions affect political science research and teaching, the preoccupations of journals, and the hiring and tenuring of faculty?

How important is it to revisit the history of the discipline, and its relation to the practices of colonization and war? If we reconsider the history of the American strand of IR, does that cause us to think through central aspects of US politics and foreign policy differently? Should it cause us to rethink the role of theory or the categories of analysis we take for granted? Would we have to rethink the legitimacy of contemporary world orders?