12 - Beyond Illusions: Imperialism, Race, and Technology in Merze Tate’s International Thought

Summary

Merze Tate, a graduate of both Oxford and Harvard, was one of the few African-American women who secured a professorship at an American university in the 1940s. This chapter analyses Tate’s early intellectual formation in interwar Anglo-American academic internationalism, augmented by her global travels and her time teaching in the segregated south. At Howard University, she continued her analysis of American racism and imperialism and developed a distinctive ‘anti-racist geopolitics.’ She regarded herself first and foremost as a diplomatic historian, with a realist bent. This did not mean that Tate embraced a restrictive view on the public’s say in foreign policy formation, particularly when this public was African-American. But Tate insisted that to hold U.S. power to account, one had to understand what power was and how it was wielded internationally.