What I seek to do in this chapter is to build on the existing methodological reflections put forward by historians in order to put forward an alternative form of “serial contextualism,” focused on the reception of an author rather than of a concept, and anchored in that author’s original context of writing. In doing so, I am also building on existing studies of actual reception processes in IR, history, and international law, but my aim is to give a more systematic account of how one might go about studying the reception of a famous author and what this type of inquiry can contribute.

Earlier accounts of Eslanda Robeson have tended to focus on her stage-managing her husband’s career, minimizing her decision to go to Africa as an outcome of the breakdown of their marriage. Yet after the 1945 publication of African Journey Robeson became a household name among African American intellectuals, famous for her shrewd analyses of race and empire in the emerging Cold War. Building on recent work on the history of black international thought, this essay foregrounds Robeson’s journalism and involvement in internationalist and Pan-African networks. Robeson was an activist-intellectual whose international thought centered on the struggle for women’s participation and the significance of the so-called Third World. She astutely observed the limits of action imposed by international organizations. Committed to promoting women as political actors, Robeson nonetheless remained wedded to maternalist thinking. Yet, her widely read writings offered new representations of global politics to her readership, highlighting Robeson’s pedagogical commitment.

This chapter returns to the foundational questions of what it means to produce international thought. What are the markers of recognition, in terms of location and genre? Amy Ashwood Garvey was a race woman, a ‘street-strolling’ Pan-Africanist and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this gifted conversationalist, public orator and rhetorician, political praxis and organizing were a way of theorizing. Although her political activism spanned the black Atlantic, it was partly due to her commitment to localized ‘women’s work’ that she understood the limits of a patriarchal Pan-Africanism. Rather than positing a unitary blackness, Garvey analyzed the intersections of race, class, sex, gender and nation in community-level struggles for self-determination. Viewed through such a lens, black patriarchy did not suppress but politicize black women. Understanding Garvey’s theorizing as fractal, accommodating struggle within struggle, resolves some of the seeming contradictions in her thought.

This essay discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of slavery, imperialism, and the Age of Revolution: it also raises questions about the politics and practices of recovery. Cooper’s writings offer a rich resource for countering the erasure of Black women’s contributions to international thought: readers are invited to theorize alongside Cooper's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist work as a scholar-educator. Navigating several absences, she encountered when working in French colonial archives in the 1920s, Cooper unpacked dominant frameworks, exposed gaps, and pivoted attention to the histories, ideas, and actions of people of color. Cooper’s identity, as a Black American woman in interwar France, a former slave who argued with white supremacist exponents of the ‘Nordic vogue,’ was central to her writing. While structurally marginalized by gender, race, class, age and nationality, Cooper refused to be silenced and dared to criticize the greats of French sociology while completing her doctoral work in Paris.

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.

This essay’s re-reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s international thought reintroduces us to a canonical thinker whose contributions have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Instead, Luxemburg has been infantilized by both Marxist and liberal traditions, traditions that she challenged for their exalting of national self-determination. Her most important contribution, however, relates to capitalism’s reliance on tapping into non-capitalist modes of production and exchange. This was central to her sophisticated understanding of imperialism. As Hutchings explains, to Luxemburg it would have been unsurprising that the world economy today continues to rely on bonded labor. But Luxemburg’s positionality as an international thinker is also relevant to histories of international thought. Hers was a life steeped in political activism within the imperialist core, and her analysis of international politics contended with the religious, class, ethnic and racial hierarchies of the land-based empires of pre-World War I Eastern and Central Europe.

For Barbara Wootton, international thought was a medium to explore her concerns for social and economic justice, concerns which she argued had to be viewed through a lens attuned to both global and domestic forces. Writing briefing papers and pamphlets for both the British political group Federal Union and the think tank Chatham House, Wootton proposed practical solutions and policies for a wide, non-academic readership, and opposed ‘abstract thinking’ on principle. Her federalist proposals of the 1940s fused liberal and socialist analyses and form part of the intellectual history of European integration and welfarism. Implicitly, Wootton argued for Britain to sever relations with its imperial possessions in a ‘turn to Europe.’ However, she did so without analyzing how the injustices and inequalities of empire could be undone. This unresolved tension in her thought makes her newly relevant in an era of imperial nostalgia and profound disillusionment with the European project.

Simone Weil was an unsettled thinker intent on disturbing preconceived categories and thinking in opposites. Kinsella’s essay invites us to re-read this compulsive outsider both for her theoretical contributions and for the ways in which she challenged conventional notions of what it meant to be an intellectual. Her asceticism, androgyny and complex religious identity made her a ‘lonely’ figure and prefigured her erasure as an international thinker. Kinsella roots Weil’s political philosophy in a penetrating analysis of colonialism. The despoliation of human beings and their environment lay at its core. Colonialism’s end could not be brought about by political means but on grounds that transcended politics and comprised an empathetic understanding of the degradation of people and land, an understanding she sought to achieve through the attempt to obliterate any collective identities in her person. Reading Weil invites readers to re-think the connection between international relations, empire and the spiritual.

Elizabeth Wiskemann’s international thought spans the worlds of anti-fascist activism, diplomacy and academe. She produced specialist studies on Central Europe and historical syntheses for academics and general readers. She was the lead Berlin correspondent for the The New Statesman, a think tank researcher, an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Wiskemann’s writing was often empiricist and focused on power politics and diplomacy. She deplored British IR’s tilt towards the social sciences in the 1960s and, towards the end of her career, came to describe herself as a contemporary historian. Her trajectory underlines the importance of incorporating history and public education into disciplinary histories of IR, as well as a consistent practice orientation that sprung from a reluctance to engage in purely abstract thinking.

Emily Balch is a familiar figure to historians of the early twentieth-century transnational women’s movement, not least because of her central role in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Yet, there is no doubt that Balch was also a thinker engaged in conversations now recognized as squarely belonging to the history of international thought. These include debates on race and immigration, economic interdependence, the reform of colonialism, and visions for a world society. There were contradictions within Balch’s thought but her empirical research nonetheless challenged some of the racist stereotypes within American International Relations in the 1910s and 20s. Balch was never interested in separating the domestic from the international. Her starting point remained her ‘fellow citizens’ and the contexts that shaped their lives, whether these were the ethnographic realities of East-Central Europe or the impact of the United States’ occupation of Haiti.

Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at Cambridge working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’ This chapter offers the first close reading of the text itself and of its major influences and context, challenging the (gendered) distinction between international and internationalist thought. Indeed, it argues that it was interwar internationalist international thought that inspired some contemporary IR academics to write for broader audiences, and women to engage with international politics. Overall, the essay both makes a case for including a range of genres in histories of international thought, whether work that had a primarily pedagogic or political rather than scholarly function.