Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relationship between the social sciences in the U.S. and the formation of empire. I argue that the peculiar way the U.S. has established a global presence during the 20th century—by establishing a commercial empire rather than territorially-based colonies—has generated on the part of state and corporation an unusual interest in the knowledge produced by social scientists. It has also generated an unusual willingness on their part to subsidize the production of that knowledge. Not only have government and corporation considered the social sciences essential to the project of managing empire. At each major stage in the reorganization of that empire state and capital have underwritten a massive reorganization in the production of social science knowledge.

Key Words:

• Empire
• social sciences
• geographies of knowledge
• expertise
• historical change

Notes

Related versions of this article were presented at “Creative Destruction: Area Knowledge and the New Geographies of Empire,” City University of New York, in April 2004; “The World Looks At Us: Rethinking the US State,” Arden House, New York, in October 2004; “Beyond a Boundary: Area, Ethnic/Race and Gender Studies and the ‘New’ Global Imperative,” University of Illinois, in December 2004; and “State Power and Forms of Inequality,” a panel organized for the annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Association, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, in May 2005. I thank those who organized these conferences for inviting me to participate and those who attended the conferences for raising very interesting questions that forced me to refine and clarify my argument. Conversations with and/or written commentary from Peggy Barlett, Tom Biolsi, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, John Gledhill, Zhang Hong, Constantine Hriskos, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Bruce Knauft, William Roseberry, Parker Shipton, Gavin Smith, Ida Susser, Joan Vincent, and Harry West also proved valuable in improving the article.

1. The United States had been active in establishing spheres of influence for much of the nineteenth century—but especially from mid-century onward (LaFeber 1963). The imperial vision that guided United States expansion before the 1890s is perhaps best reflected in the life and work of Willam Henry Seward, Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869 (Paolino 1973). Seward sought to make the United States the greatest commercial power on earth. Toward that end, he pushed for territorial consolidation of what became the continental United States, in large part to control ports on the West Coast that could act as staging points for further expansion into Asia. Seward also arranged for the purchase of Alaska and did everything in his power to construct a United States-controlled canal across the isthmus of Panama—both projects seen as crucial to establishing United States hegemony in the Pacific. He also sought to arrange for United States control of strategic islands in the Caribbean that could protect the isthmus canal and safeguard Latin American markets from European competition. Seward and other politicians of the era sought to extend United States influence in Hawaii and the Philippines, forced Japan to open its doors to United States commerce (in 1854), and tried to remain on an equal footing with the European powers in China. Much of what Seward envisioned did not become a reality until the 1890s and after.

2. During the post 9/11 era a new geography of enquiry is taking shape in the social sciences. Although it is still too early to characterize this new geographic framing in any definitive way, it clearly includes a process of re-territorialization that is replacing the “borderless” 1990s. It is equally clear that the United States government has developed a renewed interest in the management of territory and in monitoring the movement of people, goods, and ideas through space.

3. For critical scholarship on the geography of knowledge of the cold war era, see Chomsky et al. 1997; Cumings 1997; Mirsepassi, Basu, and Weaver 2003; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Ross 1998; Simpson 1998; Smelser and Bates 2001; Szanton 2004.

4. As will be clear from the discussion that follows, I approach the domain of academia and academic knowledge analytically as one example of a more general process—the production of expertise. In using the term expertise, however, I intend to refer not only to the post-structuralist literature (cf. Foucault 1991; Rose 1996) but also to reference Gramsci's discussion of traditional and organic intellectuals (Gramsci 1971).

5. It would also be a mistake to attribute consistency of purpose or perspective to those who managed the philanthropic and government offices that sponsored the social sciences (see Friedman and McGarvie 2003; Lageman 1989).

6. For an insightful discussion of the radical potential of anthropology despite it being embedded in institutions of the kind described in this article, see Stavenhagen (1971).

7. McBride (1936) provided a similar analysis of the socio-economic and political structure of Chile.

8. In Anthropology and Politics, Joan Vincent (1990) provides extensive documentation of a subterranean tradition of anthropological scholarship that has dealt with similar themes since the 1870s. The present work is heavily indebted to Vincent's pioneering analysis.

9. Particularly important in this regard was the growing political power and the enormous concentrations of capital that accumulated in the hands of a new, industrial, and financial elite as a result of the “second industrial revolution” (Magdoff 1978; Williams 1980), which began in earnest in the United States in the 1870s. Sometimes referred to as “monopoly capital” (cf. Baran and Sweezy 1966) or “oligopolistic capitalism” (Jomo K.S. 2003), by the 1890s this new form of industrial organization was associated with economic crisis, unemployment, labor strife, and saturation of domestic markets (White 1982; Williams 1969). It was in this context that a commercial empire overseas, which was seen as having the ability to solve domestic economic problems, took on such enormous importance (LaFeber 1963).

10. Some sense for the sea change (if the pun may be forgiven) in the attitude of the United States government toward the world beyond its borders between, say, 1880 and the early 1890s may be glimpsed in the following; the defense of United States interests abroad after the Civil War was of so little consequence that the government had not even bothered to re-build its navy. As a result, by 1880 the country was in possession of “a flotilla of deathtraps and defenseless antiques” (LaFeber 1963: 58). In the context of growing industrial crisis, however, Congress authorized major funding for a new, world-class navy. Beginning in 1883, but especially after 1890, the Congress approved construction of a fleet of great battleships (Sprout 1939). This fleet of offensive, first-strike weapons was to play a crucial role in establishing the United States as a global presence.

11. As many scholars have pointed out, these bureaucratic machines produced categories that bore little resemblance to pre-colonial principles of organization. Although in many cases colonial subjects came to identify with the categories of their colonizers, in others they translated these alien categories into terms that were more meaningful to their own situations, into visions of empowerment, emancipation, or revenge. The long-term consequences of this process of this process of translation have been unplanned, unexpected and often tragic.

12. Many authors have noted the reticence of the United States to establish, retain, and administer territorial dependencies and have contrasted United States imperial practice with those of the other capitalist countries of that era—Japan, and those of Western Europe (Cooper 2006; LaFeber 1963; Smith 2003; Steinmetz 2006; Williams 1969, 1980). As Gallagher and Robinson (1953) show for the British Empire, and as Cooper (2005) argues more generally, however, the imperial practices of any given power almost invariably combine a range of strategies—from direct administration of contiguous territorial blocs, to administration of scattered colonies and dependencies, to spheres of influence established by the constant threat (and repeated demonstration) of military might. As this implies, and following Schmitt (2003), imperialism is best understood as an “authoritative ordering of space” on a global scale, in which hegemons use a variety of strategies to extend their influence beyond their immediate borders (see Lutz 2002, 2006).

13. The foundations derived their financial base from the huge profits earned by the most successful capitalist entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In virtually all cases, however, the actual decisions made about how monies were to be used quickly passed from the foundations' founders into the hands of trustees or advisors who were drawn from the intellectual, professional and business elite of United States society. As one might guess from the kind of research they sponsored, the majority of these individuals were motivated by “reformist” impulses—by the desire to improve the living conditions of those forced to bear the brunt of industrial life and at the same time to stabilize the social order as a whole (see Berman 1983; Fosdick 1952; Friedman and McGarvie 2003; Lagemann 1989).

14. The Phelps-Stokes, Rosenwald, the Peabody and Slater Funds, and the Heanes Negro Rural School Fund focused on providing the infrastructure of Black schools and colleges. This was also a major focus on the General Education Board (GEB), “a philanthropic ‘trust’ backed by the vast wealth of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller” (Finkenbine 2003: 168). The GEB, together with the Peabody and Slater Funds, worked together to ensure that Blacks participated in society in a subordinate role, primarily by providing them with “industrial” education (Finkenbine 2003: 169–170).

15. The “social science” that the major philanthropies sought to bring into being in the opening decades of the twentieth century should be understood in quite broad terms. Officers of the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, considered biology to belong to the social sciences (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981). This blurring of what is considered conventional boundaries between different branches of knowledge and the effort to re-classify them was undoubtedly related to the Foundation's vision of public health as part of a package of interventions, most of which were more properly social in nature, that would help instill in non-modern people the mental and behavioral discipline necessary to participate in the modern world. Symptomatic of this orientation was the following: The foundations and boards established with the Rockefeller fortune actively encouraged interdisciplinary work in virtually all the social science endeavors it sponsored and consciously sought to break down disciplinary boundaries (Fisher 1993: 59).

16. This is not to say that the foundations were in conflict with the nation-states in which they operated. To the contrary; the goals of the foundations and the nation-states in which they worked were often quite similar.

17. One example will help illustrate the manner in which the new industrial elite sought to help manage and control social and political unrest. Starting in 1882, and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century, the railroad industry subsidized the construction and operation of 113 YMCA centers, to the tune of over $100 million dollars (Andrews 1950; Brandes 1976; Heald 1960; Williams and Croxton 1930). In these centers, men of working class, immigrant, or displaced backgrounds were provided a gathering place where they could engage in a variety of “healthy” pursuits and forms of self-improvement. These ranged from activities designed to discipline the mind and spirit (originally, bible study and prayer meetings; later, law, business, and engineering classes) to those intended to discipline the body (competitive sports of various kinds; see Winter 2002).

18. Rose's memorandum was written to convey his views about education to the trustees of the General Education Board, a major Rockefeller philanthropy.

19. The efforts of the philanthropies embraced a number of geographic regions, from southern and eastern Europe (Hewa and Howe 1997), to Africa (Berman 1980; Fisher 1983), to Latin America (Cueto 1994), the Philippines (Sullivan and Ileto 1997), Sri Lanka (Hewa and Howe 1997), etc.

20. From the end of the Civil War (1865) onward there was a gradual shift in higher education in the United States away from the predominance of the small college, with its focus on a fixed Classical curriculum and rote memorization. Increasingly, university education at a core group of more research-oriented institutions was based instead on “cognitive rationality,” on “knowing through the exercise of reason.” Between 1890 and 1900 “cognitive rationality” emerged as the dominant value in a core group of elite universities (Geiger 1986: 9). The shift was a function of many factors acting in combination. Prominent among them was the establishment of the system of land grant colleges in 1862, the growing desire to make higher education more practical, and the advances in science and scientific investigation as developed especially in the context of the German research university (Geiger 1986: 9–10). These were the broader processes into which the foundations tapped.

21. The new social science that the foundations sought to bring into being thus blurred the boundary between “applied” and “pure” research.

22. The General Education Board, a Rockefeller financed foundation, contributed approximately $60 million dollars to the endowments of a select group of universities in the opening decades of the century (Coben 1976: 231). The philanthropic sponsorship of higher education did not occur in a vacuum. Just as research universities grew in size during this period, and in the number of students who attended them, so did the fund-raising abilities of these institutions. In addition to the foundations, two other sources of additional funds were important: (1) individual (wealthy) public donors and (2) alumni of the institutions in question (Geiger 1986: 43–45).

23. Rockefeller funds (in the specific form of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial) contributed heavily to the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, as part of the Memorial's program of creating and strengthening regional social science centers of excellence (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981: 390–392).

24. The latter institutions were funded by the General Education Board and the International Education Board, both Rockefeller-funded foundations (Coben 1976: 231).

25. Frederick T. Gates, an ordained Baptist minister, and John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s most trusted advisor on the philanthropic use of Rockefeller funds, played a key role in orienting his mentor's fortune in the direction of public health. Gates was the person who convinced Rockefeller of the potential of this field to alleviate human suffering (Buck 1980: 243, note #6).

26. As with the growth of the research university itself, philanthropic sponsorship of graduate education took place in the context of a general increase in the number of students attending the country's leading research universities (Geiger 1986: 12–13). From the 1890s onward, more and more families from society's middle ranks had -sufficient income to be able to spare the labor of their young adult sons. The increasingly career-oriented nature of university education made it an avenue of (modest) social mobility for these families (Geiger 1986: 13–14).

27. Examples include the fellowships offered to Chinese students by the Rockefeller Foundation's China Medical Program, which allowed Chinese students to study medicine in England and the United States; the RF grants to the London School of Economics and Political Science, which funded students to engage in graduate study at LSE; the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures fellowships, also provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, which also provided funds for graduate study in social anthropology at LSE; the RF Humanities Division grants of the 1930s; the SSRC graduate fellowships; and the Southern Fellowshipprogram of the SSRC. Between them, these programs provided funds that made it possible for literally hundreds of students, domestic and foreign, to receive graduate training at one of the select universities chosen by the foundations to re-make medicine the social sciences (e.g., see Cueto 1994: xi; SSRC 1934: 82–84).

28. The anthropology program at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Chicago's departments of sociology and anthropology were among the schools especially favored by the Rockefeller fortune.

29. Prior to receiving its Royal Charter, the RIIA was known as the British Institute of International Affairs, when it was founded in 1919. In addition to receiving funding from Rockefeller, the RIIA also received financial assistance from Carnegie (King-Hall 1937).

30. The LSRM, a Rockefeller-funded foundation, was the most important source of funds for social science research during the 1920s (see Bulmer and Bulmer 1981; Fisher 1983, 1993).

31. By this time the LSRM had been absorbed into the Rockefeller Foundation.

32. SSRC did so primarily by creating committees that replicated SSRC's own organizational structure within the elite universities chosen to re-make the social sciences. These university committees were interdisciplinary, being made up of representatives from each of the major social science disciplines. The committees dispersed research funds (provided by SSRC) to particular departments, discussed research priorities, etc. (Fisher 1993).

33. In one sense, of course, all of the foundations' cultural work should be understood as an effort at social engineering.

34. The distinction between academic and applied research did not become institutionalized in United States anthropology until World War II (compare Vincent [1990], on England), as reflected in the establishment of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Founded in 1941, the Society describes its mission in the following terms; “the scientific investigation of ‘the principles controlling the relations of human beings to one another … and the wide application of those principles to practical problems” (Mission Statement, Society for Applied Anthropology). The formation of the SfAA as a distinct organization with objectives distinct from academic anthropology represents a major point of departure from the vision of the social sciences that was promoted by the philanthropic foundations prior to World War II.

35. Most of these programs were funded by foundations established by Rockefeller, by Carnegie, or by a combination of the two. The Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Phelps-Stokes Fund were involved in funding education programs for Blacks in the United States south (Finkenbine 2003; Sealander 2003).

36. For a discussion of the subsequent normalization of fieldwork, and “the field,” into anthropology, see Gupta and Ferguson (1997).

37. There is striking continuity between the cultural work undertaken by the great foundations and the work of nineteenth-century missionaries (e.g., see Hewa and Hove 1997). Indeed, one might think of the social science work sponsored by the foundations as a secularized form of missionary activity, one that proselytized the virtues of modernity rather than Christianity (see Coben 1976: 236; Hewa and Hove 1997: 6). In this regard, it is revealing that the man who was more responsible than any other for convincing J.D. Rockefeller Sr. (a devout Baptist and generous contributor to missionary activities) to establish a philanthropic foundation was Frederick T. Gates. Gates was himself an ordained Baptist minister (Berliner 1985: 26), who was head of the American Baptist Education Society when he joined the Rockefeller staff in 1892. He remained Rockefeller's most trusted advisor in decisions regarding the uses to be made of philanthropic funds.

38. The new world order the United States sought to bring into being at this time is exemplified in the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions sought to establish a global economic structure based on clearly defined and bounded (but also vulnerable, dependent, and indebted) national economies and societies. In this sense, the Bretton Woods organizations can be thought of as integrally involved in the creation of “area studies.”

39. For an authoritative and in-depth treatment of the deployment of anthropologists during World War II, see Price (2008).

40. An example of action taken by the United States government to form an international intellectual elite is provided by negotiations surrounding the Boxer Indemnity Fund—an amount of money that China paid to the United States in the early part of the twenthieth century in compensation for damages done to United States interests as a result of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The cash settlement imposed on the Chinese by the United States was all out of proportion to the damages actually done to United States interests, a fact recognized by the United States Secretary of State John Hay, who negotiated the settlement (Hunt 1972: 541–542). Subsequent to the money being paid, however, the United States “magnanimously” agreed to return a portion of the indemnity, but on the condition that the moneys thus returned were to be used exclusively to pay for training Chinese students in Western (predominantly United States) universities. On this basis approximately 1,200 Chinese students attended universities in the United States and England between 1908 and 1928 (Buck 1980: 47; see Nugent 2002).

41. World War II was to have an equally transformative effect on the kind of knowledge and expertise sought by both in their efforts to make the world legible and thus amenable to control. It was the war that did much to bring to an end one period of United States imperial history even as it ushered in another (Nugent 2008).

42. Included in this figure are a scattering of professionals in non-academic fields.

43. In point of fact, the United States army was the first to innovate area studies training, for its officers and enlisted men alike, having recognized the strategic importance of area knowledge early in the war (Fenton 1947; Matthew 1947; Nugent 2008). The army drew extensively on the expertise of academics to provide this training (see Fenton 1945; SSRC 1942–1943, SSRC 1943–1944). In addition to the slate of academic advisors to the OSS mentioned in the text, the SSRC, the ACLS, and the National Research Council (all the creations of the great foundations) established area committees during the war, “when detailed knowledge and experts on virtually every area of the world were in heavy demand” (Hall 1947: iii). These committees joined with the Smithsonian Institution to form the Ethnogeographic Board, which helped coordinate the activities of academics so that they contributed as effectively as possible to the war effort (cf. Fenton 1945).

44. In no sense, of course, did the SSRC invent the notion of world regions, or culture areas, at this time. Rather, what the Council did was to privilege the notion of culture area over other, alternative ways of approaching socio-cultural phenomena. In fact, an Advisory Committee on Culture Areas is listed as one of ten such Committees in the SSRC's Annual Report for 1926–1927 (SSRC 1926–1927). Revealingly, however, this is the last mention of any committee dealing with a topic of this nature for the remainder of the 1920s and for all of the 1930s. By 1941–1942, both the military and the intelligence communities have come to regard area knowledge as being of strategic importance. At this point (the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943) the Council re-constitutes a committee that is charged with the study of world regions (see SSRC 1941–1942: 19, 40). The decision of the SSRC to foreground area knowledge during the war thus represents a major rupture withthe way the Council had been organizing the production of knowledge prior to that time.

45. The same year that the SSRC published its second report stressing the importance of area knowledge (1947), the United States Congress passed the National Security Act. This act of Congress authorized the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that had close ties with the major foundations (especially Ford) and with the area studies centers that the foundations helped build.

46. These figures do not include the considerable sums of money that Ford and the other great foundations spent on building institutions of higher learning in the non-Western world.

47. In 1962 Ford turned over control of the FAFP to interdisciplinary Area Studies Committees of the SSRC and the ACLS.

48. See Price (2004) for a discussion of linkages between the intelligence community and the foundations during the height of the Cold War.

49. Fulbright awards for both dissertation projects and post-doctoral research followed a broadly similar trajectory (see National Humanities Center 1997; Drake and Hilbink 2004).

50. It is worth noting that this was the context in which reflexive anthropology (cf. Marcus and Fisher 1986), and more generally the “post-modern turn,” first emerged.

51. By the mid-1990s rumors were circulating that SSRC had been on the verge of bankruptcy for several years (Cumings 1997).

52. The former GLC explores “the institutional, social and cultural legacies of authoritarian rule and … how to deal with them.” The latter GLC focuses on the relationships between “global communication media and shifting identities” (http://www.intl-institute.wisc.edu.crossing_borders.htm).

53. Because the foundations have sponsored so much important post-area-studies research since the early 1990s, it makes little sense to single out particular works.