Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in the European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Overall, the transformations of rights during this period were so great that it can make earlier expressions of rights seem unrelated. But, as this volume shows, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a crucial time of transformation, repackaging rights for a modern world

This chapter argues that the study of international politics in the fields of International Relations and International Law was long hampered by these fields’ neglect of historical research and reliance on schematic historical narratives featuring the rise and expansion of the European nation-state system. Beginning around the turn of the twenty-first century both fields have been reanimated by historical scholarship, much of which has attended to the modern history of empires and to patterned and persistent hierarchies. The chapter examines the longer lineage of this recent work, in earlier historical accounts that traced the emergence in the modern world of a hierarchical global order. These include W.E.B Du Bois’s account of the global color line as the product of a modern racial capitalism with roots in slavery and imperial commerce that had taken a distinctive democratic form in the late nineteenth century; and the first generation of “third world approaches to international law” written in the 1950s and 60s during decolonization. The chapter argues for historical work that resists IR’s misleading inclination to conceive of states (implicitly nation-states) as the chief or sole agents of international politics and legal scholarship’s tendency to obscure the role played by international law itself in the enforcement of coercive hierarchies.

In this address, which Du Bois delivered in London at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, he uttered the famous phrase, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Co-signed by fellow organizers of the conference, the address makes clear the global nature of the color line and argues that human progress requires that the opportunities of modern civilization be made available to the “darker races.” Appealing specifically to Christian nations, the address calls on them to refuse to draw distinctions of color or race; to resist exploiting and repressing Africans for the sake of greed; to govern their African and West Indian colonies justly and give them, “as soon as practicable, the rights of responsible government”; to recognize the Congo Free State as an independent Negro State; and to respect the integrity of the independent states of Abyssinia, Liberia, and Haiti.

This essay appeared in the July 1943 issue of Foreign Affairs and was part of a series of reflections on what post-war reconstruction might mean for the colonized world. Du Bois argues that the transatlantic slave trade and the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 that legitimized European territorial claims in Africa were two nodes in a history of a persistently exploitative relationship between Africa and the modern world. He predicts that in the absence of a significant restructuring of international relations, post-war reconstruction in Europe will be paid for by deepening the exploitation of Africa.

This 1936 essay laments the lack of knowledge that African Americans and Indians have of one another, attributing the situation to poor journalistic standards and propaganda, which encourage false, frivolous, and sensationalist stories and suppress news of freedom struggles on both sides. Religious differences also hinder understanding. It calls for Indians and African Americans to understand their respective anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles as facets of the same “world-wide clash of colour,” to stand together against exploitation by white races, and to commit to new and emancipatory forms of economic activity so that exploitation by whites is not replaced by that “of coloured races by coloured men.”

“Worlds of Color,” first published in Foreign Affairs in 1925, argues that the labor problem in Europe is only a facet of a much greater global labor problem, the “World Shadow” of colonial exploitation. It offers a comparative study of the Portuguese, Belgian, French, and British empires in Africa and their distinctive regimes of race relations, land ownership, and labor, paying particular attention to the fate of educated Africans in the various colonies. It scrutinizes the variety of colonial regimes and economic systems instituted by the British across Africa in their efforts to extract resources under different local conditions. The essay reflects on the proceedings of the 1923 Third Pan-African Congress and draws on impressions and information gained during Du Bois’s first visit to Africa. The essay was republished in Alain Locke’s landmark Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro (1925).

This 1917 essay, which appeared in revised form in Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater, develops the argument of “The African Roots of War” that increasing political and economic equality among whites had been achieved through expanded exploitation of the “darker peoples.” That exploitation in turn was enabled by the culture of white supremacy, and by an international order in which European nations could abuse their colonial subjects with impunity and without scrutiny. The essay marks out the United States as particularly unsuited to play the role of peacemaker, given the country’s history of white supremacy and racial domination. The essay predicts that the violence perpetrated by whites in the rest of the world will be a prelude to revolution on the part of “these despised and raped peoples” unless Europe commits to “world democracy” and the equality of all races and rejects industry based on theft.

This essay, given as a public address in St. Thomas in 1952, proposes that the West Indies represent “in microcosm the problem of our time.” Long exploited by the European powers as a “deliberate laboratory” of modern production techniques, the subjugation of labor, and the capitalist system, the West Indies now face the “world problem”: the urgent challenge of preserving capitalism’s increased power of production while using the wealth it generates to promote the health, well-being, and democratic voice of all people. Political and economic discipline can make the West Indies a haven not only for the wealthy but for all their residents: a paradise of the “higher and simpler life in which the human spirit blooms and unfolds.”