H.G.

Wells and the World State: A Liberal

Cosmopolitan in a Totalitarian Age
Dr John S. Partington, University of Reading, UK

Abstract

H.G. Wells advocated some form of world government from 1901 (with the publication
of Anticipations) to his death in 1946, though his contribution to cosmopolitan thought
is often overshadowed by the various totalitarian internationalisms of the 1920s to the
1940s. Far from advocating a simple, inflexible formula for the whole world, and far
from demanding immediate revolutionary political change, Wells outlined several
cosmopolitan models aimed at accommodating different cultures at different stages of
economic and social development. Thus, while decrying imperialism, he supported
empire pooling and education and investment to raise the colonial peoples to the
economic level of their erstwhile exploiters. In Europe, he gave support to European
federalism as a first stage to global governance. Ultimately, however, he saw global
governance by function as the model towards which to strive. Functionalism, for Wells,
permitted the exercise of local and regional culture without inhibiting the provision of
goods and services across the world. Through a series of writings spanning the period
1901 to 1944, Wells sharpened his cosmopolitan thinking, revising it often though never
veering far from his original intention of unifying humankind in a sovereign world state
of peace and prosperity.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, empire pooling, federalism, functionalism, H.G. Wells,

internationalism, League of Nations, transnationalism, United States of Europe

Traditionally, scholars of the interwar period, when discussing the concept of ‘the
New World Order’, have largely focused upon either the Nazi scheme for
European conquest or the communist internationalism of the Soviet Union.
Liberal internationalists and liberal schemes for the reconstruction of the interwar
world have not been given anywhere near the same attention. Indeed, many of
their efforts have tended to be derided – a tradition that began in earnest with the
publication of E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis in 1939. Carr of course
advanced the thesis of an internationalism of power politics, believing that,
no durable peace can be made unless those who have the power have also the
will in the last resort, after having tried all methods of persuasion, to make and
enforce with vigour and impartiality the decisions which they think right.1
Although Carr’s ‘realist’ position dominated international relations theory for a
lengthy period, there has, of late, been a growing interest in the ideas of those who
could be broadly brought together under the banner of ‘liberal internationalism’.
Some of this work has looked into 19th-century free trade movements centred in
Britain2 or the post-1945 ideas of a federal Europe3 and the United Nations.4 A

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good deal, however, has focused on President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and his
apparently futile efforts to create a viable League of Nations.5 Fortunately, more
recent studies by David Long, and Peter Wilson and Lucian Ashworth have begun
to re-examine the liberal interwar tradition with greater seriousness.6 In this
article, I would like to examine the thought of an interwar liberal cosmopolitan
who gets very little academic attention today but who, I believe, promoted, 20
years ahead of his time, many of the internationalist policies and realities of the
post-1945 period. That campaigner was H.G. Wells.7
In 1920 Wells published The Outline of History. Although never denying its
crudity, he argued that the study was the first conscious attempt to tell the story of
humankind from a non-nationalist perspective.8 He used the project to propagate
his own sincere beliefs in the globalizing nature of human progress. He argued
that, from the start of human evolution, humankind was constantly merging into
larger and larger social units. From the family unit, humans gathered into villages
before expanding, through improved methods of communication, into nation-
states and eventually, from the 18th century, towards even larger coagulations.
Napoleon’s attempted conquest of Europe and the new imperialism of the late-
19th century were both cited as negative examples of nations attempting to break
out of the restraints of their boundaries. More favourable examples were the
liberal nationalist movements of the mid-19th century which led to both German
and Italian unification. By 1920, Wells argued, if humanity was to avoid a second
Great War more devastating than the first, the planned development of
cosmopolitan structures was vital. Wells’s reading of the contemporary mood was
summed up in The Outline of History thus:
It is this gradual world-wide realization of the practical necessity of unity and
unified action that is the most significant feature of this phase in human affairs.
The primary condition of freedom and power is freely communicated thought.
Islam becomes formidable because it is developing inter-communications and a
common consciousness. It is in a phase of renascence. China, which has always
been resentful of foreign interventions, becomes now more and more
effectively resentful, because a new education has given it a framework of
modern ideas and a better understanding of how to become inconvenient.
Indians, Egyptians, Turks and Arabs now discuss European imperialism
together – and discover a common attitude towards it.9
This passage is crucial for an understanding of Wells’s World-State ideas. He sees
no contradiction in asserting that greater world unity is necessary while simul-
taneously citing the raised consciousness of imperial subjects and their resentment
of foreign dominance as a further example of the new phase in human
development. There is no contradiction in this passage as Wells was simply
arguing for consensual world unity and acknowledging that union based on
conquest and subjection was bound to fail. Only when the imperial subject
peoples had a voice of their own and could negotiate terms of federation along
with the imperial powers could a stable and secure world union come into being.
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235

Although Wells first considered world unity during the Edwardian period, it is
nonetheless possible to consider The Outline of History as Wells’s manifesto
launching his career as publicist for world peace and integration.10 Following his
research into the origins and development of human culture and society, Wells
became convinced that the choice for humankind was between cosmopolitan unity
and human extinction. From 1919 to his death in 1946 Wells actively campaigned
for the former, warning against the latter, and offered suggestions to his
contemporaries in a bid to stop the cycle of devastating wars and prevent the death
of the species.
Through the ideas of empire pooling, regional unions and business unions,
Wells saw ways of moving towards global unity even where wider union was
considered impracticable due to regional disparities in, for example, industrial and
educational development. Wells himself acknowledged the impossibility of
forging an immediate world union when he criticized the League of Nations on the
grounds that countries like Abyssinia, India and the Hedjaz were accorded equal
status in its general assembly with such highly developed countries as Belgium
and the Netherlands and, indeed, greater status than countries like Germany,
Russia and Turkey, which were excluded from the League in its early years of
existence.11 Although his ultimate ambition was to see all peoples of the world
represented on terms of equality through global institutions, during the interwar
years he felt the structural and educational gap between Europe and America on
the one hand and Africa and Asia on the other was too great for a fair and equal
unity to be created. For this reason, he supported the idea of subsidiary unions
which could ultimately lead to a general synthesis when the time was right.
The idea of empire pooling first occurred to Wells during the Great War, and he
wrote of the idea in a letter to President Wilson in 1917.12 He took this up again at
the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921 when he wrote:
For my own part, it seems to me that any real ‘League of Nations’, any
effective ‘Association of Nations’, must necessarily supersede the existing
‘empires’ and imperial systems and take over their alien ‘possessions’ and that
one commission embodying the collective will of all the effective civilized
nations of the world is the only practicable form of security for all those parts
of Africa incapable or not yet capable of self-government.13
With the establishment of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates
Commission and its system of administering former German and Ottoman
territories by mandating them to other imperial powers (Mesopotamia to Britain
and Syria to France, for example) or administering them directly (as in the case of
the Free City of Danzig), Wells saw the method by which empire pooling could be
achieved. In Part II of the 1935 manifesto, The Next Five Years, signed by Wells
and 150 others, it was declared that ‘the principle of trusteeship which was laid
down in the Mandates system of the League should be extended to colonial
territories not yet under Mandate’.14 Later that year, however, in a letter to Lord
Esher, Wells made it clear that he did not simply want colonies converted into
236 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

mandates to be administered by their current imperial rulers. Rather he urged that

Britain join in ‘A consortium with the other liberal powers of the world for the
common development of their vast colonial possessions under a federated under-
standing’.15 Such a federated system would take imperial possessions out of the
control of individual nations and end the competitive acquisition of the benefits of
imperial dominance. It would nonetheless operate for the benefit of both the
colonial inhabitants and the ex-imperial powers. Examples of the former were
given by Wells in his article, ‘Africa and the Association of Nations’. There, he
called for ‘the complete abandonment and prohibition now of the enlistment and
military use of the African native population’, and he expressed his wish to see,
a more organized care of the native African population by a tightening up of
the existing restrictions upon the arms and drink trades and the development of
some sort of elementary education throughout Africa that will give these very
various and largely still untried peoples a chance of showing what latent
abilities they have for self-government and participation in the general human
common weal.16
This is an important example of how Wells intended to wed self-government with
the idea of the World State. He sought to empower people in order that they
should eventually enter into the cosmopolitan polity on terms satisfactory to their
needs. This could only be achieved by bringing all peoples of the world to roughly
the same standard of education and administrative competence.
While demanding such improvements in the conditions of the colonial peoples,
however, Wells was also adamant that the industrialized nations should not lose
access to the precious resources of their former colonial lands. Thus, while
advocating the protection and betterment of the native, he restated his wartime
support for ‘The application of the principle of the “open door” and equal trading
opportunities for all comers in the regions between the Sahara and the Zambesi’.17
This liberal approach of supporting policies that satisfied all parties was based on
Wells’s belief that, on the one hand, all people are responsible for each other and if
some people possess greater wealth and education than others, they have a moral
obligation to pass on their know-how to those people lacking in the skills and
knowledge to help themselves. On the other hand, Wells believed that the natural
resources of the world belong to all the people inhabiting the world and, hence, no
nation should be able to forestall the distribution of raw materials to the detriment
of others. Wells believed that if the industrial nations committed themselves to
assisting the ex-colonial peoples to achieve knowledge and wealth, they were
justified in exploiting the resources found in the ex-colonial lands. Through the
federal control advocated by Wells to administer the ex-colonial territories, the
distribution of those raw materials would be monitored and their exhaustive use
and abuse prevented in an effort to make the resources of the world as widely and
permanently available as possible.18
Empire pooling, although the most obvious subsidiary union for Wells to
consider, due to his distaste for national imperialism, was not the only such union
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 237

that he advocated in the immediate term. Despite his understanding of the

communications revolution which made world unity practicable, he still accepted
a role for local geographical unions as precursors to the more general world union
that he desired. Due to the fact that no one nation is isolated in its activities to its
immediate surroundings, Wells saw the possibility of overlapping unions covering
continents or language groups or religious groups.
In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Wells saw European cooperation
as a priority in maintaining world peace. For, on the one hand, he believed that if
Europe is in conflict, the world would inevitably be rent asunder, as European
interests extended far beyond the continental boundary (for example, in terms of
global imperial possessions, or in the fact that Russia and Turkey extended across
the Eurasian border). On the other hand, however, Wells was a firm believer in
Europe’s role as exporter of culture and civilization, often citing the wealth and
power of the predominantly European-populated USA as a case in point. With
these opinions about the centrality of Europe in maintaining and advancing world
stability, it is not surprising that Wells saw Europe as crucial in forging greater
world unities and thus desired a united Europe to forward that role:
Europe, could it achieve political and moral unity, might still be the brain and
headship of mankind. But outside it, and in self-protective antagonism to it,
these other unifications go on, and as they grow strong they will find clearer
expression for their view of world affairs. They are still relatively vague,
instinctive, primitive, under-developed and incomplete, but they may become
at last pillars upon which the coming world state will rest, as important as the
great tradition of the European civilizations.19
It is important to note here that, although Wells advocated the extension of certain
European institutions to the lesser developed regions of the earth such as
representative government and comprehensive education, he was careful to avoid
the charge of ‘white supremacist’ which later befell many Europeans and
Americans who attempted to stamp northern-hemisphere economic practices on
Africa and Asia. Wells respected cultural diversity and, in his advocacy of
cosmopolitan federation, was always quick to express the liberating effect that
such a unity would have. Rather than create uniformity, Wells believed world
union would lead to diversity, as the lack of necessary international competition
would free individuals and groups to experiment with different modes of lifestyle
and production.
As well as advocating European union as a means of spreading European
civilization, Wells also acknowledged the logistic pressures making a European
regional union likely. In ‘The Fantasies of Mr. Belloc and the Future of the World’
Wells declared, ‘The congested and entangled States of Western Europe – I leave
out the Russian and British systems, which are neither of them truly European –
are destined to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of
transport that have expanded and held together the American United States.’20
Wells’s citation of the American example refers to the transport revolution that not
238 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

only linked the initial 13 states of the union, but also followed the frontiersmen,
laying railroad lines and connecting a continent with a transport network which
made nationhood over thousands of miles practicable. With the existence of
efficient national railways and the rapid development of the motorcar and aero-
plane, Europe was poised, according to Wells, for a communications revolution
even greater than the American example. Through the linking of national railways
and through systematic road building and flight networking, Europe could emerge
as an integrated transport union above the heads of the individual nations, a
transport union that might act as a springboard for greater political union. In 1931,
in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Wells reinforced this view and
further fleshed out areas of European cooperation that were immediately
achievable:
The League of Nations Commission of Enquiry for European Union (1931),
with its sub-committee on organization, with its examination of the world
economic crisis, its projects for the international transmission of electric power
and international co-operation in production, is an interesting preliminary
exploration (within the limits of the League) of the possibility of getting past
political boundaries in economic matters.21
But, of course, the subtext underlying all of Wells’s suggestions for European
union is the maintenance of peace. Whether one considers the Napoleonic,
Crimean or Great wars, imperial squabbles or lesser skirmishes over the balance
of power, the European nations were at the heart of all of the 19th- and 20th-
century international conflicts. And between at least 1870 and 1940, the chief
antagonists in Europe were Germany and France. Thus, when discussing the
various ways of forging greater European cooperation, Wells insisted that ‘upon
the development of a Franco-German friendship hangs all the hope we have of a
great future for Europe’.22
Although Wells saw an important role for Britain in Europe, he usually implied
that a preliminary European union would exist without Britain. This was partly
because of Britain’s imperial responsibilities, but more significant was Britain’s
perceived kinship with the United States. Wells visited the USA several times and
cherished a great pride in the size and success of that country.23 Wells believed
that language was an important cultural link between different countries and so he
tirelessly advocated greater British–American cooperation in international affairs.
Moreover, as both Britain and the USA had wide influence over many parts of the
globe, their united efforts at world union would carry much international weight.
In The New America, following his trip to the USA in 1935, Wells wrote, ‘It seems
to me that the commonsense of the world situation demands that the English-
speaking community should get together upon the issue of World Peace, and that
means a common foreign policy’, and further, that ‘I do not see how we can get
far on the way to the world revival unless we homologize the financial control and
monetary organization of our world-wide groups of people’.24 Through such
cooperation, not only would Britain and America move closer together, but their
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 239

spheres of influence would be drawn into closer union: ‘A real English-speaking

synthesis would go far beyond its linguistic limits; it would trail with it much of
Northern Europe, much of the Spanish-speaking world and Asia’.25
Wells’s support for a united Europe and a British–American union, although
assisting in maintaining peace, were considered most practicable in securing
greater infrastructural and governmental union. When it came to addressing
immediate security needs, however, Wells suggested greater selectivity in co-
operation. Hence, in 1935 he wrote to Lord Esher that ‘A special Naval alliance
and cooperation of the United States, France and the Empire for the preservation
of the freedom of the seas and the policing of the sea-ways throughout the
world’26 would be enough to prevent the use of international waters for aggressive
purposes. Similarly, in The Way to World Peace, when discussing the free
movement of trade around the world, Wells declared, ‘It is not necessary to
convert all the nations of the world to world free-trade’; rather, ‘At most Britain,
the United States, Germany, France and Russia need be converted’.27 With such
great trading nations applying free trade, Wells believed aggressive trade practices
would be diffused and the majority of the world’s nations would introduce free
trade themselves.
Although these examples of regional unity are fairly specific in their
parameters, it was more common on this issue for Wells to make vague
suggestions for regional unity, simply as intermediate formations on the way to
world unity. Thus, when discussing the reconstruction of the League of Nations,
Wells suggested: ‘Rather at first a league of two or three countries with a real
community of purpose – or two or three such leagues – than a lax assembly
admitting to its councils such countries as France and Italy which openly flout its
fundamental ideas.’28 It was that idea of a ‘community of purpose’ that was at the
crux of Wells’s proposals. The League of Nations failed because it tried to per-
suade nations at various stages of development and with various governmental
systems to work together for peace and stability. Wells preferred the voluntary
union of like-minded nations that could then interact with other unions to
eventually merge into a World State. As he wrote in The Work, Wealth and
Happiness of Mankind:
M. Briand’s scheme for the ‘United States of Europe’, British projects for
‘Empire Free Trade’, the reality of Pan-America, the dream of an Anglo-Saxon
alliance, and the like, may all serve a greater purpose. They may all help to
break down the spirit of national and local egoism and to turn men’s minds not
simply to the possibility but the need of larger systems of co-operation.29
Although regional unions were important in Wells’s scheme for a Cosmopolitan
World State, they were simply a means to an end, breaking down national feeling
and making the transition from nation-state to World State easier through a
concentration on an initial unity of similars rather than an immediate unity of all –
something the League of Nations attempted, only to cement international
differences and lead to a second Great War.30
240 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

Whereas empire pooling and regional unions were ideas based on pre-existing
geographical units, Wells also advocated what might be termed ‘business unions’ as
practical immediate-term institutions feeding into eventual cosmopolitan federation.
Such business unions would be service-based rather than geography-based
organizations, designed to create the need for cosmopolitan unity through the extra-
national nature of large business enterprises. Far from being Wells’s idea, business
unions were already in existence before the Great War. An example that inspired
Wells greatly was David Lubin’s International Institute of Agriculture, established in
Rome in 1905. This organization ‘kept a record of the state of the crops and the
general agricultural outlook throughout the world, based on telegraphic reports from
the boards of agriculture of its constituent countries’.31 Through its records of
agricultural production, ‘the destinations of all the prospective supplies could be
adjusted to the probable demands’,32 thus helping traders to prevent scarcity or glut.
In addition, ‘the Institute had developed departments dealing with the world
prevention of plant diseases and with meteorology and agricultural legislation’.33
More significant than the service that the Institute provided, however, was the way
in which it struck agreements and obtained its funding. The Institute ‘was sustained
by subsidies from fifty-two governments’,34 and the collection of data from the
signatory nations was guaranteed, not through treaties between the constituent
states, but between the Institute itself and the participating governments. It was this
latter fact that Wells so admired. As far as he was concerned, there was no need for
such international business initiatives to come from nation-states. Rather individuals
or institutions representing specific business interests might enter into negotiations
directly with governments or other institutions around the world and forge business
links. By so doing, cosmopolitan institutions would come into being de facto over
the heads of individual governments and unsatisfactory international organizations
like the League of Nations.
Although critical of the League of Nations, Wells did applaud some of the
institutions the League established in the interwar period. One such example is the
Bank of International Settlements, established in Basle in 1930. Its aim was ‘to
assist in credit operations necessary for the development of countries arrested in
their economic development’.35 A direct response to the Wall Street Crash of
1929, the Bank was intended as a cushion for countries threatened with
bankruptcy during the Depression years. It received funds from its constituent
states and was empowered to redistribute those funds as credit to countries in
greatest need. Although the Bank of International Settlements was ‘international’
rather than ‘cosmopolitan’, Wells believed that it provided the opportunity, ‘to
weave together the highly industrialized countries of north-western Europe into
one economic system with the still mainly rural countries of the south-east’.36
A third example of a business organization that Wells considered able to assist
in world unity was the International Red Cross of Geneva. Of this organization he
declared, ‘The Red Cross again could expand its work by degrees to become an
effectual control of world health, no patriot objecting, and it could expand modern
conceptions of sanitary regulation throughout the world’.37 Although again
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 241

advocating the exportation of western ideas to lesser developed countries, by

encouraging higher levels of hygiene throughout the world Wells sought to
empower countries to utilize their human resources for prosperity and thus allow
them to eventually join a cosmopolitan polity on terms of equality.
These are just three pre-existing institutions that Wells endorsed as advancing
the World-State idea. They were all administered on a ‘non-national’ basis, with
the interests of the whole world at heart. As far as Wells was concerned, they were
models for other such business unions contributing towards world unity. With
these bodies as models, Wells stated that ‘Control of staple products, systematic
regulated production and distribution in the case of such commodities as coal are
urgently needed. [...] Oil, cotton, wheat – the mention of these words now
conjures up thoughts of world-wide operations’.38 As long as a cosmopolitan body
did not exist to orchestrate world production and distribution and the provision of
services from above, Wells saw the development of separate overarching bodies,
providing specific services, as a practicable and immediate alternative. With the
formation of many such bodies, Wells hoped that some kind of cosmopolitan
control would emerge, either through the unity of the separate institutions or
through their absorption into a simultaneously developing political union,
contributing towards the formation of a wider Cosmopolitan World State. In his
utopian novel of 1923, Men Like Gods, Wells gives an inkling of the method of
such a cosmopolitan body – one engaged in feeding the world – and suggests a
large degree of independence within its field:
I take it you have [...] a great number of people concerned in the production
and distribution and preparation of food; they inquire, I assume, into the needs
of the world, they satisfy them and they are a law unto themselves in their way
of doing it. They conduct researches, they make experiments. Nobody compels,
obliges, restrains or prevents them.39
Although Wells’s utopia is necessarily vague, it does reveal his desire for a world
administered by specialists in each field, free to engage in all aspects of their task,
from research to production and distribution, and therefore fulfilling the needs and
desires of consumers while ensuring (through the abandonment of capitalistic
competition) the protection of natural resources on a global level.
Thus far the immediate-term advocacy of empire pooling, regional unions and
business unions have been discussed to demonstrate the mechanisms through
which Wells hoped to achieve a Cosmopolitan World State. These aims were what
he considered practicable objectives to begin working for. In many ways, Wells’s
advocations may be taken as pointers suggesting how his Cosmopolitan World
State might look. It is now necessary to follow those pointers and analyse Wells’s
statements regarding general world union.
It was when Wells spoke generally about world unity that his favoured
structure for cosmopolitan control was revealed. As is clear from Wells’s criticism
of the League of Nations, he rejected union based on delegated power. Through
delegation, self-interests must necessarily be protected. A delegate chosen by one
242 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

country or region must fight for the advantages of that country – otherwise the
delegate would be deselected and someone else, more patriotic, would be made
the replacement. Delegates, by definition, represent their constituency and are
therefore unable to put collective interests first. Wells insisted that as long as
nation-states existed, they had to sacrifice their sovereignty insofar as it affected
other nation-states. Such was his cynicism after the Great War and during the
build-up to the Second World War that he believed that any issue that could arouse
conflict, be it imperialism, trade or even the pollution of the environment, would
eventually lead to conflict. All such issues that affected more than one nation had
to be controlled by supranational organizations and those organizations, almost
without exception, needed to be federal.40 That is not to say that Wells advocated a
federation of ‘nations’ – his preferred phrase was a League of Peoples – but, at the
same time, he did not necessarily desire the destruction of the political unit which
is understood as a ‘nation’. In other words, if a nation happened to be, for
example, culturally and linguistically self-contained, Wells would not object to
that nation forming a unit within a federal World State:

All I should do, as World Dictator, would be to deprive these governments of

the power and means of making war, relieve them of supreme financial and
economic control, and take the general direction and protection of education
and scientific research throughout the world out of their hands.41

Such ‘relief’ would ‘denationalize’ all nations of the world, while leaving certain
cultural powers in local hands – tourism, language teaching and the maintenance of
important cultural practices, for example. As has been demonstrated in the section
on regional unions, Wells often discussed federal units in terms of language group;
hence a Spanish-speaking union, an Anglo-Saxon union, a German–Austrian
union, etc. Even these were not concrete units, however, as Wells made it clear that
where economic necessity demanded more diverse or extensive units, they would
come into being – hence, he suggested an Anglo-Saxon unit joined by the North
European peoples. His vagueness on the specifics of the federal unit might seem a
fault but in fact it reflects his desire, particularly in the face of the emerging
totalitarian states, for absolute freedom of union. He made this perfectly clear in his
letter to Lord Esher in November 1935. There he wrote, ‘The increasing facilities
of communication, the abolition of distance, render the federal association of the
free communities more and more imperative’ and ‘Free Trade with free peoples is
the modernized rendering of the free trade idea’.42
If Wells favoured a system of free federation, however, he did not endorse the
notion of an elected chamber or ‘world parliament’. He made this plain in The
Open Conspiracy when he wrote:

There will be little need for president or king to lead the marshalled hosts of
humanity, for where there is no war there is no need for any leader to lead hosts
anywhere, and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind or any sort of
council that meets and talks is an inconceivable instrument of government.43
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 243

When proposing governmental structures, Wells had in mind functional bodies

rather than political debating chambers44 – in the World State, ‘The voice will
cease to be a suitable vehicle’.45 The only explicit statement he made on these
functional bodies was in his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come. There he
wrote:
The effective subdivision of the [Modern State] Fellowship was into faculties,
and these again were subdivided into sections and departments. There was to
begin with a faculty of scientific research, a faculty of interpretation and
education, a health faculty, a faculty of social order, a supply and trading
faculty, a number of productive faculties, agricultural, mineral and so on.46
It was this government by faculty that Wells had in mind when he declared, in The
New World Order, ‘This new and complete Revolution we contemplate [is]
outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed’.47 Or, in other
words, ‘World government, like scientific process, will be conducted by state-
ment, criticism, and publication that will be capable of efficient translation’.48
Such a faculty-system of government would organize society from top to bottom.
Thus trade, for example, would be coordinated by a production faculty which
would, through its sections and departments, undertake the gathering of the raw
materials required, their distribution to the places of production, the production
itself and the distribution of the produced goods. In addition, continuous research
would be undertaken by the faculty into ways of improving the various processes
of production and trade. The results of that research would not only be imple-
mented but would be made available for public scrutiny and criticism. All the
activities of such a faculty would occur in cooperation with other faculties to
ensure the greatest results and to prevent any one faculty becoming corruptible
through the unregulated monopolization of a process. To Wells’s mind such a
system would make for the greatest efficiency while providing the general public
with a wide variety of choice and an input into the procedure where criticism was
warranted. Wells believed that all the duties of the state, including the
maintenance of law and order and the provision of education and health care,
could be organized in such a way. Were such an organization to be achieved,
democratic government as it was understood in Wells’s day and, indeed, as it is
known today would be redundant. Elected representatives and a central govern-
ment would have no function; rather the faculty organizers, selected by merit and
acting as management, would coordinate their areas of activity and would be
beholden to the results of researchers on the one hand and the general public on
the other. As Wells stated in The World of William Clissold, cosmopolis ‘will not
be a world kingdom nor a world empire nor a world state but a world business
organisation’.49 The general public’s input, both through expressing public
opinion and through their utilization of the educational system to become a part of
the World-State organization, would ensure popular control of the cosmopolitan
institutions in an equalitarian, post-democratic world – a world emerging, to use
Wells’s phrase, ‘After Democracy’.50
244 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

Notes

1 Edward Hallett Carr (1942) Conditions of Peace, p.275. London: Macmillan.

2 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson (1999) Globalization and History: The Evolution
of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; Susan H. Farnworth (1992) The Evolution of British Imperial Policy during the
Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Peelite Contribution, 1846–1874. London: Garland.
3 Derek W. Urwin (1992) The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since
1945. London: Longman; Stephen George (1991) Britain and European Integration since 1945.
Oxford: Backwell.
4 Stephan Ryan (2000) The United Nations and International Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
5 John Milton Cooper (2001) Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for
the League of Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Ian Nish (1993) Japan’s
Struggle with Internationalism: Japan, China and the League of Nations, 1931–1933. London:
Kegan Paul.
6 David Long and Peter Colin Wilson (1995) Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Interwar
Idealism Reassessed. Oxford: Clarendon; Lucian Ashworth (1999) Creating International
Studies: Angell, Mitrany and the Liberal Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate.
7 Although Wells has not been given the credit by international relations scholars or historians that
he deserves, there has been some acknowledgement of his contribution within Wellsian studies.
W. Warren Wagar (1961) H.G. Wells and the World State. New Haven: Yale University Press;
David C. Smith (1986) H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal. A Biography. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
8 Wells was, according to Wagar, strongly influenced by Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man
and did acknowledge other attempts to break away from traditional history writing, such as F.S.
Marvin’s The Living Past. Wagar, pp.139, 108 (see note 7). Smith goes further, claiming Wells
was on the periphery of the ‘New History’ movement, which included such outstanding
historians as Carl L. Becker and J.H. Breasted. Smith, pp.255, 258 (see note 7).
9 H.G. Wells (1925) The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, pp.708–9.
London: Cassell.
10 Wagar, in his critical introduction to Wells’s The Open Conspiracy, argues that Wells’s
cosmopolitanism emerged in 1902 with the publication of Anticipations. W. Warren Wagar,
‘Critical Introduction’, in W. Warren Wagar (ed) (2002) The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on
World Revolution, pp.1–44. Westport, CT: Praeger. Although I acknowledge that Wells first
introduced the concept of the World State in Anticipations, that early model amounts to little
more than global confederation. It was only with the Great War and Wells’s recognition that
sovereignty over such issues as arms, colonies and raw materials had to be ceded by nation-states
if peace was to last, that he moved from the confederal position to one of cosmopolitanism,
rejecting the nation-state as the ideal model of governance in the world.
11 For a more detailed account of Wells’s critique of the League of Nations, see Wagar pp.35–7 (see
note 7).
12 H.G. Wells (November 1917) letter to Bainbridge Colby [for President Wilson], in H.G. Wells
(1934) Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain
(Since 1866), pp.605–11. New York: Macmillan.
13 H.G. Wells (1922) Washington and the Riddle of Peace, p.263. New York: Macmillan.
14 Liberty and Democratic Leadership (1935) The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political
Agreement, p.274. London: Macmillan.
15 H.G. Wells (2 November 1935) ‘letter to Lord Esher’, in David C. Smith (ed) The
Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 4, 1935–1946, p.48. London: Pickering & Chatto. Wells’s
suggestion for colonial federation was an inversion of the contemporary movement for ‘imperial
federation’ which generally advocated a federal relationship between Britain and her ‘white
empire’ (Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). Wells’s schemes
advocated a federation of the non-self-governing African and Asian possessions of the European
imperial powers under the control of an international body charged with fairly distributing the
resources of those territories but also raising them through education, training and infrastructural
improvements to ultimate self-governance.
16 Wells, Washington and the Riddle of Peace, p.263 (see note 13).
17 Wells, Washington and the Riddle of Peace, p.263 (see note 13).
 H.G. WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 245

18 Wells’s ideas relating to the ‘imperial question’ bear a close resemblance to J.A. Hobson’s
critique of imperialism. J.A. Hobson (1920) The Morals of Economic Internationalism. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin; J.A. Hobson (1988) Imperialism: A Study. London: Unwin Hyman.
19 Wells, The Outline of History, p.709 (see note 9).
20 H.G. Wells (1924) A Year of Prophesying, p.119. London: Fisher Unwin. This article was
originally published on 16 February 1924. In November 1922, Count Richard Coudenhove-
Kalergi first published, in German, his call for a pan-European union. As Coudenhove-Kalergi’s
appeal did not get translated into English until 1926, with the publication of Pan-Europe, it is an
interesting question whether Wells and Coudenhove-Kalergi were aware of each other’s
suggestions. Wells, of course, had advocated European union in 1902, but the timing of the idea’s
re-emergence is interesting given that the Ruhr crisis made Franco-German (and therefore
European) cooperation seem further away than ever during 1923–4. Richard Coudenhove-
Kalergi (1926) Pan-Europe. New York: Knopf.
21 H.G. Wells (1932) The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p.648. London: Heinemann.
22 H.G. Wells (1929) The Way the World is Going: Guesses & Forecasts of the Years Ahead, p.90.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran. Wells made this statement in a newspaper article first
published on 27 November 1927, two years ahead of Aristide Briand’s call for a United States of
Europe centred on Franco-German rapprochement. The fact that a close working relationship was
clearly developing between Briand and Gustav Stresemann at the time when Wells was writing,
however, may have influenced his observation.
23 For a detailed account of Wells’s many trips to the USA between 1906 and 1940, see Smith (see
note 7).
24 H.G. Wells (1935) The New America: The New World, p.24. London: Cresset. Wells’s ideas for
Anglo-American union go back as far as 1902 thus predating the later Federal Union schemes of
Clarence Streit and his followers by a third of a century. H.G. Wells (1902) Anticipations of the
Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. New York:
Harper. For an account of Streit’s ideas and their influence on British liberal internationalists at
the beginning of the Second World War (as well as Wells’s influence on them), see W.B. Curry
(1939) The Case for Federal Union. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
25 Wells, The New America, p.24 (see note 24). In a recent article, Daniel Deudney has presented
Wells’s notion of an Anglo-American ‘greater synthesis’ as Wells’s alternative to Halford J.
Mackinder’s and J.R. Seeley’s ‘Greater Britain’ scheme of empire federation. Daniel Deudney
(2001) ‘Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder, and Wells on Britain in the
global industrial era’, Review of International Studies 27(2): 187–208. Deudney’s argument,
however, suffers from his taking Anglo-American union out of the Wellsian cosmopolitan
context. In no instance did Wells cite Anglo-American union as an end in itself but saw it simply
as one step towards global integration. Indeed, Deudney cites Wells’s views in Anticipations
(1902) but tactically ignores Wells’s conclusion in that book that the ‘New Republic’ would be a
World State formed through the merging of several regional conglomerations. Deudney also fails
to point out that Wells advocated European union (with and without Britain) and empire pooling
at different times in his writings, though he is correct to stress that Wells had no truck with the
racist ‘white imperialism’ of Seeley and Mackinder. For a fuller discussion of all these facets of
Wells’s cosmopolitan worldview, see John S. Partington (2003) Building Cosmopolis: The
Political Thought of H.G. Wells. Aldershot: Ashgate.
26 Wells, letter to Lord Esher, p.49 (see note 15).
27 H.G. Wells (1930) The Way to World Peace, p.18. London: Benn.
28 H.G. Wells (November 1923) ‘letter to the Electors of London University General Election’, in
David C. Smith (ed) The Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 3, 1919–1934, p.161 (see note
15).
29 Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p.645 (see note 21).
30 Wagar makes the same observation about the temporary nature of regional groupings in Wells’s
thought when he notes ‘But the main current of Wells’ thought ran in a rather different direction
from the arguments usually put forward for regional federations. As temporary and provisional
arrangements, he might tolerate them. [...] But the main business of the Open Conspiracy was to
operate on a world-wide scale and produce in its upward thrust all over the world an integrated
world community’ Wagar, p.204 (see note 7).
31 H.G. Wells (1933) The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle, 2 vols, ii, p.386.
London: [n.pub.].
32 Wells, The World of William Clissold, ii, p.386 (see note 31).
246 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17(2)

33 Wells, The World of William Clissold, ii, p.386 (see note 31).
34 Wells, The World of William Clissold, ii, p.386 (see note 31).
35 Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p.642 (see note 21).
36 Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p.642 (see note 21).
37 Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p.648 (see note 21).
38 Wells, The Way the World is Going, p.43 (see note 22).
39 H.G. Wells (1923) Men Like Gods, in H.G. Wells (n.d.) The Sleeper Awakes and Men Like Gods,
p.227. London: Odhams.
40 The two exceptions I can locate are in the article ‘The League of Nations and the Federation of
Mankind’ in which Wells states, ‘I am hostile to the present League of Nations because I desire
the Confederation of Mankind’ [Wells, A Year of Prophesying, p.9 (see note 20)] and in The
Outline of History where he writes, ‘There is little in the political constitution of such countries
as the United States or Switzerland that would impede their coalescence upon terms of frank give
and take with other equally civilized confederations’. [Wells, The Outline of History, p.718 (see
note 9)]. I am tempted to speculate that Wells’s use of ‘Confederation’ was a slip and that
‘Federation’ was what he had in mind. This is not only supported by the fact that Wells
overwhelmingly uses ‘Federation’ in his writings when describing the type of world structure he
desired but also by the fact that he uses ‘Federation’ in the title of the article from which the first
quotation is taken as well as in the section which follows the second quotation in The Outline of
History, entitled ‘A Federal World State’ [Wells, The Outline of History, pp.719–21 (see note 9)].
41 H.G. Wells (1932) After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation,
p.203. London: Watts.
42 Wells, letter to Lord Esher, p.47 (see note 15). Emphasis in the original.
43 H.G. Wells (1933) The Open Conspiracy, in H.G. Wells (1933) The Open Conspiracy and Other
Writings, pp.30–1 London: [n.pub.].
44 In this article I do not refer to Wells’s ideas as ‘functionalist’ as David Mitrany’s functionalist
school of international organization was not founded until 1943 [David Mitrany (1943) A
Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of International
Organization. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs]. Of course the idea of organizing
the state by function was not new by the 1930s; indeed, Wells himself had created a fictional
world state organized by function as early as 1899 [H.G. Wells (1899) When the Sleeper Wakes.
New York: Harper]. However, this appears coincidental, as Wells did not begin considering
government by function as a potential solution to the world’s ills until the interwar period.
45 Wells, The Open Conspiracy, p.30 (see note 43).
46 H.G. Wells (1933) The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution, p.359. London:
Hutchinson. Emphasis in the original.
47 H.G. Wells (1940) The New World Order: Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and
what sort of world a world at peace will have to be, p.119. London: Secker and Warburg.
48 Wells, The Open Conspiracy, p.30 (see note 43).
49 Wells, The World of William Clissold, p.377 (see note 31).
50 Wells, After Democracy, p.iii (see note 41).