The Social Sciences and US Imperial Expansion

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:244, 2010
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online
DOI: 10.1080/10702890903458838
Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United

States Imperial Expansion
David Nugent
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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 centuryby establishing a commercial empire
rather than territorially-based colonieshas 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 produc-
tion 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
The development of the social sciences in the United States has an

intimate but largely unacknowledged relationship to the formation of
empire. My goal in the article is to render this relationship more
transparent. I suggest that the peculiar way that the United States
has established an overseas presence during the twentieth century
by establishing a military-commercial empire rather than territorially-
based colonieshas generated on the part of government and corporate
foundations an unusual interest in the knowledge produced by social
scientists. It has also resulted in an unusual willingness on their part
to subsidize the production of that knowledge. Not only have government
and foundations considered the social sciences essential to their ability
to manage global empire, but at each major stage in the reorganization
of that empirestages precipitated by crises in capitalist accumulation
practicesthey have underwritten a massive reorganization in the
production of social science knowledge.
On this basis I suggest that the social sciences may be divided into
three periods, each of which corresponds to a shift in the relationship
between the United States and its imperial domains. The first of these
periods, the Formation of Overseas Empire (circa 19001940; in
2
Knowledge and Empire 3
particular, the period between World War I and World War II) was
precipitated by the depression of 1893 and came to an end with the
advent of World War II.1 The second period, the Consolidation of Over-
seas Empire (circa 19431972), began in response to the Depression of
the 1930s, and the world war that followed in its wake, and came to an
end with the termination of the Bretton Woods agreements. The third
period, the Reconstitution of Overseas Empire (circa 19722001), was
precipitated by the crisis of Fordism (Harvey 1989) and the recession of
the early 1970s, and continued until the turn of the millennium.2
During each of these periods, I argue, the social sciences have been
characterized by a distinctive geography of enquiry. Area studiesthe
geographic mode of the second periodis the best known of these.3 As
we shall see, however, the other two periods have their own distinctive
geographic frames. My intent is to identify the broader structural forces
that have produced these various forms of social science knowledge.4
My emphasis in this article is thus on the broad, structural forces
that have defined the parameters of social science debate in the
United States during the twentieth century. I argue that the activities
of foundation and government vis--vis the social sciences represent
an attempt at what Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 4) refer to as moral
regulationa project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for
granted, in a word obvious, what are in fact ontological and episte-
mological premises of a particular . . . form of social order. It should
be emphasized at the outset, however, that the infrastructures of
social science knowledge created through foundation and government
activity represent only efforts to establish a common material and dis-
cursive framework that establishes the terms in which social life will
be lived and conceived (Roseberry 1994). In virtually all cases, the
actual operation of foundation and government sponsored university
departments, programs of graduate training, publication networks,
post-doctoral research institutes, etc., was shot full of contradictions
(see Guyer 2004; Nugent 2002). While much of the knowledge that
emerged out of these institutional processes was fully compatible with
the interests and perspectives of its sponsors, some was not.5 In fact,
each of the three periods generated a small body of progressive schol-
arship alongside a much larger corpus of conventional knowledge.
In an article of this length I cannot hope to capture all the nuances
and complexities of these processes. This must await a book-length
work (now in progress; see Nugent n.d.). Nor can I attend to micro-
political processes within and between academic departments
processes that have played such a crucial role in producing internal
differentiation within the social science disciplines, and in generating
competition and debate among differing schools of thought (see Roseberry
4 D. Nugent
1996, 2002). Finally, I also emphasize that my intention here is not to

criticize, either the foundations or the scholars (myself included) that
have been the recipients of their largesse.6 My goal instead is to
understand the conditions of possibility of the distinct geographies of
knowledge that have emerged in United States social science during
the twentieth century.
The article is divided into three sections. In the third I examine the
most recent phase of academic production. My focus is on the
conditions that have encouraged academics to move beyond the
geographic fixity of area studies and its attendant conceptual categories
and to focus on movement (of commodities, symbols, human beings),
contingency (of cultural patterns, forms of identity), and emergence (of
novel socio-cultural configurations and forms of identity). Before
analyzing the conditions of possibility of the current conjuncture, how-
ever, I examine the historical processes out of which the present has
emerged. In the opening sections of the article I analyze two previous
periods of scholarship that have much in common with the present
in the sense that during both a reorganization in global capitalism
introduced crisis into the then-prevailing geography of academic
enquiry. By means of this examination of twentieth-century social
science as a whole, I seek to place the most recent phase of knowledge
production in a historical trajectory of similar processes and concerns.
A new social science for a new empirethe inter-war period

My discussion begins with the period between World War I and World
War IIan era that offers a series of instructive parallels (and
contrasts) with the present. During the inter-war period government
and foundation interests centered in the United States were seeking
to expand and consolidate a commercial empire of global reach (Israel
1971; Ninkovich 1984; Smith 2003; Wiebe 1967). To do so they considered
it essential to intervene in the production of knowledge on an unprece-
dented scale. In addition to underwriting a major reorganization of
universities in general (Fosdick 1962; Geiger 1986), they also oversaw
sweeping changes in the organization of the social sciencesin the
aims, methods, and means of evaluating research, in the background,
training, and professional activities of practitioners, and in the insti-
tutional processes that underwrote the production of knowledge
(Berman 1983; Bulmer and Bulmer 1981; Fisher 1993).
In the first section of the article I examine the new geographies of
knowledge that took shape as social science practitioners trained in
the novel, foundation-sponsored methods of the day found themselves
conducting field-based, empirically-oriented research along the
contested frontiers and the internal lines of fracture of United States

imperial expansion. My focus is on the ways in which the social scien-
tists of the era were able to draw on the novel opportunities of the
time to produce a body of innovative scholarship that transformed the
ways people conceived of the relation between global and regional pro-
cesses. Their scholarship also provided a critical perspective on the
very imperial project out of which the new social sciences emerged.
Several examples provide a sense for the novel, globally engaged
scholarship that emerged during this era as new geo-political concerns
compelled government and foundations to intervene extensively in the
production of social science knowledge. In the late 1920s and 1930s
Chinese scholars trained in the West were examining the impact of
capitalist development on China (Tao 1929), and the extent and effects
of industrialization on that country (Ho and Hsien 1929). Others, also
trained in the West, were analyzing the role of nineteenth-century
British imperial expansion in bringing about the disintegration of
Chinese rule. They analyzed how plantation agriculture in the European
colonies of Southeast Asia acted as a magnet for huge numbers of
displaced Chinese, who were fleeing the chaotic conditions associated
with that collapse. In so doing, they drew attention to the novel forms
of political community emerging as communities of the Chinese
diaspora in Southeast Asia sought formal political affiliation with
China (Chen 1939).
Western scholars working on China (Lattimore 1932) and Chinese
scholars alike (Ho 1931; Chen 1931) were similarly preoccupied with
issues of state hemorrhage and breakdown in the north of China. They
were especially interested in the devastating impact of government
disintegration on the rural populace of the north. Three great empires
(Russia, China, and Japan) threatened to collide to Chinas north, in
the volatile region of Manchuria, as massive numbers of displaced
Chinese fled into this frontier region, the control of which was
contested by Japan and Russia.
European expatriates raised in Africa, but trained in England,
along with African scholars (Kenyatta 1938), were writing on related
themes with regard to Africa. Just as Chinese scholars were examining
the devastating impact of the European presence on Chinese populations,
scholars like Richards (1939) and Wilson (1941) were analyzing the
consequences of European imperialism and capitalist enterprise for
indigenous groups in the mining region of what was then Northern
Rhodesia. As was true of their counterparts in China, these scholars
were concerned with the role of imperialism and colonialism in under-
mining indigenous economic and socio-political forms. They also
analyzed the forces that drew enormous quantities of African labor
6 D. Nugent
into industrial centers, and the nature of relationships established

between those in the home communities and in the industrial centers.
Other scholars were examining similar questions in South Africa.
Here, Monica Hunter (Wilson 1936) focused on the distinctive pressures
brought to bear on indigenous economic patterns, socio-political insti-
tutions, and religious practices in a settler colony where the expropri-
ation of land and forced labor laws tended to convert the indigenous
population into a class of dependent wage laborers. In addition to ana-
lyzing the forces that led to the breakdown of indigenous institutions,
Hunter also discussed the emergence of racial consciousness, the
growth of nationalism, the formation of labor organizations (national
and international), and worker militancy.
In Mesoamerica indigenous scholars trained in the United States
also addressed the question of the hemorrhaging of government rule
in the face of powerful pressures exerted by capitalist industry. In this
case, however, the focus of analysis was the movement of population
across the United States-Mexican border. Enormous numbers of Mexican
nationals resorted to migratory wage work in the face of extreme
inequalities in land distribution, land scarcity, and an absence of work
opportunities in Mexico. In the process, they provided cheap labor for
United States farms, ranches, and other enterprises (Gamio 1930).
United States scholars addressed similar concerns. Some (McBride
1923) analyzed the historical underpinnings of the Mexican land crisis
that drove migrants across the border into United States capitalist
enterprises. McBride focused in particular on the importance of the
hacienda, the exacerbation of land inequality at the end of the nineteenth
century (during a period of rapid foreign capitalist investment), and
the pivotal role of the land question in the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
Other scholars (Tannenbaum 1929) provided in-depth analyses of the
Mexican Revolution itself, focusing on the evolution of the land system
and the role of capitalist industrialization at the close of the
nineteenth century in provoking Mexicos great political upheaval.7
Tannenbaum (1943) also sought to understand the movements of
national and transnational identity that were sweeping through Latin
America during this era.
In Europe, scholars focused on the devastating consequences of the
Great War (19141918), and its role in re-configuring the political
map of Europe. They also analyzed the emergence of new forms of
political association (such as the Soviet Union and the Third Commu-
nist International [Toynbee 1928]), and the growth of new nationalisms
(Macartney 1934). Some even sought to understand what was
regarded at the time as a novel developmentthe predicament of
stateless peoples (King-Hall 1937: 43).
In other words, Western and non-Western scholars alike were

involved in an historically-based analysis of the role of North Atlantic
industrial capitalism and European imperialism and colonialism in
shaping regional and local arenas around the globe, in undermining
indigenous economic and socio-political forms, in precipitating enormous
population movements, and in stimulating novel cultural configurations
and new forms of political affiliation. We now turn to a consideration
of the forces that produced this inter-war engagement with the
dynamics of the global arena.8
The formation of overseas empirethe inter-war period

The emergence of a social science that was directly involved in the
study of global forces of power, economy, and culture may be under-
stood in the context of transformations in the organization of global
capitalism in the decades after 1900.9 Particularly important in this
regard was the growing dominance of the United States in world
affairs, the expansion of the United States overseas to create a military-
commercial empire of global scope (LaFeber 1963; Dobson 1978; Smith
2003), and the gradually receding importance of the European powers
(Hobsbawm 1994).10 Although this shift in the relative weight of the
capitalist countries was underway at the turn of the century, it was
accelerated by World War I, which left most countries in Europe
devastated. Of the major participants in the war, only the United
States and Japan emerged in a stronger position than they had
entered it (Hobsbawm 1994).
While the expanding United States was the most powerful political-
economic and cultural center of gravity at this time, it was of course far
from alone in the world. Competing centers of gravity, some with impe-
rial intentions of their own (most notably Japan and Tzarist Russia),
created contested frontiers of imperial controlespecially along select
inner Asian frontiers of China, in China itself, and also in parts of South-
east Asia. Other centers of gravity had little in the way of imperial goals,
but instead sought autonomy from Western domination, whether this
domination was colonial in nature (as in Indonesia, India, and Africa),
neo-colonial (as in China and parts of Central Asia), or post-colonial (as
in Latin America). These autonomy seeking centers of gravity also pre-
sented serious challenges to the broad material and cultural project of the
United States. A globally oriented social science took shape after the turn
of the century as the North Atlantics newly ascendant power consciously
sought out greater knowledge about and ultimately control over social
conditions, cultural patterns, and human subjects located along the
contested margins of its expanding spheres of influence.
8 D. Nugent
Prior to this internal reshuffling within the Western world, the

European countries, as the dominant powers, had evolved bureau-
cratic infrastructures in their dependent domains that had codified
systems of knowledge about their subject populations, knowledge of a
more-or-less anthropological nature (Cohn 1996; Dirks 1992). These
infrastructures and their associated systems of knowledge played an
integral role in the implementation and reproduction of colonial rule
(for example, Biolsi 1995; Kelly 2006; Pels 1997; Steinmetz 2006).
They did so by helping to constitute governable subjects within depen-
dent domains (Foucault 1991).11
After the turn of the century the United States shared with the
European powers the need for detailed knowledge about the social
groups and cultural patterns that were found along the contested
frontiers of expanding United States controlknowledge that would
render these groups legible and manageable. In seeking to generate
such knowledge, however, the United States was faced with an
unprecedented set of problems. With a few notable exceptions (in
particular the Philippines, Hawaii, and parts of the Caribbean; cf.,
Marion 1948; Jomo K.S. 2006), in the process of establishing its growing
empire the United States did not create formal political dependencies,
the administration of which the United States then oversaw.12
Because the United States did not erect bureaucratic, state-like struc-
tures that were empowered to administer territorially bounded colonies,
the United States could not draw on existing (colonial) state-based
infrastructures to generate the forms of knowledge and control needed
to constitute governable subjects throughout its increasingly far-flung
empire.
In the absence of existing bureaucratic infrastructures that could
be mobilized to generate the requisite knowledge about the potentially
dangerous peoples who found themselves in the path of expanding
United States imperial influence, in the opening decades of the twentieth
century a novel experiment occurred in the creation of such an infra-
structure. The experiment was underwritten in part by the United
States government, but predominantly by the great United States
corporate foundationsall of which were established with funds
derived from the great fortunes amassed in the second half of the
nineteenth century in the context of the rapid industrial development
of the United States.13 The Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies
took the lead role in this effort, but they were assisted by the Brookings
Institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the
Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the Russell
Sage Foundation (Crocker 2003).14 Between them, the foundations
invested enormous sums of money in the creation of a new infrastructure
for the production and dissemination of social science knowledge. In

the process, they underwrote the vast majority of all social science
research in the English-speaking world.15
The new infrastructure of training, research, publishing, and control
that these foundations brought into being in many ways paralleled in
its structure the emergent United States empire. The infrastructure
was international and extra-territorial in scope and design, seeking to
accommodate as it did spheres of United States influence that
spanned the globe. The new infrastructure was also irreducible to (and
incapable of being contained by) the bureaucracy of any particular
state apparatus, although the foundations did not hesitate to draw on
existing government institutions when it suited their purposes to do
so. As often as not, however, the foundations were compelled to create
new institutions to achieve their novel goals or to give a significantly
changed direction to existing institutions.16 Although the foundations
were tied to a particular nation-state (the United States), during a
period when nation-states were the main arbiters of cultural messages
and capital flows, the social science infrastructure that Rockefeller,
Carnegie and the other foundations helped to construct was largely
independent of (though in no way in conflict with) national controls. In
the long run, this infrastructure promoted a flexible accumulation of
knowledge on a global scale, and in the process helped bring into
being an international public sphere of social science knowledge.
The new infrastructure of knowledge and control that emerged in
response to the exigencies of the era did not arrive on the scene full-
blown. Nor was it the product of a carefully thought-out strategy or
plan. Rather, it emerged on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis in the process
of United States expansion, as the United States government and the
great foundations struggled to understand and control conditions
along particular contested frontiers.
Foundation activities abroad were a direct extension of these same
activities at home, where the foundations directed their energies
toward internal lines of fracture in the capitalist order. Problems of
rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and economic
instability associated with the second industrial revolution in the closing
decades of the nineteenth century, culminating in the depression of
18931897, had led to mounting pressures in the United States that
seemed to threaten the countrys social stability and system of demo-
cratic government (Wiebe 1967; White 1982; Williams 1969). Social
unrest had escalated in the context of growing urban poverty, ethnic
conflict, and serious (and not uncommonly violent) clashes between
organized labor and corporate capital (Berliner 1985: 1213; Buck
1980: 5455). Indeed, during the three years of 1893 to 1895 class
10 D. Nugent
conflict became so severe that the United States Secretary of State

referred to symptoms of revolution throughout the land (LaFeber
1963: 173).
These developments convinced the countrys new industrial and
financial elite that the mechanisms that had once worked to ensure
the stability of American society were no longer effective and that new
mechanisms were desperately needed to ensure social order (Crocker
2003; Keller 1990, 1994; Sealander 2003). The foundations saw
themselves as aligned with expanded government in establishing new
organizational structures that could promote social stability, the inte-
gration of the foreign-born into American life, and the general well-
being of all. These organizations ranged widely in form and function,
from a myriad of organizations designed to promote social welfare
(e.g., social work organizations, the settlement house movement, and
the YMCA and YWCA [Buck 1980; Bulmer and Bulmer 1981]), to
organizations promoting the control of gambling and prostitution,
those promoting improved sanitation and hygiene, to those encouraging
government reform (less graft, more efficiency), and those empowered
with surveillance functions (concerning prisons, reform schools, etc.;
Berliner 1985: 13).17 The foundations thus envisioned themselves as
involved in a task of social control that consisted in helping the
masses adjust to the rigors of industrial life and representative
democracy (Hall 1992).
Most of the problems that plagued the rapidly industrializing
United States were believed by the foundations to be caused: (a) by the
deteriorating physical conditions of United States cities; (b) by what
was perceived to be the lack of familiarity of the foreign-born population
with democratic institutions; and (c) by the resultant breakdown in
social order. To counteract these developments, the foundations
sought to instill in the minds and bodies of these untutored peoples
the discipline and order needed to ensure social control. The foundations
further sought to create and/or modify the institutions, public and
private, needed to inculcate the new standards of discipline and to
train the personnel needed to oversee the process. The result was a
sweeping program of social change and control.
A new infrastructure of social science knowledge

Conditions abroad were thought to mirror those at home in many
ways. Outside the United States it was abundantly clear that there
were a great many peoples and cultures that had been partially or
wholly excluded from enjoying the advantages of modern life. Many, the
foundations recognized, had already been subject to the enormously
damaging effects . . . of industrial activity (Rockefeller Foundation

1914: 89). Most were seen as weighted down by pre-modern social
structures, traditional value systems, and backward customs. Founda-
tion officials and advisors singled out as especially unfortunate what
they called the radically false views of life and radically false views of
nature (Eliot 1914: 5) that characterized these societies, their over-
reliance on customs and traditions (Addresses 1922: 64), their
recourse to superstition instead of science (Rockefeller Foundation
1914: 89) in attempting to solve the problems they faced. All of these
were regarded as enormous barriers to modernization and progress.
To bring these societies into the modern age, the philanthropies
believed, what was needed was almost a social revolution (Judson
1909 [in Ninkovich 1984: 809]), one that would develop [in tradi-
tional societies] the scientific spirit, high moral ideas . . . and greater
strength of [individual] character (Burton 1907: 2). Equally impor-
tant would be to offer pre-modern peoples training in new forms of
political and social organization (Burton 1907: 2), so that they could
overcome the limitations of traditional social structures. Most important
of all, however, would be to develop the [social] circumstances in
which Science [can] flourish (Addresses 1922: 65). In the words of
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the philanthropic activities of the Rockefeller
Foundation were intended to offer the best of Western civilization,
not only in . . . science but in mental development and spiritual
culture (Addresses 1922: 63).
Rockefellers remarks echoed the guiding philosophy behind many
activities of the foundation that bore his family name. Professor
Wicliffe Rose, who directed several Rockefeller philanthropies during
his lifetime, expressed this philosophy with great clarity in a 1923
memorandum written to other Rockefeller officials (quoted in Fosdick
1952: 141):18
All important fields of activity . . . from the breeding of bees to the

administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and
technique of modern science . . . Science is the method of knowledge. It is
the key to such dominion as man may ever exercise over his physical
environment. Appreciation of its spirit and technique, moreover,
determines the mental attitude of a people, affects the entire system of
education, and carries with it the shaping of a civilization.
In sum, the great foundations believed that cultural work on an

enormous scale would be necessary if they were to bring the best of
Western civilization to traditional societies struggling to adjust to the
shocks of industrial expansion. As a result, the philanthropies set as
12 D. Nugent
their long-term goal nothing less than the wholesale transformation of

entire non-modern modes of thought and forms of behavior. That is,
the foundations sought to inculcate in peoples they viewed as non or
partially modern the virtues of Western rationality, the mental,
physical, and behavioral discipline that the foundations regarded as
the basis of a modern social order.19
The foundations efforts to modernize along these lines had several
components. Educational institutions, however, played a prominent
role in virtually all of the foundations activities. From the turn of the
century onward the foundations contributed to a major expansion in
and reorganization of higher education, both at home and abroad
(Berliner 1985; Fosdick 1962; Geiger 1986; Sealander 2003). Philan-
thropic efforts initially focused on the university and the laboratory as
the key sites for the transformations they sought.20 Drawing on the
model of the German research university, one important component of
their efforts to reform higher education focused on promoting the
development of research (rather than teaching) within a select group
of elite universities. This research, however, was to be of a certain
kind, and was to focus on specific issues. The foundations eschewed
what they regarded as the idle philosophical and historical speculation
of university intellectual life, speculation that was carried out at a
great distance from the social world and its myriad problems. The
impingement of the phenomenal world on the observer is the beginning
of things scientific, declared Beardsley Ruml, architect of Rockefeller
philanthropys massive expansion into the social sciences in the 1920s
(quoted in Fosdick 1952: 195).
In place of the speculation that they believed dominated the univer-
sities, the foundations sought to promote research that was empirically
grounded, based on the scientific method, and focused on the pressing
social problems of the day.21 Edmund E. Day, director of the Social
Science Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained in 1930 that
the single, overriding objective of his Division involved an attempt to
acquire a better understanding of the nature of social phenomena,
social institutions, social behavior; along with the direct cultivation of
a scientific approach to social problems (quoted in Fisher 1980: 236).
So as to leave no doubt about the ultimate purpose of research, he also
explained that, the validation of the findings of social science must be
through effective social control (quoted in Fisher 1980: 237).
The foundations intended that universities reorganize to promote
empirically grounded, problem-oriented research would act as shining
and highly visible examples of the vast potential of Western rationality
to make a positive contribution to social lifeboth at home and
abroad. They intended these re-made university centers to act as a
kind of cultural vanguard that would help establish (or strengthen)

the legitimacy of Western rationality, empiricism and problem solving.
Once established, the foundations believed, these institutions would
define new values and ideals that would radiate outward into society
as a whole as more and more people recognized the value of and
sought to emulate a United States cultural world view. Jerome
D. Greene, secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, prosaically
declared that building a school of this nature in China would light a
lamp which would burn for centuries (quoted in Ninkovich 1984:
801). Speaking in 1930, Edmund E. Day, Director of the Social
Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained the founda-
tions general strategy with regards to universities (quoted in Fisher
1980: 235):
There has been from the start a definite . . . plan, the idea of developing
within each country of any importance some center which would fructify
the local situation and influence other institutions within the same
sphere of scientific influence, then within the larger regional centers.
From the turn of the century onward the foundations invested

many millions of dollars in the reform of higher education.22 Within
the United States, the University of Chicago was the showpiece of this
effort, although Johns Hopkins, Clark, and the established Ivy League
schools like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Pennsylvania received
considerable support as well (Berliner 1985; Bulmer and Bulmer 1981:
365, 372, 387). In the southern United States the University of North
Carolina was the focus of philanthropic efforts.23 On the West Coast
the University of California and Stanford received the bulk of philan-
thropic largesse. In England the London School of Economics and
Political Science received the lions share of philanthropic funds
(Bulmer and Bulmer 1981: 387). In France the foundations provided
some support to the Institut dEthnologie and in Austria to the Institut
fur Volkerkunde (Stocking 1985: 127), although other major research
universities received support as well.24 In China the foundations
initially sought to build an entire new research university modeled on
the University of Chicago, but settled instead for building the Peking
Union Medical College and underwriting a public health program (see
Buck 1980). Later, most philanthropic support to China went to the
Department of Sociology at Yenching University and the Institute of
Economics at Nankai University (Chiang 1986; Hriskos n.d.; Trescott
1997).
Prior to World War I most philanthropic funds went into university
general funds and/or focused on medical and public health-related
14 D. Nugent
research. Public health received such heavy emphasis because it was

seen as having virtually unlimited potential to relieve the vast human
suffering resulting from poor hygiene and epidemic disease, and thus
to instill in non-modern peoples essential disciplines of the body.25
After the Great War the majority of philanthropic funds went to
university-based social science centers of excellence in the United
States, Western Europe, and China (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981: 384).
In these centers, philanthropic funds were used to free faculty from
teaching responsibilities, to carry out research projects, and to publish
research results (Coben 1976: 226227; Fosdick 1952: 196, 197).
A second key component of the modernizing cultural work under-
taken by the philanthropic/governmental nexus focused on efforts to
form a new intellectual elite.26 This elite was to be trained in the virtues
of empirically grounded, practically oriented research within one of
the foundations re-made institutions of higher learning. To make it
possible to train a new elite along these lines the foundations provided
their re-made institutions of higher learning with large sums of money
specifically for the training of students.27 The foundations made it
possible for these institutions to offer scholarships to fund the entire
graduate training of promising students. They thus helped influence
entire cohorts of graduate students, who were schooled in the scientific,
empirically grounded, practically oriented concepts, methods, and
techniques that the foundations believed would make such a contribution
to the pressing social problems of the day.
The decision to subsidize graduate education along these lines was
to have significant and unanticipated consequences, for the foundations
did more than simply expand the number of students who received
graduate training. More importantly, the foundations made graduate
school an option for social elements that had previously been unable
or unlikely to attend graduate school. Furthermore, philanthropic
sponsorship of graduate education came at a time when massive
European immigration to the United States brought with it an infusion
of critical social thought and political actioncontributing to the very
sort of social disturbances that led the foundations to intervene in the
social arena in the first place. In a number of urban centers there was
a growing sense of unease with and criticism of the established state
of affairs (Hall 1992; Keller 1990, 1994; LaFeber 1963; Weibe 1967).
As a result, social elements and issues found their way into the class-
room that had formerly had little or no place there.
Many of the students whose graduate educations were funded in
this manner were United States citizens, while a number of other
students came from Europe. In addition, however, the foundations
made a conscious decision to include a significant minority of students
from outside the West. By bringing these students into their re-made
centers of higher learning the foundations hoped to form an indigenous
intellectual elite (e.g., see Berman 1983). They hoped that, once
adequately trained, this indigenous elite would return to their homes
to help school their countrymen in the virtues of a practical, empirically-
based, scientifically grounded approach to social problems.
The decision to train an indigenous elite in empirically-grounded,
practically-oriented concepts, methods, and techniques was also to
have significant and unintended consequences. This elite was to prove
far less malleable than had been presumed. In many cases the founda-
tions were only partially successful at best in converting these
individuals to the reformist point of view implicit in their graduate
training. Rather, as intellectuals from around the world made their
pilgrimages to centers of higher learning in the United States and
England, they brought with them indigenous concernsimperialism
and government disintegration in China, colonialism and capitalist
penetration in Africa and India, and nationalism and revolutionary
conflict in Mexico.
As foreign students with indigenous concerns passed through
infrastructures of graduate training in the West, they helped broaden
the perspectives of United States students. The foreign students also
learned more about and made common cause with the concerns of
other foreign students (Dahrendorf 1995: 190). And when they
returned home after their graduate training was completed, they not
uncommonly occupied positions of authority and influenceas the
foundations intended, but not with the ideas they intended. As sug-
gested by the trajectories of people like Jomo Kenyatta, Z. K. Matthews,
Manuel Gamioall of whom were trained under the conditions just
describedhowever, these individuals often used their positions of
influence in ways that were far afield indeed from what the foundations
had intended. Kenyatta, for example, went on to help lead the inde-
pendence movement that freed Kenya from British colonial control.
Matthews became an outspoken critic of the racist policies of the
South African government (see Matthews 1932, 1937, 1938).
A third component of the cultural work undertaken by the great
foundations consisted of subsidizing research concerning the nature of
social conditions along the contested frontiers and the internal lines of
fracture of capitalist modernity. Some of this research was carried out
by university departments with funds provided directly by the founda-
tions.28 In terms of the quantity and quality of research and publishing
sponsored, ultimately more significant were the new institutions
created through philanthropic efforts and the existing institutions
whose activities the foundations considered worthy of support. These
16 D. Nugent
included the Social Science Research Council (SSRC; founded in 1923,

and funded by Rockefeller philanthropy [RPH] as of 1924), the American
Council of Learned Societies (founded in 1919, and heavily subsidized
by the great foundations throughout its history), the Institute of
Pacific Relations (founded in 1925, and funded by RPH as of 1927), the
Royal Institute of International Affairs (founded in 1919, and funded
by RPH as of the early 1920s),29 the International Institute of African
Languages and Cultures (founded in 1926, and funded by RPH as of
1926), the American Geographic Society (founded in the early 1850s,
and funded by RPH as of the early 1920s), and many others.
These institutions sponsored an enormous amount of research,
virtually all of which was intended by the foundations to aid in the
investigation, elucidation, and eventual amelioration of concrete social
problems, at home and abroad. To take the most prominent example
(the SSRC), raw dollar figures (not adjusted up for inflation) may help
give some sense of the scale of research activities funded by the foun-
dations. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM)30 provided
the initial funding for the Social Science Research Council in December
of 1924, with a grant of $425,000. The grant provided research fellow-
ships for a period of five years (Fisher 1993: 31). LSRM gave the SSRC
an additional $2,000,000 in 1927, of which the general research fund
received $750,000 (Fisher 1993: 6768). In 1931, SSRC received an
additional $575,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation (RF),31 of which
$225,000 was for general research projects over six years, $225,000
was for conferences and planning, and $100,000 was for grants-in-aid
over four years (Fisher 1993: 123). In 19321933, the RF gave the
SSRC $180,000 for postdoctoral fellowships over a two-year period and
continued support for this purpose throughout the 1930s (Fisher 1993:
123). In 1935, SSRC began funding pre-doctoral research fellowships,
and the General Education Board (another Rockefeller-funded founda-
tion) provided $100,000 for this purpose in each of three consecutive
years1935, 1936, and 1937 (Fisher 1993: 161).
In some instances these institutions (especially SSRC) helped fund
the university-based centers chosen by the foundations to remake
social science research.32 In other instances these institutions (SSRC,
Institute of Pacific Relations, Royal Institute of International Affairs,
etc.) funded the research of individuals who had received training at
one of the university-based centers funded by the foundations. What
emerged as a result was an international network of mutually
reinforcing institutions and processes in which research and publishing
of a particular kind were underwritten for individuals with specific
kinds of training (the training centers themselves having been funded
by philanthropic largesse). In the process, the foundations established
the material foundations for the subsequent development of an inter-

national discourse of social science debatea global public sphere of
social science knowledge.
A fourth component of the cultural work underwritten by the
foundations involved efforts at social engineering.33 The ultimate goal
of the research and publishing efforts sponsored by the great foundations
was not knowledge per se, but rather incorporation. The foundations
believed that non-modern peoples were unable to recognize the
superiority of modern values and behaviors because of the abysmal
social conditions in which they lived. Successful incorporation of these
peoplewhich also meant the steady advance and long-term stability
of United States influencewas contingent upon the amelioration of
these social conditions.
Accordingly, the foundations chose select problems or contexts that
were considered especially significant (or problematic) and actively set
out to mold social conditions in these contexts in the desired direction
(and thus to do away with the distinction between academic and
applied research).34 Among the most important of these were the wide-
spread programs of public health and epidemic disease eradication
instituted in many parts of the world (Buck 1980; Cueto 1994; Hewa
and Howe 1997); the Tuskegee Program, which provided vocational
education (as well as academic education for a tiny elite) for Blacks in
the United States South (Berman 1980; Finkenbine 2003); the
International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, which was
originally an attempt to implement the Tuskegee Program in Africa;
and several more comprehensive attempts at social engineering in
China (Hayford 1990; Trescott 1997).35
Part and parcel of the training offered within the network of insti-
tutions sponsored by the foundations was the inculcation of a partic-
ular view of social problems and their solutions. This view
emphasized the observation, description and amelioration of prob-
lematic conditions rather than the rapid and total reorganization or
transformation of society as a whole. Useful knowledge was there-
fore knowledge that was grounded in the empirical observation and
analysis of ongoing social conditions and that offered some sense of
direction about how to improve these conditions so as to insure social
stability.36
The foundations thus underwrote the production of knowledge that
could be usefully applied to the amelioration of social conditions that
were regarded as standing in the way of the advance of modernity,
individuality and consumption. They were interested in promoting
forms of knowledge about the world that would help keep it safe,
stable, and ordered.37
18 D. Nugent
The consolidation of overseas empire: 19451975

During phase twothe consolidation of empirethe goals of the foun-
dations remained unchanged. As in phase one, they sought to ensure
stability and order in a global arena in which capitalist modernity
would be the dominant force. While their goals remained the same,
however, the context in which they sought to realize these goals
changed profoundly. It was the contradictions of capitalism itself
specifically, the great depression, the world war that followed in its
wake, and the bipolar political structure of cold war conflictthat
transformed the conditions in which the foundations attempted to
make the world legible and thus subject to control.
By 1943 it was clear that the United States would play a greatly
expanded role in global affairs after the end of the war. Both the
foundations and the government recognized the pressing need for
greater knowledge about the world they were soon to inherit (and
reorganize!).38 As we will see, they also worked in concert to establish
the infrastructures of training, research, and publishing that would
produce the knowledge they sought.39
Such close cooperation between the foundations and the government
in the domain of knowledge production was unprecedented. During
phase onethe formation of overseas empirethe foundations had
maintained a complementary but independent relationship with the
United States government, hesitant to have state officials directly
involved in their internal decision-making processes. Thus, although
the government pursued some policies that helped create an interna-
tional intellectual elite,40 the foundations took the leading role in
creating most aspects of the inter-war social science infrastructure
(see Nugent 2002).
This relationship of complementary independence began to shift in
1929 with the advent of the Depression. As the 1930s progressed, and
the Depression deepened, closer ties developed between government
leaders, for example, and the officials of the SSRCwho used their
control over research funds to focus scholars on the economic, social,
and political problems of the global economic crisis. Despite the growing
rapprochement between government and foundation, however, there
was little institutionalized interaction between them. Nor was there
much cross-over between these two domains; those who occupied
positions of leadership in the foundations rarely went on to fill posts of
importance in government, or vice versa.
World War II was to forge new institutionalized linkages between
the foundations and the United States government.41 William Donovan,
head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the war-time precursor
to the CIA), took key steps in this direction. In 1941 he decided to

draw on the academic community to assemble a strong team of intelli-
gence experts to contribute to the war effort. Donovan invited repre-
sentatives of the SSRC and the ACLS to help him draw up a slate of
academic advisors for this purpose (Cumings 1997; Katz 1989). By
the time he was done, Donovan had compiled a list of hundreds of lead-
ing academics and young scholars.42 Many of these individuals went
on to play a key role in intelligence activities during the fight against
fascism.
The war-time bonds established between the government and the
foundations were to prove strong and enduring. In addition to cooper-
ating with OSS Director Donovan on intelligence in the narrow sense,
the SSRC and the ACLS also began working collaboratively with the
United States military and intelligence communities to expand the
conventional meaning of intelligence beyond its normal bounds (Fenton
1947; Hall 1947; Matthew 1947; SSRC 19421943; SSRC 19431944).
The Councils argued that, in light of the direct responsibilities the
United States was about to assume for the well being of the entire
planet, knowledge about other peoples and places in every corner of
the globe should be considered a matter of intelligence. Further-
more, the Councils asserted, the United States was sorely lacking in
the expertise necessary to gather this intelligenceas a result of
which the country had put its interests at great risk.
The SSRC was determined to remedy these problems and laid out
its vision for doing so in a 1943 document entitled, World Regions in
the Social Sciences (Hamilton 1943). The Councils plan to resolve
the countrys crisis of intelligence and security was based on the
deployment of a novel classificatory discourse (cf. Cohn 1996)one
that brought all the peoples and cultures of the world into a single
ordering schema in which the constituent units were discrete,
bounded cultural regions. World Regions in the Social Sciences
(Hamilton 1943) prescribed (in general terms) the kind of intelli-
gence that should be gathered about these regional units. It also pro-
vided a rationale for ranking the regions, according to their
geopolitical significance. Finally, the report suggested how to train
experts who could generate the much-needed intelligence about
these regions.43
What emerges out of the World Regions document is a plan for the
institutionalization of a new geography of knowledge and power.44 The
report begins by arguing that the rapidly changing geopolitical concerns
of the United States called for the production of a new kind of knowledge
on an unprecedented scale (Hamilton 1943: 1; see also Robinson 2004;
Wallerstein 1997):
20 D. Nugent
The present war has focused attention as never before upon the entire
world. Interest in foreign regions has been intensified and sharp attention
drawn to areas over which we have felt little or no concern . . . The
immediate need for social scientists who know the different regions of
the world stands second only to the demand for military and naval officers
familiar with the actual and potential combat zones. Since few overseas
areas have hitherto attracted research, we lack the regional knowledge
now required . . . The consequent scarcity of professional and scientific
personnel combining linguistic and regional knowledge with technical
proficiency seriously hampers every war agency.
The SSRC report went on to argue that the need for a greatly
expanded corpus of knowledge about unfolding conditions around the
globe was anything but limited to the period of the war itself. Rather,
once the fighting came to an end the safety and security of United
States interests abroad would depend critically on the continued
production of such knowledge (Hamilton 1943: 2):
Our need for comprehensive knowledge of other lands will not end with
the armistice or reconstruction. No matter what shape international
organization may assume, the US will enjoy unparalleled opportunities
and face heavy responsibilities. The ease, speed, and cheapness of
communication and transportation will tend to promote economic, political
and cultural relations among nations. Trade, shipping, airlines, the
press, mining, the production and distribution of petroleum, banking,
government service, industry and communications will require thousands
of Americans who combine thorough professional or technical training
with knowledge of the languages, economics, politics, history, geography,
peoples, customs and religions of foreign countries [emphasis added].
On this basis the SSRC called for a sweeping reorganization of edu-

cation in the United States to provide the expertise required to meet
the new exigencies of empire. According to the World Regions report
(Hamilton 1943: 2):
In order that we may fulfill our postwar role [in the world] our citizens
must know other lands and appreciate their people, cultures, and
institutions. Research, graduate teaching, undergraduate instruction,
and elementary education in world regions will be desirable as far as one
can see into the future.
Although Council planners recommended that United States educa-

tion as a whole be revamped to train the experts needed to manage
United States imperial domains, the special focus of reform efforts
should be the creation of new institutes in major universities that

could provide advanced training in each of the worlds major areas
(SSRC 1943: 6):
In any development for the study of world regions in this country, the
first step should be the establishment of university centers for research
and graduate instruction. These centers will extend our knowledge of
the major areas of the world: supply government and business with
experts; and provide materials and teachers for lower levels of instruction
. . . The graduate-research centers alone, [however,] will not meet the
needs of our country. The benefits of regional instruction must permeate
our entire educational system. America will not be able to assume her
[global] economic, political, and cultural responsibilities . . . after the
war without enlarged spatial concepts and a more comprehensive
knowledge of the world.
Discussions about the relation between area knowledge and the

security of empire continued after the war (Price 2004). A combination
of Cold War politics and decolonization movements in Africa and Asia
appeared to threaten United States interests on all sides and made it
abundantly clear that knowledge about seemingly far-off people and
places did indeed have a strategic dimension. In this context, in the
immediate aftermath of World War II high-ranking officials at the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and at the Carnegie Endowment
arranged a series of meetings to discuss what was to be done (Szanton
2004: 9). They agreed that the United States had to greatly enhance
its capacity to understand and act effectively in previously unfamiliar
nations and societies all across the globe (Szanton 2004: 9). A new
cadre of specially trained personnel with expertise in the various
regions of the world was required, foundation officials agreed, to promote
capitalist development, . . . to achieve social and political stability and
to secure United States interests (Szanton 2004: 9).
In the late 1940s the foundations began to make good on this vision.
In 1947 the SSRC published a new report reiterating the strategic
importance of area knowledge (Hall 1947).45 The following year area
studies got off to a modest beginning when the Carnegie Endowment
helped the SSRC launch its first program of area studies research and
training (Robinson 2004: 137). As the Cold War heated up during the
1950s Joint SSRC/ACLS Committees that focused on specific world
areas came to dominate the funding activities of both organizations and
continued to do so for decades. There were ultimately eleven Joint
SSRC/ACLS Area Studies Committees: Slavic, Latin American Studies,
Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Contemporary China, African Studies,
22 D. Nugent
Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, Eastern Europe, South Asia,

Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. With generous financial support
provided by the foundations, these Joint Committees were instrumental
in making area studies the dominant perspective in the social sciences.
It was the Ford Foundation, however, that was to take the lead role
in creating a new, post-war geography of knowledge. At the dawn of
the Cold War, Ford embarked on a project of truly massive proportions
to create a new infrastructure of training, research, and publishing in
the social sciences. Using the two SSRC reports on world regions/area
studies as a blueprint, Fords Division of International Training and
Research (1952) began building interdisciplinary, advanced-degree-
granting Area Studies Institutes at major universities throughout the
United States (Mitchell 2004). By 1966, when Ford discontinued this
program, it had succeeded in building Institutes at 34 leading univer-
sities, including Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago,
and Michigan (Ford Foundation 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965,
1966). The Foundation spent $120 million dollars on the endeavor
(Szanton 2004: 11).46
These Institutes used the generous resources provided by Ford to
become exciting new centers of intellectual activity, policy analysis,
and career possibility. Star-studded lecture series and conferences
hosted by the Institutes provided graduate students and faculty alike
the opportunity to mingle with distinguished members of government
and academy. The publications that resulted from these conferences
were widely disseminated and highly influential works. The research
monies that the Institutes disposed of allowed graduate students to
carry out (generally short-term) field research and provided faculty
(who often allocated these funds) the opportunity to promote the
careers of their most promising students. The advanced degrees
awarded by the Institutes acted as important professional credentials
for the students who earned them, whether they were bound for
academia or government service. The in-depth training in language,
culture, economics, politics, etc., offered by the Institutes was also
very attractiveprovided as it was by excellent university faculty,
drawn from several departments, to whom the Institutes were able to
give courtesy appointments, additional office space, and secretarial
support.
The intellectual vision guiding the activities overseen by the Area
Studies Institutes was the in-depth study of discrete world regions. As
a result, the Institutes played a key role in making area studies the
dominant knowledge geography of the time. In the belief that the
Institutes themselves would not be sufficient to train the extensive
corps of experts necessary to produce the intelligence required to
safeguard United States interests around the globe, Ford invested an

additional $150 million dollars (Szanton 2004: 11) in a fellowship
program designed to draw graduate students directly into area studies
training and to involve them in area studies research in virtually
every corner of the globe. In 1951 Ford implemented its Foreign Area
Fellowships Program (FAFP), which provided unprecedented levels of
graduate student support to an entire generation of scholars. In addition
to subsidizing two years of university-based training on a specific
country or region (often at one of Fords 34 Area Studies Centers), the
grant also paid for overseas dissertation research. The FAFP grants
even provided funds for the crucial write-up stage of doctoral training,
thus helping to ensure that students who did fieldwork abroad were
able to complete their degrees. Between 1951 and 1972 this program
supported the research of approximately 2,050 doctoral students in
the social sciences and humanities (Soderlund 1973).47
In the late 1950s the United States government also became exten-
sively involved in sponsoring area studies research. The event that
overcame conservative opposition to this project was the 1957 launching
of Sputnik, which precipitated a national security crisis (Mitchell
2004: 77; Robinson 2004: 138). One response was the National
Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958. Title VI of the NDEA
provided large sums to designated area study centers located across
the United Statesto support basic programs, provide student support
(especially through the Foreign Language and Area Fellowships),
purchase additional library materials and hire language faculty. The
Fulbright Program for Mutual Education and Cultural Exchange, first
established in 1946 and expanded greatly in 1961, similarly provided
funding for a large number of dissertation projects, as well as for post-
doctoral research and teaching, much of which had an underlying area
studies orientation.
The combined efforts of the Ford Foundation and the United States
government literally transformed the face of the social sciences in the
United States. The nexus of government and foundation created novel
institutions in which the most influential social scientists of the era
were trained. The foundations and the government also created new
professional networks that linked the formerly autonomous domains of
academia and government. It was within these new networks that the
most influential academics of the era passed and that the most promi-
nent careers in the social sciences were forged.48 The publications
authored by the experts who were trained within these institutions, and
who passed through these networks, defined the cutting edge of
mainstream scholarship in the social sciences for an entire generation.
Indeed, political scientist Bruce Cumings mentions seven books in the
24 D. Nugent
Studies in Political Development series sponsored by the Committee on

Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, and
published by Princeton University Press, all of which became required
reading in the political science subfield of comparative politics (1997:
15, Note #42): Pye 1967; LaPalombara 1969; Ward and Rustow 1964;
Coleman 1966; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966; Pye and Verba 1965;
and Binder 1971. Many more works could be added to this list, but per-
haps the most influential was Walt Rostows 1960 classic, The Stages of
Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Rostow 1960).
The reconstitution of overseas empire: 19752001

As the foregoing suggests, during both the formation (circa 19001940)
and the consolidation (circa 19451975) of empire, the great foundations
(and secondarily, the United States government) invested huge sums
of money in creating infrastructures of training, research, and
publishing. These infrastructures established the material conditions
for the production of social science experts and social science knowledge.
Each of these two periods, and its associated infrastructure, generated
a distinctive knowledge geographya knowledge geography that
reflected United States political and economic interests during the
period in question.
The great foundations were compelled to invest these enormous
sums in creating this infrastructure because of the peculiar way in
which the United States established its global economic presence after
1900. Unlike the Western European powers (and also Japan), the
United States had not created territorially-based colonies, where
government bureaucracies could produce detailed information about
subject populations. Government and corporate foundation interests
in the United States were nonetheless faced, however, with the need
to generate forms of knowledge that could help constitute governable
subjects throughout the United States far-flung empire. It was this
need that compelled the foundations to create an international public
sphere of social science.
Although much changed in the political economy of global capitalism
in the closing decades of the twentieth century (see Harvey 1989,
2003), and despite military adventures of the era, the United States
continued to show a real reluctance to engage in direct, long-term
political administration of territories beyond its borders (Smith 2003:
31). At the same time, the effective management of the United States
sprawling imperial domains was contingent upon the availability of
detailed knowledge about emergent social conditions, cultural
patterns, and forms of subjectivityknowledge that is essential to
render the groups concerned visible and manageable. Just as they did
during the inter-war period, government and foundation interests
continued to look to the social sciences to provide this knowledge.
Evidence that the traditional sponsors of the social sciences still
looked to academics to generate the knowledge considered essential to
the management and reproduction of United States interests abroad
may be seen in the following. Not only were the foundations (and the
United States government) instrumental in organizing academic
debate around world regions during the heyday of Fordism, they
played an equally important role in directing scholarly attention away
from area studies thereafter. Furthermore, they began this process of
academic restructuring in the early 1970sjust as the breakdown of
Fordist accumulation practices and the rise of flexible accumulation
began to transform the global dynamics of empire.
The infrastructures supporting area studies research began to
weaken in the first half of the 1970s. Confronted with a rising foreign
debt, inflationary pressures, and a serious recession (problems
symptomatic of the crisis of Fordism), in 1974 the United States Con-
gress was poised to do away with Title VI funding entirely. Although
Title VI narrowly escaped termination, it was again threatened in
1984 and 1994 (Guyer 2004: 502503). Although funding stabilized
subsequently, over the long term support was reduced considerably
(although not to the same degree for all world areas, and not all at
once). The result was that there was much less money available for
area studies centers, for graduate training, and for research. To take
but one example, FLAS fellowships for graduate students specializing
in the study of Latin America fell from an average of 170 per year in
the 1960s to a low of 54 in 1975 (Drake and Hilbink 2004: 39).49
During the 1970s the foundations also began to reduce support for
area studies. Ford Foundation funding for graduate training and
research dropped precipitouslyfrom approximately $27 million per
year in the 1960s to $4 million per year in the 1970s (Drake and Hilbink
2004: 39). This reduction in support included funding for Area Studies
Institutes and also for the Foundations Foreign Area Fellowships
Program (Drake and Hilbink 2004: 39). By the early 1980s academics
in many disciplines were feeling the crunch, confronted as they were
with a hostile funding environment that made it increasingly difficult
for established scholars or their students to carry out research.50
These deteriorating conditions continued into the 1980s and 1990s
at an accelerating pace. In the mid-1980s both MacArthur and Mellon
began moving away from research that focused on areas, and a number
of smaller private foundations terminated their sponsorship of area
studies training and research. By the late 1980s the reduction of funds
26 D. Nugent
for research had reached crisis proportions. One example, drawn from
research on Latin America, helps to illustrate the depth of the crisis.
By 1989, the total grants available per year to United States faculty to
carry out extended research on Latin America were sufficient to cover
only 7 percent of the existing pool of active researchers that numbered
approximately 1,800 (Drake and Hilbink 2004: 40)!
Although the foundations and the United States government did
indeed withdraw support from area studies beginning in the 1970s,
they did not eliminate their sponsorship of training, research, and
publishing. Instead, they took the social sciences through yet another
round of restructuring. Specifically, the foundations began trans-
forming area studies (cf. Ford 1999) by directing research away from
areas and toward the changing configuration of global and regional
space under late capitalism. In the process, the foundations began to
focus the attention of scholars on a series of de-territorialized
problems: globalization, democracy, development, human rights, and
sustainability.
With this as their stated mission, the Foundations provided institu-
tions of higher learning and individual scholars alike with very generous
funds for research, presenting findings to peer professionals, engaging
in scholarly debate, publishing, and training students. In 1993 Mellon
nearly abandoned its support of area-based research, but replaced it
with a focus on research themes that resonate in the cultures of several
regions (Heilbrunn 1996)on globalization, democracy and develop-
ment. In 1994 the SSRC also began to move away from its longstanding
area-by-area funding strategy. At the same time the Council began
to support research topics similar to those being sponsored by Mellon.
To explain the shift in funding strategy, the Council cited pressure
from major donorsin particular, the Ford and Mellon Foundations!51
On a more scholarly note, SSRC President Kenneth Prewitt (1996: 14)
wrote that the SSRC had come to believe that a number of discrete
and separate area committees, each focused on a single world region,
is not the optimum structure for providing new insights and theories
suitable for a world in which the geographic units of analysis are nei-
ther static nor straightforward.
Prewitt clearly meant what he said. In 1997 the SSRC did away
completely with its area studies committees, replacing them with a
smaller number of less powerful regional advisory panels that did
not control significant amounts of funding for graduate fellowships or
research projects (Drake and Hilbink 2004). In the process, the Council
did more than simply eliminate an important source of funding for
area studies. It also gave formal notice to social scientists that it had
decided to abandon the entire logic of classification that had ordered
social science research since 1943, the date of its earlier, war-time
report, World Regions in the Social Sciences. The SSRCs late 1990s
reorganization away from area studies and toward globalization
(Cumings 1997) sent shock waves throughout the academic community.
The Ford Foundation went in a similar direction that same year.
Having invested $270 million dollars in creating area studies
programs across the United States during the heyday of Fordism, and
having pulled away gradually from area studies research since the
early 1970s, in the late 1990s the Foundation began focusing its energies
on the production of a new geography of knowledge more in tune with
the realities of the era of flexible accumulation. At the close of the
twentieth century the Foundation launched a multi-year, $25 million
initiative called Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies.
Although this program continued the philanthropic tradition of spon-
soring the in-depth study of particular languages and areas, its special
focus was on innovative approaches to [area studies] intellectual
foundations and practices in light of a dramatically changed, and
increasingly interconnected world (Ford Foundation 1999: xi).
We will see in a moment specifically what kind of knowledge Ford
sought to produce under the auspices of this program. First, however,
it is worth examining what steps the Foundation took to place a revi-
talized area studies on the agenda of colleges and universities around
the country (and the world). In the first phase of Crossing Borders,
Ford invited 270 United States universities and colleges with area
studies programs (that the Foundation had done much to create) to
submit grant applications outlining projects that explored the dynamics
of what the Foundation characterizes as our dramatically changed,
increasingly interconnected world. The Foundation received 205
applications, from which it chose 30 granteesfrom major research
universities to small liberal arts colleges, from Maine to Hawaii
(Ford Foundation 1999: xi). Each institution received a grant of
$50,000. The following examples provide a sense for the kinds of
programs and schools that received funding from Fordand the
degree to which the Foundation sought to forge a new geography of
academic enquiry in the process:
Duke University: Oceans Connect: Culture, Capital and Commodity

Flows Across Basins; this project examines the cultural and economic
links forged across oceans . . . seeks to rethink traditional notions of
area both intellectually and pedagogically, [and approaches] maritime
basins [as] sites of intercontinental trade and travel, conversion and
conquest, migration and creolization. Rather than simply redrawing
area boundaries, the project seeks to stimulate a more critical, historical
28 D. Nugent
and relational way of thinking about how the human world is put
together, stressing interconnections rather than fixed identities (Ford
Foundation 1999: 1516).
University of Virginia (in conjunction with the Australian National
University, the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica in
Taiwan, and the Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per [the Catholic
University of Peru]): uses Foundation funds to establish a revitalized
graduate training program focused on the Pacific Rim, [that examines]
processes of transnationalism and globalization, and [that] looks beyond
static geographical definitions of region and place . . . The Pacific is a
particularly rich zone of transnational exchange, with its long history of
conquest, colonization, and . . . challenges many conventional assumptions
of . . . area studies (Ford Foundation 1999: 19).
Colby College (Maine): uses funds from Ford to launch a model
faculty-student research group in [the Colleges] international studies
curriculum . . . The goal of [Colbys] initiative is to overcome the disconti-
nuity that typically characterizes undergraduate international studies
experiences, by engaging students in three-year, progressive, interdisci-
plinary exploration of international issues . . . Two research groups in the
pilot year of the program focus on New Democracies and Post-Conflict
Settlement in Latin America (Ford Foundation 1999: 3637).
Thirty schools in the United States were funded to carry out similar
projects during Phase I of Crossing Borders, 270 having been put on
notice about the new direction of the Foundations funding efforts.
In the second phase of Crossing Borders, Ford provided grants to 18 of
the 30 institutions that had received funding in Phase I. Phase 2 grants
ranged in size from one hundred thousand dollars to almost a million. Sev-
eral additional examples illustrate the kinds of institutions and activities
Ford sponsored during Phase 2. These also bring out the degree to which
the Foundation sought to deepen its commitment to transforming the spa-
tial frame of reference of academic research and training:
University of Wisconsin International Institute: used a Phase 2 grant

to form two global learning communities (GLCs): Legacies of Authori-
tarianism (LOA), and Media, Performance and Identity (MPI).52 Both
GLCs feature comparative study of local issues in global context,
collaborative learning in a network of scholars from around the world;
innovative training for a new generation of scholars; and new courses
and better teaching methods for all students. UW faculty will conduct
collaborative research with peers in other countries; graduate students
will study with leading scholars from the countries they work on; and
students at all levels will have more contact with scholars, activities,
artists and fellow students around the world (http://www.intl-institute.
wisc.edu .crossing_borders.htm).
Middlebury College: received a $250,000 Phase 2 grant to strengthen

[its] international studies curriculum . . . to expand the number of senior
seminars . . . and to provide enrichment through visiting lecturers, confer-
ences, and international fellowships. The grant . . . also provide[d] outreach
to local [high] schools and [high school] teachers through programming
that . . . involve[d] both Middlebury students and faculty. [Ford also]
sponsored a major conference in international studies in the third [and
final] year of the grant to discuss the impact of Middleburys new senior
seminar programand initiatives taken by other schoolson efforts to
improve international studies at the undergraduate level (http://www.mid-
dlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/news_releases/news_1999/ford.htm).
The first observation that may be made about these programs

concerns their content. Virtually none deal with areas in the conven-
tional sense. Rather, most focus on movementof people, ideas,
commodities. Other programs examine problems or processes (author-
itarianism; identity formation) rather than areas. Regardless, Ford
appeared to have in mind an area studies so revitalized that it had
almost nothing in common with its Cold War counterpart.
A second set of observations about Crossing Borders concerns the
structure rather than the content of Fords revitalization efforts. The
Foundation chose to intervene on an extensive basis in virtually all
aspects of knowledge productionfrom the training of high school
students and undergraduates to the formation of innovative under-
graduate and graduate programs to the research of undergraduates,
graduate students and professional academics.
Ford thus continues a number of philanthropic traditions begun in
the inter-war period. One of these concerns the creation of new stan-
dards of academic excellence. By virtue of its ability to define new
priorities in training and research (both through its own auspices and
through its influence on organizations like the SSRC) and to create
competitive pressures among colleges and universities for scarce
research funds Ford did more than simply intervene in the production
of knowledge in a select group of colleges and universities. The Foun-
dation also influenced the standards to which all institutions of higher
learningfunded and un-funded alikeaspire.
Fords Crossing Borders program continued the inter-war traditions
of creating an international public sphere of social science knowledge,
and of forming an international intellectual elite. It did so by (1)
encouraging extensive collaboration between United States and
foreign universities; (2) establishing ties between academics and non-
governmental organizations (Ford Foundation 1999); (3) sponsoring
the work of foreign scholars who focus on appropriate themes; (4)
bringing foreign scholars to United States universities, where they
30 D. Nugent
work collaboratively with their United States counterparts, and share

their research results with the North American academic community;
and (5) encouraging university-affiliated research institutes around
the globe to pursue projects that investigate the dynamics of our
dramatically changed, increasingly interconnected world.
Looking beyond Crossing Borders itself, the decision of the
foundations to shift their funding priorities away from area studies
continues yet another inter-war tradition. It has already resulted in
the publication of a series of authoritative works that help define what
many regard as the cutting edge of scholarship.53 As the extensive
research and numerous conferences sponsored by the foundations
(including Crossing Borders) comes to fruition in future years, even
more authoritative publications are likely to appear.
Just as they did at the two previous moments in the twentieth
century when the United States sought to reconstitute its global
empire (i.e., the inter-war period and the Fordist era; see Smith
2003), as the twentieth century came to an end the Foundations once
again sought to intervene in the production of knowledge. In closing,
I suggest that there is a logic to these recurrent transformations in
the organization of the social sciences. Furthermore, I suggest that
this logic reflects continuities in the development of United States
imperialism. To the extent that the United States continues to main-
tain a global empire, but to avoid direct colonial administration of
territories beyond its own borders, it will be essential that experts
of some kind produce the knowledge and do the work of representa-
tion, upon which control so vitally depends. There is every indication
that social scientists will continue to play a central role in providing
this expertise.
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 Imper-
ative, 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 inter-
esting 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 centurybut especially from mid-century onward (LaFeber 1963).
The imperial vision that guided United States expansion before the 1890s is per-
haps 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 con-
solidation 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 Carib-
bean 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 replac-
ing 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 processthe
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
Gramscis 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 struc-
ture of Chile.
8. In Anthropology and Politics, Joan Vincent (1990) provides extensive documenta-
tion of a subterranean tradition of anthropological scholarship that has dealt with
similar themes since the 1870s. The present work is heavily indebted to Vincents
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, indus-
trial, 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 oli-
gopolistic 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
32 D. Nugent
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 govern-
ment 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 estab-
lishing 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 eraJapan, and those of
Western Europe (Cooper 2006; LaFeber 1963; Smith 2003; Steinmetz 2006; Will-
iams 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 strategiesfrom direct adminis-
tration 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 busi-
ness 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
impulsesby 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 col-
leges. This was also a major focus on the General Education Board (GEB), a philan-
thropic 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: 169170).
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 Foundations vision of
public health as part of a package of interventions, most of which were more prop-
erly 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 disci-
plinary 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 sub-
sidized 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. Roses memorandum was written to convey his views about education to the trust-
ees 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 rea-
son. 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 edu-
cation more practical, and the advances in science and scientific investigation as
developed especially in the context of the German research university (Geiger 1986:
910). 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 approx-
imately $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
34 D. Nugent
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: 4345).
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 Memorials program of creating and strengthening
regional social science centers of excellence (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981: 390392).
24. The latter institutions were funded by the General Education Board and the Inter-
national 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 mentors 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 countrys leading research universities (Geiger 1986: 1213).
From the 1890s onward, more and more families from societys middle ranks had -
sufficient income to be able to spare the labor of their young adult sons. The increas-
ingly career-oriented nature of university education made it an avenue of (modest)
social mobility for these families (Geiger 1986: 1314).
27. Examples include the fellowships offered to Chinese students by the Rockefeller
Foundations 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 fellow-
ships, 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 Fellowship program 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: 8284).
28. The anthropology program at the London School of Economics and Political Science
and the University of Chicagos 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 SSRCs own organiza-
tional structure within the elite universities chosen to re-make the social sciences.
These university committees were interdisciplinary, being made up of representa-
tives 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 institution-
alized in United States anthropology until World War II (compare Vincent [1990],
on England), as reflected in the establishment of the Society for Applied Anthropol-
ogy. 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 repre-
sents a major point of departure from the vision of the social sciences that was pro-
moted 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 con-
tributor to missionary activities) to establish a philanthropic foundation was Fred-
erick 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 Rock-
efeller staff in 1892. He remained Rockefellers 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 institutionsthe 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 interna-
tional intellectual elite is provided by negotiations surrounding the Boxer Indem-
nity Fundan 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: 541542). 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
36 D. Nugent
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 train-
ing, for its officers and enlisted men alike, having recognized the strategic impor-
tance 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 19421943, SSRC 19431944). 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 cul-
ture 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 Commit-
tees in the SSRCs Annual Report for 19261927 (SSRC 19261927). 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 19411942, 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 19411942: 19, 40). The decision of the SSRC to foreground area
knowledge during the war thus represents a major rupture with the 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 authoritar-
ian 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.
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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:244, 2010

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United

Key Words: Empire, social sciences, geographies of knowledge, expertise, historical

The development of the social sciences in the United States has an

1996, 2002). Finally, I also emphasize that my intention here is not to

A new social science for a new empirethe inter-war period

contested frontiers and the internal lines of fracture of United States

into industrial centers, and the nature of relationships established

In other words, Western and non-Western scholars alike were

The formation of overseas empirethe inter-war period

Prior to this internal reshuffling within the Western world, the

for the production and dissemination of social science knowledge. In

conflict became so severe that the United States Secretary of State

A new infrastructure of social science knowledge

damaging effects . . . of industrial activity (Rockefeller Foundation

All important fields of activity . . . from the breeding of bees to the

In sum, the great foundations believed that cultural work on an

their long-term goal nothing less than the wholesale transformation of

kind of cultural vanguard that would help establish (or strengthen)

From the turn of the century onward the foundations invested

research. Public health received such heavy emphasis because it was

included the Social Science Research Council (SSRC; founded in 1923,

the material foundations for the subsequent development of an inter-

The consolidation of overseas empire: 19451975

to the CIA), took key steps in this direction. In 1941 he decided to

On this basis the SSRC called for a sweeping reorganization of edu-

Although Council planners recommended that United States educa-

should be the creation of new institutes in major universities that

Discussions about the relation between area knowledge and the

Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, Eastern Europe, South Asia,

safeguard United States interests around the globe, Ford invested an

Studies in Political Development series sponsored by the Committee on

The reconstitution of overseas empire: 19752001

Duke University: Oceans Connect: Culture, Capital and Commodity

University of Wisconsin International Institute: used a Phase 2 grant

Middlebury College: received a $250,000 Phase 2 grant to strengthen

The first observation that may be made about these programs

work collaboratively with their United States counterparts, and share

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