The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863). His best-known work isAn Essay on the Government of Dependencies(1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.” Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.