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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2010

Robert Vitalis*
Affiliation:
Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Extract

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 is An 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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010

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