1 Pre-proof copy International Studies Quarterly (forth. 2018) Founding the World State: H. G. Wells on Empire and the English-Speaking Peoples Duncan Bell University of Cambridge Introduction Celebrated as a genius by many, dismissed as a monomaniacal crank by others, H. G. Wells (1866- 1946) was once hard to ignore. Most famous today as one of the founders of modern science fiction, during the first half of the twentieth century he was known throughout the world as an audacious and controversial political thinker. Questions of global order were central to his work. From the opening decade of the century until the close of the Second World War he campaigned tirelessly for the eradication of the system of sovereign states and the creation of a new order, characterised by universal peace and justice. He was the twentieth century’s most prolific, original and influential advocate of the world-state. While omnipresent before the Second World War, Wells’s star waned rapidly. Even as millions continued to marvel at his “scientific romances,” his political writings were largely forgotten. The evolving discipline of International Relations (IR), fighting for credibility in the rapid post-war expansion of the social sciences, and shaped by the power dynamics of the Cold War, had little time for such a protean writer. There have been exceptions to this general rule. In 1950, for example, the eminent strategist Edward Mead Earle published an acute analysis of Wells’s political thinking. He was, Mead wrote in the pages of World Politics, a “mercurial and versatile genius” who had “exercised an almost unique influence on the generation which reached maturity during the decade 1910-20” (1950, 181, 185). But few other scholars followed Earle’s lead.