H.G. Wells and the World State: A Liberal Cosmopolitan in a Totalitarian Age

Abstract

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