ABSTRACT
In the cases of Sean Wilentz in the United States and Michael Ignatieff in Britain and Canada, inventions in international relations highlighted the repositioning away from history 'from below'. The episodic but flattering attention paid by the disastrous John Sweeney leadership of the American Federation of Labor to labor historians quickened international relation transition. Balancing Du Bois exemplary framing of matters with the fact that the history he lived let him see some things with remarkable clarity and others with less facility introduces also the question of race and international relations where European and American realities were not at the center. Finally, in the United States, IR about as often abbreviates industrial relations as it does international relations. One task in future work ought to be bringing questions of race and the management of workers in the Global South and relatively undeveloped parts of Europe and the United States to the fore.
