Conventional disciplinary histories of International Relations situate the origins of the formalised academic discipline not in the imperial metropole but in Aberystwyth, where the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics was established in 1919. This disciplinary origin story overlooks that the Wilson Chair was accompanied by two equivalent Chairs, in Colonial History and in Geography and Anthropology (held by the eugenicist HJ Fleure), each funded by the Davies family. This paper will situate the ‘Aberystwyth myth’ relating to the disciplinary origins of IR in a wider historical context to argue that the new discipline was not the scholarly wing of a harmless noble endeavour to build a lasting peace on the back of the League of Nations, but was a discipline forged in the crucible of empire that sought to claim an explicitly scientific legitimacy.

It positions the Wilson Chair as one in a trilogy of Chairs inimperial science at Aberystwyth, funded around the same time by the same family, and argues that when taken together, these Chairs highlight the existence of a largely forgotten movement to impart a ‘scientific’ legitimacy on the study of new models of imperial rule beyond formal Empire. Ultimately, it will argue that when the historical silences concerning the ‘Aberystwyth myth’ are addressed, IR can be reconceptualised as a science of empire. The discipline that emerges from this historical reassessment is not a non-normative, value-free social science, but a self-proclaimed interdisciplinary ‘science’ that emerged out of tangled networks of imperialism, eugenics, and race science.