Planetary Orders and Global Divisions in the Political Thought of Barbara Ward

The British economist Barbara Ward (1914-1981) is best known for her contribution to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and for her book Spaceship Earth (1966), which was one of the first studies of the interplay of economics and sustainability, anticipating later debates about the Anthropocene. Born to a Catholic-Quaker British family and educated in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Somerville College, Oxford, Ward became a senior contributor to The Economist and an advisor to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and to American politicians Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. She advanced her ideas about global cooperation against poverty and inequality in the UN and the Vatican.

Despite her high-profile career, Ward is not a well-known figure in the history of international thought: Oxford historian Tehila Sasson suggests that she is ‘one of the most influential yet understudied intellectuals of the twentieth century’. Being a woman in the predominantly male environment of international politics surely didn’t help to enhance her legacy: as Patricia Owens has recently argued, women were often intentionally ‘erased’ from the canon of international thought. Ward was not completely forgotten, but her legacy was reduced to one element, sustainable development, an idea mostly associated with her writings from the 1960s and 1970s. By retrieving some of her earlier ideas about global and planetary orders, I suggest that she made significant contributions to conceptualizing the global sphere as a space of unity notwithstanding important geopolitical antinomies of West and East, North and South. Through her eyes, we see the global not as a smooth political space but as an internally divided unit influenced by imperial and civilizational hierarchies. Despite, or due to these divisions, from the 1970s onwards, Ward became a promoter of a collaborative ‘planetary order’ aimed to address existential risks to the natural environment and human survival.

After the Second World War, Ward embraced the polarization of the world into two camps, capitalist and communist, West and East, which replaced for her the opposition between competing imperial powers over the domination of the non-Western world. The two broad spaces, conceptualized as distinct yet malleable geopolitical and ideational realms, constituted the West (Europe and sometimes including the United States), the East (Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, or other parts of Asia such as India, China and Japan).

This abstraction of political ‘order’ permitted her to emphasise the importance of ideas in political relations. While she discussed the history of war and empire as the foundation of her arguments, she focused on a conceptual division between two world systems – each aspiring to universality – that co-habited the globe and could be potentially reconciled. Despite ideological differences, however, she consistently argued that both East and West should be understood as parts of a global whole, which could, in appropriate conditions, find a sense of unity.

In her 1948 book The West at Bay, Ward argued that ‘no corner of the world – except perhaps ancient Greece – has contributed as much as Western Europe to the development and enrichment of mankind’. The distinctiveness of the Western system was institutional but also spiritual: ‘Christianity lay the foundation of western citizenship’ through tolerance, freedom, and respect for the human personality. Ward acknowledged liberal democracy’s weaknesses: generating a system of economic inequality and lacking social justice. She also acknowledged the advantages of Eastern democracies, such as gender and race equality, economic planning for stability and growth and improved education. Nonetheless, with limited tolerance and freedom, strong arms, and a lack of voluntary non-state organizations, Eastern regimes were only partially democratic. This discrepancy was problematic. For Ward, ‘cooperation is virtually impossible without some meeting of minds’, and therefore, ‘an attempt must be made to see if the gap can be bridged’.

In her 1957 Foreign Affairs article, Ward expressed a positive view of Britain’s ‘colonial system’, in which exploitation was at most a ‘by-product of exploration’. The British were ‘one of the creative imperialisms experienced by mankind’, though she conceded that it might be too soon to pass judgment. ‘Empire has proven one of the great civilizing forces in human history’, despite its ‘darker ways’. While the negative characteristics of imperialism were global, its supposedly positive traits were predominately Western.

Ward advanced a civilisational view inspired by her friend and fellow Catholic, Arnold Toynbee, yet argued that the West needed to come to terms with the ways it was perceived by others: ‘aggressive, outgoing and disturbing force for all other civilizations and ways of life’. Colonial rule brought some benefits to Asia, including infrastructure, education and bureaucracy, but ‘the picture that remains is one of disruption and exploitation’. Now, she argued, both past exploitation and the Communist menace endowed the West with the moral responsibility to advance the Eastern economies. Such ideas led her, in 1961, to propose a Marshall Plan for India, with moralistic motivations: ‘Behind the Indian figures and statistics lie the realities of children without bread, men without work, women without hope. If these do not move us to action, the outer form of our society may survive – but its inner spirit will have withered away.’

East and West were parts of a ‘small planet’ and needed to cooperate to guarantee its survival. While global cooperation was possible and desirable, she was wary of plans for a formal world federal constitution, which circulated in the United States public arena during the preceding decade. A new world order should not come at the expense of diversity and plurality, but should diminish the absolute power of state sovereignty. Her proposal was a ‘minimum plan for international order’ inspired not by the UN, but by the Chinese empire. A new international monetary fund, world trade organization and an organization to manage the movement of capital and people would emerge out of fear but also curiosity, which she considered as a distinctive mark of Western civilization.

In 1950, Ward married Australian civil servant Robert Jackson and moved with him to the Gold Coast (Ghana), where he was in charge of planning the Volta Valley project. Over the next decade, she became closely involved with the project, and with the local political leaders’ attempt to counter the establish a new postcolonial nation-state. Using a rhetoric based on a pre-Cold War set of divisions, North and South, she argued that Africans, not Europeans, should state the terms of the engagement between the North and South in the post-colonial world order, and rejected plans for a ‘Eurafrican’ union that could facilitate Europe’s economic growth for its imperial legacy. If federation should be a tool for political freedom, it should be initiated by the Africans for their own benefit: it was advisable to ‘encourage a parallel movement of unity in Africa to match the growing unity of Europe’. Like others, she saw Nkrumah’s charismatic pan-Africanism as an effective alternative to the ‘Eurafrica’ vision that replicated imperial exploitations under a neo-colonial cloak. The problem of political and economic order in Europe and Africa related to political judgement and agency. In the existing climate of opposition to Western influence and “Eurafrican” economic assimilations, such moves would only encourage ‘violent nationalism’ and thus ‘increase the instability of that disturbed continent’.

North and South entailed not only economic disparity but also moral and spiritual contrasts. In 1961, in her inaugural Massey lectures in Canada, she rejected natural determinism about development, arguing that adverse climatic conditions were not sufficient to explain poverty. The real reason was the lack of ‘revolutions’ in the South. ‘Change is possible’, she argued, although limited by factors such as high birth-rate or centuries of exploitative rule, which demanded ‘a sustained an imaginative strategy of economic aid by the wealthy to the poor’, driven by international organizations rather than private initiative.

The discussion of development led Ward to envisage a ‘world-society’, or a global dimension of human political, economic and social order. Development thus depended on the fundamental value of the ‘equality of man with man in the new world-society that is beginning to emerge’. This vast and ‘almost cosmic’ view of equality included ‘poor and uncommitted lands’ under colonial rule. She argued that ‘generosity is the best policy’, and consequently ‘, all the wealthy nations must accept a common obligation to provide capital and technical assistance to the under-developed areas’ and eventually contribute to their own prosperity. Foreign aid, an Atlantic Reserve Bank, development and investment would create ‘the economic pre-conditions of a functioning world order’, with a ‘minimum standards of trust rooted in the fact that we are all men, that we all stand under the judgement of history, and that we all love and seek to live and know that men must die’. Yet global equality emerged from the ‘Western sense that men, as souls of infinite metaphysical value, stand equal before the throne of God’. For Ward, the motivation for global action was rooted in Christian universalism.

The transformation of a divided world into a united globe passed through the abandonment of earlier divisions, East-West, North-South, in favour of a multi-layered global sphere. Such a system would not be ‘international’ as it would not, for Ward, be based on nation-states alone. Rather, she also sought to include ‘post-national regional groupings’ as an alternative unit to the state that could overcome the divisive effects of earlier geopolitical imaginaries.

Ward positioned the North Atlantic or West as the sphere of global political innovation. When she wrote about Spaceship Earth in 1966, she argued that a new global order would require first a degree of unity in the Western part of the world, where economic plenty would be facilitated by technology and science. In the second stage, the problems of inadequate growth in the ‘global South’, and protectionist policies in the ‘developed’ economies, would need to be addressed to enhance the progress of the world’s economy. At the core of the global transition, Ward placed a new spirituality defined as the ‘conquest of things of the mind’.

While arguing that the ‘planetary’ expansion of Western ways of living extended the nation-state, capitalism and world commerce from the West to the whole planet ‘dialectically’, she suggested that such proto-globalization was not accompanied by global accord. The problem boiled down to ideological differences. She encouraged dialogue between opponents sharing ‘such basic Western beliefs as brotherhood, equality, the rights – and wrongs – of the poor, and the vision of mankind using its new tool of scientific thought and technological discovery to progress towards a juster and more peaceful world order’.

Barbara Ward’s political thought offers several insights for intellectual historians. Her writings about planetary politics demonstrate a theoretical link between Christian morality and sustainable development. While she advocated for planetary economic development that would take into consideration the post-colonial world and the natural environment, her main motivation for thinking about wealth on a planetary scale was, for her, moral-religious. Christianity provided the sense of brotherhood and unity that could motivate people to act for the supposedly common good and establish a new planetary order. The development of science and technology was not enough to improve humanity’s future, for her. Yet unlike Hannah Arendt, who, as Belcher and Schmidt have shown, theorized dehumanizing earth alienation in response to outer space explorations, Ward’s Catholic creed made her more optimistic about the prospects of planetary development and human unity.

Intellectual history can shed new light on Ward’s ideas, which hitherto have interested predominantly economic historians and social scientists. Her social-scientific thinking provides a glimpse into the way economic issues were conceptualized outside academia, by experts involved in policymaking and public advocacy, and how these issues were communicated to large international audiences. Ward’s wide-ranging writings show the multi-disciplinary roots of sustainable development on global scale, drawing on ideas from Christian theology, economics, international politics, critique of technology and longue-durée narratives of imperial history. By paying attention to Ward, intellectual historians may reevaluate the conventional canon of international political thought and gain a better understanding of the vast web of ideas that set the ground for global and planetary thinking in the twentieth century.

This blog was originally published by the University of Oxford's Centre for Intellectual History in May 2025 and is reproduced here with their kind permission.