Erased: A History of Intellectual Thought Without Men has the potential to be one of the most important books of the decade … and the previous century. By recovering the influence of 12 women on the development of the field of British international relations (IR) throughout the twentieth century, Patricia Owens reveals a history that explains a lot about where the field stands today on methodology and imperialism as well as the role that racism and patriarchy have played in shaping those legacies. This new understanding provides a caution and a call for thinking about possible directions for the field of IR. Most notably, when early leaders of British IR focused on defining the field rather than addressing the important questions of the day, it tended toward irrelevance and ossification. The result is, as Owens notes, these leaders are known within the field, but not outside it, and journalists and historians (which many of the women Owens discusses were) remain the more impactful contributors to public discussions in IR.

Erased reminds us that the twentieth century was a century in which the marginalized peoples of the world suffered and rejected the terms of national and international politics which left them vulnerable to military aggression, environmental degradation, and life-threatening poverty. Furthermore, it reveals how a discipline ostensibly dedicated to understanding and addressing those problems failed to do so.

The book is important today as the field of IR struggles to be relevant to current political struggles, in part because the terms of debate set in the previous century forced to the margins or the archives the arguments most directly engaging them. Today, people around the world are conveying to their political leaders through democratic and nondemocratic means that global institutionalism, international law, international aid, and their promises have failed to secure the lives and futures of much of humanity. Threats from military aggression; persistent legacies of settler colonialism, colonialism, and imperialism; climate change; and life-threatening poverty are not being sufficiently addressed. Often global institutions and foreign aid exacerbate these inequalities. The field of IR will need to draw on its interdisciplinary roots—including on diplomatic history, decoloniality and empire, and international political economy (as a subject not a method)—if it is going to be relevant to international politics, economics, law, and geopolitical relations in this decade and the next.

My only complaint about the book is the title. Erased suggests that the book will be about the act of erasing the contributions of women IR scholars to the development of, and key debates within, British IR. Owens provides consistent and varied evidence of that. However, Erased should not be read as an exposé of patriarchy within British IR. While documenting that, the lasting impact of the book—and the reason that I started recommending it to others even before I was done reading—is that it recovers the ideas of these women and reconstructs the debates in which they were engaged. Through these debates, the women of British IR contributed to building the field across a range of institutions and to shaping broader public debates about the role of Britain in an era of declining imperial power and subsequently declining economic power.

In showing the ideas that were erased, the book also reveals the practices of erasure. Drawing primarily on archival sources—many of which are privately held (Agnes Headlam-Morley’s were held by her father) or obscured (Lucie Zimmern’s, subsumed and uncatalogued with her husband’s)—Owens constructs an empirical record that demonstrates the women’s ideas, their public engagements, and their distinctive contributions. This detailed archival work also maps the varied practices by which individual women’s intellectual contributions to the field were erased (or appropriated) by specific men, acting at specific times with specific interests. The tools of erasure varied by institution and man, but the racism and sexism in the men and their institutions were consistent epistemic enablers of their behavior. These mechanisms of silencing and subordination will not be surprising to feminist historians.

By contrast, the intellectual contributions “erased” from the disciplinary field of IR create many “ah ha” moments. Taken together, these 12 women’s contributions reveal “intellectual paths taken and not taken” (and buried) (p. 13). While they had varied political orientations, they considered Britain’s role in an era of resistance to decolonization and defense of imperialism. For example, Eileen Power uses “the transition from a medieval pluriverse of empires to a world of national–imperial states” (p. 17) and comparative analysis to explain the differing approaches of China and Japan in their engagement with the emerging world order of the twentieth century. The discussion of Merze Tate intersects with the importance of the Black Atlantic of IR, the record of which is embedded in the intellectual work of IR scholars at Howard University.

Readers will be compelled to enrich their bibliographies and syllabi with readings from these brilliant women intellectuals. Some will be inspired to pick up some of the many promising threads revealed in Owens’s rich exposition of their lived scholarship. There are many. From the perspective of the historical moment of July 2025, one of the most pressing threads appears to be the need to recover these earlier methodological and theoretical resources for an engagement with racism and empire. Without these tools—and following the decades of underdeveloped or marginalized scholarship on these topics—IR lacks what it needs to be relevant to the international crises of this decade.

Fortunately, for those who find the disciplinary and methodological diversity of IR, a source of strength, some journals (including the International Feminist Journal of Politics) have paid attention to race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, colonial legacy, neo-imperialism, and the methodological tools required for revealing and interrogating these phenomena. Likewise, Erased and the recent scholarship cited in the very long endnote 20 in the Introduction reveals that by working from the margins, in the archives, and with the epistemic possibilities laid bare through historical contextualism, the field has the resources it needs to revitalize the curiosity and ambition that would render the field of international relations relevant to the international crises of our present moment.