The Downstairs of Diplomacy: A Transnational History of Servants’ Roles in Foreign Relations (c. 1935–1965)

Although scholars agree that diplomacy has long been a highly racialized and classed as well as gendered institution, intersectional analyses of diplomatic hierarchies are rare. This project aims to analyse classed, racialized, and gendered hierarchies in diplomacy by highlighting changes and continuities in the practical and symbolic roles of embassy household staff (at the time known as servants) between 1935 and 1965. In that period, class, gender, and race hierarchies engaged the agency and subjectivities of people at all levels at the same time that global power shifted with the Depression, war, the Holocaust, decolonisation, and the Cold War. Servants’ tangible omnipresence in diplomatic relations offers a unique opportunity to anchor a conceptual analysis of diplomatic hierarchies at the macro level in concrete hierarchies at the micro level. The research question is designed to integrate analyses of high politics with a history from below: How were racialized, classed and gendered hierarchies within the diplomatic household connected to the practices of diplomatic relations and to international status?

The project draws on theoretical perspectives from feminist International Relations, intersectionality studies, the history of everyday life, and research on the mechanisms of personal trust and reliance. From feminist IR, I draw inspiration in particular from analyses of the symbolic use of bodies and the role of norms in international hierarchies. (Åse 2016, Towns 2010) Feminist studies overlap with intersectional approaches rooted in critical race theory. Race as a global idea emerged parallel to the age of empire and nation-building and is an important analytical concept for studying domestic and transnational hierarchies in the period of contested decolonisation. Moreover, an intersectional approach gives me the framework to consider not only the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race and gender but also of class and nation. Besides analysing how “dynamics of difference and sameness” (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall 2013, p. 787) influenced servants’ possibilities for employment in the transnational community of diplomats and their position within the household, those dynamics will make a useful prism through which to view servants’ representative functions and connection to international hierarchies.

Through the focus on subalterns in an elite setting, the study applies a history-from-below perspective on a topic – diplomacy – that is traditionally associated with high politics par excellence. It takes big questions about the structures and ideas that shaped the post-war world and international hierarchies down to earth by studying their connection to the practical micro level, bringing the insights from studies of how low-wage labour has underpinned the whole system of international (economic) relations (à la Cynthia Enloe) into the individual diplomat’s salon and day-to-day activities. The history of everyday life can mean many things. I use the concept to indicate that I study people who are ordinary (in the sense not exceptional in their context) and not individually powerful – “cogs in the machine”, as Alf Lüdtke (1995) puts it.

Because the cogs studied here were part of the machine of diplomacy, and because most diplomats have left behind far more written material than servants, there is a risk of giving the employers an interpretative privilege. However, a critical reading of inherently subjective accounts reveals not only the authors’ interpretations but the socially produced ideological system in which those interpretations were formed. (Smith & Watson 2010) Theories of trust and reliance in social relations (as opposed to institutional trust) are used when examining them. By not speaking of trust in general, but rather posing the question “who could be trusted/relied upon to do what?”, trust becomes a tool for applying an intersectional framework as it makes it possible to identify perceptions of what persons – bodies – were considered suitable for what kind of work and position. (Erlandsson & Nauman 2019; Erlandsson 2022)

Four aims have been formulated to answer the overarching research question. Coupled with more detailed methodological questions, they guide the research. These aims are

1. to map the selection criteria and composition of diplomats’ domestic staff. How did diplomatic households select their staff? What gendered, racial, and national considerations came into play and why?
2. to highlight how servants’ backgrounds and skills influenced everyday diplomatic work. Servants themselves often came from foreign lands or were of a different ethnicity from their employers. Some of them took advantage of older stereotypes about skills being vested in certain nationalities (like French cooking) or races (like the belief of many of the American Washington political elite that African-Americans from the South had a unique talent for serving whites). What sorts of networks did these servants utilize to obtain their positions, and how did they see their own role?
3. to analyse the performative ideals these households were striving for. How did the diplomatic household reflect the (imagined) nation it represented, and what attempts were made to embody or perform a specific relationship to that nation’s present or former colonies or national history? How did the choice and management of multi-ethnic servants constitute a form of symbolic capital?
4. to foreground a) individual servants’ relations to individual diplomats, b) relations among servants, and c) relations between the servant corps and the diplomatic corps as a whole. How did personal and political relations and hierarchies intersect?

The connected aims add up to a picture of servants’ place in and influence, both direct and indirect, on diplomatic relations and perceptions at a critical juncture in international history.

Empirically, various source materials are analysed, from salary lists and diary notes to newspapers, photographs, and literature, using microhistory methods to ask “large questions in small places”. (Joyner 1999) Connecting to a macro history of dominant systemic patterns, I focus on Western diplomatic culture because of its disproportionate influence on international relations in the period studied. Geographically, the study centres on London and Washington, D.C., as the main Western diplomatic hubs of the period before and after World War II, respectively. The micro-historical approach is combined with a comparative method, where the focus is on these two places and on the diplomatic representation of four states, chosen for their mixture of similarities and differences to enable a certain degree of generalisation. I compare

1. the attitudes towards diplomatic household staff and staff conditions in London before and during World War II and in Washington, D.C., during the post-war period, and
2. the households of Swedish, Dutch, British and American missions. The similar and different positions of these four states before and after the war make it possible to identify links between personnel and, among other things, state size, (former) neutrality and (changing) colonial status.