Before BISA: the British coordinating committee for international studies, S.H. Bailey, and the Bailey conferences

The story of how International Relations in Britain was organised before the setting up of BISA in 1975 has been largely forgotten. This paper recovers that history and shows that it links directly back to the interwar years, when the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies was set up as part of the League of Nations-linked International Studies Conferences. S.H. Bailey, a long-forgotten junior scholar at the LSE, almost single-handedly pioneered what was after 1945 to become the norm of national academic associations and conferences for IR.