Barbara Ward’s vision

She was among the first to argue that prosperity, equality and the protection of nature are inseparable planetary goals

by Or Rosenboim  BIO

Barbara Ward at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. Courtesy UN Photo

is associate professor of history at the University of Bologna in Italy. She is the author of The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950 (2017) and Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family, and Belonging (2024).

In 1957, the economist and journalist Barbara Ward gave the first of the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures at the University College of Ghana. Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah led the British colony of the Gold Coast towards self-government, he invited Ward to address the independent country’s first cohort of students. Ward was well acquainted with the local political landscape because she had spent the previous four years living in the Gold Coast, witnessing its political transformation. As the world’s eyes were set on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence from European rule, Ward was determined to provide her audience with the knowledge needed to govern their newly founded country.

Her lectures, titled Five Ideas that Change the World, developed a world-historical narrative of the supposed human progress from nationalism to colonialism, industrialism, communism, and finally to internationalism, the highest point of political order.

Ghana’s peaceful democratic transition showed that African colonies were ready to govern themselves, weakening European arguments about the need for prolonged imperial guidance. The country soon became a model for new African statehood based on postcolonial sovereignty, inspiring other colonies on the continent to join the decolonisation process, which culminated in the ‘Year of Africa’ in 1960. The charismatic Nkrumah, who ruled Ghana from 1957 to 1966, became an international player in Cold War diplomacy by promoting pan-Africanist visions of post-imperial unity. He wanted to show the world that Africans were no longer imperial subjects but important and influential members of the global political community. While Nkrumah was a vociferous opponent of colonialism, Ward uncritically appreciated the civilisational and technical legacies of empire. Yet in her lectures, she supported Nkrumah’s international political aspirations by suggesting that economic development, international cooperation, and even world peace were interrelated problems that warranted a planetary solution.

Barbara Ward was a remarkable thinker, a visionary who imagined a ‘planetary’ political, economic and environmental justice based on both material and spiritual principles. She was an unusual figure in the Cold War political sphere, a charismatic public intellectual who advised world leaders and the United Nations at a time when women’s voices were often marginalised. She was among the first thinkers to argue that human prosperity, environmental sustainability and global justice were inseparable political questions. Her distinctive vision of planetary politics, grounded in ecological interdependence, moral responsibility and global cooperation, still offers insights into some of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.

Ward’s diagnosis of Ghana’s predicament emerged from an intellectual trajectory that predated decolonisation itself. She was born in 1914 to a British Quaker-Catholic family that put a strong emphasis on education, encouraging her to attend a French lycée in Paris and later Somerville College, Oxford, where she was among the first women to graduate in politics, philosophy and economics in 1935. She continued to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in Catholic circles, until 1939, when she launched her journalistic career as a contributor to The Economist on foreign affairs.

‘For 30 years, it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in Barbara Ward’

During the war, Ward joined the Sword of the Spirit, then a British Catholic organisation that encouraged believers to support the democratic battle against totalitarianism. This experience, as well as her friendship with Arnold J Toynbee, Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain, persuaded her of the importance of religion – and especially Christianity – as the moral foundation of political and economic internationalism. Ward drew inspiration less from the doctrinal authority of the Catholic Church (which she frequently criticised as rigid and conservative) than from her own universalist interpretation of Christianity, which she regarded as a source of moral principles applicable to all humanity. Well beyond a personal creed, Ward’s Catholicism reflects a fundamental aspect of her political thought.

After the Second World War, Ward was interested in the global challenges of economic growth and reconstruction. She travelled extensively in the United States, India, Europe and Africa, where in 1946 she prepared a study of demography and migration in British Togoland. In 1950, she married the Australian civil servant Robert Jackson, and three years later the couple relocated to the Gold Coast, where Jackson was appointed chairman of the preparatory commission of the Volta Dam, one of the continent’s major economic-development projects.

Ward’s bestselling books and prestigious public lectures made her a well-known figure, and she developed a public profile as a political commentator and advisor to world leaders, including Nkrumah, Adlai Stevenson, John F Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Lyndon B Johnson. By the late 1950s, she divided her time between Harvard, where she held a visiting professorship, and Ghana, where she continued to promote the Volta Dam project, sharing Nkrumah’s hope that it might foster Ghana’s economic independence. Later, she was appointed to a prestigious professorship in development economics at Columbia University in New York, and in the 1970s she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a life peer. Upon her death in 1981, The Washington Post acknowledged her influence by stating that: ‘For 30 years, it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in........

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