'[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history.
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers.
A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told.' Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
Table Of Contents
Introduction; Part I. Modern Mobilities:
1. The coming man: Chinese migration to the Goldfields;
Part II. Discursive Frameworks:
2. James Bryce's America and the negro problem;
3. Charles Pearson's prophecy: 'The day will come';
4. Theodore Roosevelt: re-asserting racial vigour;
5. Imperial brotherhood or white: Gandhi in South Africa;
Part III. Transnational Solidarities:
6. White Australia points the way;
7. Defending the Pacific slope;
8. White ties across the ocean: the Pacific Tour of the US Fleet;
9. The Union of South Africa: white men reconcile;
Part IV. Challenge and Consolidation:
10. International conferences: enmity and amity;
11. Japanese alienation and imperial ambition;
12. Racial equality? Paris Peace Conference, 1919;
13. 'Segregation on a Large Scale': immigration restriction, 1920s;
Part V. Towards Universal Human Rights:
14. Rights without distinction.
'Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three exceptional nuggets will be left. It’s fair to say that I have a privileged perspective.' (Introduction)
'Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three exceptional nuggets will be left. It’s fair to say that I have a privileged perspective.' (Introduction)