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"Between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War, many prominent thinkers in Britain and the United States elaborated a vision for the unification of the English-speaking world into a single political entity. The basis for this utopian thinking was a shared assumption about the racial and cultural exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This book by Duncan Bell is the first study of the wide range of figures - prominent scholars, journalists, novelists, politicians and businessmen - who pushed for closer co-operation and integration between the two transatlantic anglophone powers and even for the eventual creation of an 'Angloworld' which would extend to the British settler colonies in North America and the Pacific. Such ideas were given added impetus by geopolitical crises, including the Venezuela boundary disputes of the mid-1890s and the imperial wars in South Africa and the Philippines. The author takes up the ideas of dozens of thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, from the celebrated to the obscure, though central to the book is a quartet of noteworthy figures: Andrew Carnegie, W.T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H.G. Wells. Campaigning groups were established; transatlantic networks were formed; articles, pamphlets, books and speeches were written and disseminated - all with the aim of emphasising unity. Proposals for institutionalising transatlantic links ranged from the modest to the extraordinarily bold. The former included strengthening defence co-operation, deepening economic connections, and co-ordinating imperial strategy, while the latter encompassed plans for the creation of novel forms of political community, even a single transatlantic state. And much of the thinking was underpinned by ideas about race and a shared Anglo-Saxon cultural inheritance. Although the popularity of this vision began to wane in the mid-Edwardian era, versions of it reverberated through the twentieth century, and echo now into the present"--! Provided by publisher
About the author
Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. He is the author of Reordering the World and The Idea of Greater Britain (both Princeton).
Summary
How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States
Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order.
Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire.
Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.
Additional text
"It would be a fool’s errand to try to convey the book’s richness and detail.—Inder S. Marwah, Review of Politics"
