Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality

by Marilyn Lake , Henry Reynolds

• ISBN13: 9780521707527
• ISBN10: 0521707528
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-02-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In 1900 W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the colour line would be the key problem of the twentieth-century and he later identified one of its key dynamics: the new religion of whiteness that was sweeping the world. Whereas most historians have confined their studies of race-relations to a national framework, this book offers a pioneering study of the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century these countries worked in solidarity to exclude those they defined as not-white, actions that provoked a long international struggle for racial equality. Their findings make clear the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of both race and human rights.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Modern mobilities
The coming man: Chinese migration to the goldfields	p. 15
Discursive frameworks
The American Commonwealth and the 'negro problem'	p. 49
'The day will come': Charles Pearson's disturbing prophecy	p. 75
Theodore Roosevelt's re-assertion of racial vigour	p. 95
Imperial brotherhood or white? Gandhi in South Africa	p. 114
Transnational solidarities
White Australia points the way	p. 137
Defending the Pacific Slope	p. 166
White ties across the ocean: the Pacific tour of the US fleet	p. 190
The Union of South Africa: white men reconcile	p. 210
Challenge and consolidation
International conferences: cosmopolitan amity or racial enmity?	p. 241
Japanese alienation and imperial ambition	p. 263
Racial equality? The Paris Peace Conference, 1919	p. 284
Immigration restriction in the 1920s: 'segregation on a large scale'	p. 310
Towards universal human rights
Individual rights without distinction	p. 335
Index	p. 357
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