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

This book studies the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia.

Marilyn Lake (Author), Henry Reynolds (Author)

9780521707527, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 January 2008

382 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.622 kg

'Drawing the Global Colour Line forces us to reconceptualize the discursive and institutional development of whiteness as simultaneously nationally grounded and globally mobile. Scholars striving to extend the study of the geographies of empire, race, and whiteness, in particular, should find considerable inspiration in the approach marshaled so successfully herein.' H-HistGeog

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 studies 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], History of ideas [JFCX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], General & world history [HBG]