MMB Reading Group – ‘Drawing the Global Colour Line’ by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds

*** Please note this event has been rescheduled to 30th June***

This month the MMB Reading Group discusses Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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 principal 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 underpinned 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.

‘This exceptionally ambitious and important book confirms and gives fresh meaning to W. E. B. DuBois’s famous declaration that the problem of the twentieth century was the “problem of the colour line”. By tracing the efforts by ruling elites in the United States, Australia, and other Anglo settler states in the early twentieth century to forge self-proclaimed “white men’s countries” by means of racial segregation and immigration restrictions, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds demonstrate that their assertions of “whiteness” were a transnational phenomenon, responding to the threats that migrant labor, colonial nationalism, and other forces seemed to pose to the established order. Their rich and compellingly written work provides us with a model of how to write history that transcends the nation, and it speaks to issues that remain relevant today.’

Dane Kennedy – Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs, Department of History, George Washington University.

A review of Drawing the Global Colour Line by Antoinette Burton can be found here.

If you would like to join the discussion for this reading group meeting, please register here.