Dreamworlds of Race

Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America

Duncan Bell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691235110, 9780691194011
• eBook ISBN: 9780691208671
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

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.

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Introduction

DREAMWORLDS OF RACE

Axes of the Angloworld

The late nineteenth century was a time of social dreaming in Britain and the United States. Thousands of novels, songs, poems, and sermons flowed from printing presses, reshaping the sense of the possible. Speculative fiction proselytizing concrete programs for remaking the world jostled with political commentary articulating fantastical visions of the future. New conceptions of society, of cultural life, and of humanity itself proliferated.¹ Political imaginaries as well as literary genres were refashioned. The implications of emerging scientific knowledge and innovative technologies stood at the heart of this intellectual ferment.

The burst of utopianism at once reflected and helped to constitute debates over the future of global order. It found powerful expression in dreams of imperial and racial union. Encompassing the British settler empire and the United States, the Angloworld was a popular source and subject of utopian desire. Coalescing during the early nineteenth century, by the late Victorian age it formed a “politically divided but culturally and economically united intercontinental system.”² The ambition to forge political unity animated various groups during the closing decades of the century. Imagining a vast Angloworld political community, these efforts were driven by a fissile mix of anxiety and hope—anxiety that unless action was taken, and taken soon, the Angloworld would fragment, fatally undermining its transformative potential and condemning the British Empire to inevitable decline; hope, that the resulting combination would dominate and lead humanity. Though emanating principally from Britain, Angloworld advocacy was at once transatlantic and transcolonial in scope, drawing contributors from all the lands its proponents aimed to amalgamate. It assumed two principal forms. One focused on the consolidation of Britain and its remaining settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and (more ambivalently) southern Africa. Flowering in the 1880s, and echoing through the twentieth century and into the present, this debate unfolded under the sign of “imperial federation.”³ The other main axis focused on relations between Britain and the United States. This was the discourse of Anglo-America. These distinct but overlapping projects were often seen as compatible, although there was much disagreement over which should be prioritized and how they might be coordinated. They could also conflict. Some of the leading acolytes of Anglo-America recommended the dissolution of the British Empire, and showed little interest in the claims of the remaining settler colonies, while many imperial federalists regarded the United States as a threat to British primacy.

This book explores some of the most ambitious ideas about the unification of Anglo-America, concentrating on the years between 1880 and the First World War. During that tumultuous period, numerous members of the intellectual elite on both sides of the Atlantic—scholars, journalists, novelists, preachers, and politicians—encouraged closer cooperation, even political integration, between the two powers. Such arguments fused hard-headed geopolitical and economic reasoning with bombastic declarations about racial destiny, grounded in a fervent belief in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” or “English-speaking peoples.” They were often framed in utopian terms: yoking together Britain and the United States would inaugurate an era of perpetual peace and global justice. Or so it was maintained. But while Anglo-American unionists concurred about the world-historical significance of the race, they diverged significantly over the constitutional form the emergent community should assume, the best political strategies to pursue, the value of imperialism, and the ultimate ends of union. The object of competing claims and fantasies, the racial dreamworld was fractured, contested, and unstable.

Dreamworlds of Race can be read both as a stand-alone monograph and as the third volume of a loose trilogy dedicated to analyzing the metropolitan settler imaginary. In The Idea of Greater Britain, I dissected the discourse of imperial federation.⁴ Reordering the World expanded my account of imperial ideology, stressing the intricate entanglement of liberal political thought and settler colonialism. Dreamworlds of Race turns to the other main axis of Angloworld debate. Diplomatic and political historians have written extensively about the “rapprochement” between Britain and the United States, often divining in it the roots of the “special relationship” that did so much to shape twentieth-century geopolitics.⁵ Cultural historians and literary scholars have probed the transatlantic intellectual worlds of the fin de siècle, mapping flows of people, images, and texts, as well as the lines of influence connecting writers and artists on either side of the ocean.⁶ An impressive body of writing has tracked the wide circulation of ideas about domestic social and political reform.⁷ Scholars of International Relations return incessantly to the era, attempting to explain the dynamics of “hegemonic transition,” as one great power relinquished predominance to another without sparking war between them.⁸ Work on the political thought of Anglo-America is rarer. Ideas of inter-imperial cooperation have drawn some attention, as has the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism and the recurrent use of British exemplars by American imperialists.⁹ Yet the intellectual currents, concerns, and frameworks that underpinned and structured arguments for union remain poorly understood. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of the unification debate or pinpoint its impact on specific government policies or decisions. Rather I seek to analyze the boldest arguments about Anglo-America, the dreams that motivated and shaped them, and the discourses in which they were embedded, with the intention of illuminating a pivotal moment in both the intellectual history of world order and the development of modern utopian thought. In particular, I want to suggest that they can be read productively as expressing a potent form of racial utopianism.

Four extraordinary individuals stand at the center of the book: Andrew Carnegie, Cecil J. Rhodes, W. T. Stead, and H. G. Wells. I focus on this quartet because they were the most high-profile and influential advocates of Anglo-American integration. Moreover, they constituted a loose network, bound to varying degrees by personal ties, professional connections, and a shared belief in racial destiny. One of the richest men in the world, Carnegie promoted the “reunion” of Britain and the United States tirelessly for over three decades, believing that the “English-speaking peoples,” if combined politically, could serve as the engine of global industrial progress. Rhodes was the most prominent imperialist of the age, a man at once vilified as a megalomaniacal jingo and celebrated as a world-making colossus. Fulminating against the incompetence of the late eighteenth-century British statesmen who had driven the United States from the imperial embrace, he dreamt of a future Anglo-Saxon polity that adopted the American constitution as a model. Wells was renowned for both his speculative fiction and social prophecy. He predicted that Britain and the United States would fuse together during the twentieth century, creating a “New Republic” that would dominate an unruly planet and lay the foundations of a universal world-state. The American political scientist and editor Albert Shaw anointed Stead “the man who above all others proclaimed the gospel of a world redeemed through the prevailing influence of the English-speaking race.”¹⁰ The most famous journalist in the British Empire, as well as a best-selling author in the United States, he believed that providence would deliver “one vast federated unity,” an “English-speaking United States of the World,” to redeem humanity.¹¹ A friend and collaborator of both Rhodes and Carnegie, and a man who helped to launch Wells on his astonishing literary career, Stead utilized his editorial talents to spread the gospel of racial destiny through the media networks of the Angloworld. All four of them argued that Anglo-American union would inaugurate an era of perpetual peace. In the following chapters, they are joined by, and put into dialogue with, a large cast drawn from the intellectual and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

To capture the contours of the discourse, I mix fine-grained analysis of individual writers with more expansive discussions of themes and concepts. The former allows me to delve into the intellectual development and commitments of some of the key unionists, tracing the evolution of their thinking, its subtleties, confusions, targets, and sources. The latter allows me to locate unionist arguments in wider patterns of social and political thought, identifying the genealogy of some of the core ideas and the ways that the champions of Anglo-America intervened in and reshaped political debate. The first half of Dreamworlds of Race anatomizes the visions of Carnegie, Stead, Rhodes, and Wells. In chapter 2, I examine Carnegie’s shifting ideas about union from the 1880s until the outbreak of war in 1914, reading them in the context of debates about war and peace, international law and empire, theology and race. Chapter 3 turns to Stead and Rhodes. I analyze the theological basis of Stead’s account of the “English-speaking peop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Dreamworlds of Race
• 2. The Dreamer of Dreams: Andrew Carnegie and the Reunion of the Race
• 3. Americanizing the World: W. T. Stead and Cecil J. Rhodes
• 4. Artists in Reality: H. G. Wells and the New Republic
• 5. Machine Dreams: The Angloworld as Science Fiction
• 6. Beyond the Sovereign State: Isopolitan Citizenship and Race Patriotism
• 7. A Messenger of Peace to the World: Racial Utopianism and the Abolition of War
• 8. Conclusion: Unveiling the Sphinx
• Bibliography
• Index