Drawing the Global Colour Line

White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds

'This book by two of Australia's most respected historians is a tour de force. . .'
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

Awards

Winner 2008 Queensland Premier's Literary Award in the History Book category
Winner 2009 Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the History of Australia or New Zealand.

Opinion

'[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers. A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told.'
Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

'A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told.'
Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

About this Title

Whoever had created Australia, white men were certain that 'this land of promise' belonged to them . . .

At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to the mobilisation and mobility of colonial and coloured peoples around the world, self-styled 'white men's countries' in South Africa, North America and Australasia worked in solidarity to exclude those peoples they defined as not-white--including Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Pacific Islanders. Their policies provoked in turn a long international struggle for racial equality.

Through a rich cast of characters that includes Alfred Deakin, WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Lowe Kong Meng, Tokutomi Soho, Jan Smuts and Theodore Roosevelt, leading Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell a gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness. The legacy of the White Australia policy still cases a shadow over relations with the peoples of Africa and Asia, but campaigns for racial equality have created new possibilities for a more just future.

Remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative, Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century.

'By reinterpreting race, this critically important study reorients our understanding of the whole story of the twentieth century.' --David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part 1 Modern mobilities
Part 2 Discursive frameworks
Part 3 Transnational solidarities
Part 4 Challenge and consolidation
Part 5 Towards universal human rights

Index

About the Author

Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. His previous publications include The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Why Weren't We Told? (2000) and The Law of the Land (2003).

Marilyn Lake holds a Personal Chair in the School of Historical and European Studies at LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Her publications include Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (1999), Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (2002) and, as co-editor, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (with Ann Curthoys, 2006).