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  • Mobility, Masculinity and Color in Transnational History
  • Fiona Paisley (bio)
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. x + 371 pp. ISBN 0-521-88118-8 (cl); 0-521-70752-8 (pb).
Cassandra Pybus . Black Founders: The Unknown History of Australia's First Black Settlers. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. x + 222 pp. ISBN 0-86840-849-2 (pb).
Ravi de Costa . A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. xiii + 239 pp. ISBN 0-86840-954-5 (pb).

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds open their transnational history about white men's countries and the drawing of a global color line with the prophetic words of the renowned African American historian and commentator W.E.B. DuBois. Describing in 1903 the emergence of a virulent politics of whiteness, DuBois wrote of a coming century marked by hostile white reaction to the call for race equality then gathering apace around the world. He was among the very first, the authors note, to recognize within the longer history of post-Enlightenment colour consciousness "a new, modern, phenomenon" (2).

In pursuing DuBois's vision of the embattled White Man, Lake and Reynolds uncover a transnational network of political leaders and commentators in and across Australasia, the United States, South Africa, and Canada. Defending the virtue of a global white brotherhood, these men aimed to remedy what they saw as the flawed nature of the multiracial nation and to limit the spread of an anticolonial politics proclaiming race equality. Through their study of this brotherhood and its influence on twentieth-century history, the authors argue persuasively that racial inequality cannot be viewed as anachronistic to the rise of modern nationalism, but central to its flourishing.

In their extraordinarily comprehensive and erudite book, Lake and Reynolds trace the circulation of influential texts, politics, and policies about whiteness between the United States, Britain, and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth. Reading across official records and private [End Page 188] papers, and between policies and interpersonal exchanges, they people a landscape of whiteness politics through the lives and views of its key male protagonists. During these decades white commentators and politicians persuaded of the flawed nature of the multiracial nation were enthusiastic advocates of immigration restriction, citing the future of modern democracy as their cause, while Black intellectuals such as DuBois and M.K. Gandhi argued for modernity on quite different grounds.

Interested not only in the racial ideology of the global color line but also in the views of its critics, masculinity and mobility feature in this study of the dynamic and compelling history of modernity on a global scale. Access to the right of mobility ascribed to male citizens in the global community constituted one arena in which contestation over the future of modern democracy was fought. Lake and Reynolds point out that in the context of the rise of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modern nation-state "modernity meant mobility" (23). In global terms, modernity was imagined in no small part as a right to freedom of movement enjoyed by the white nations and their citizens. Although existing international doctrines of freedom of movement provided a framework whereby global mobility might be managed equitably and peaceably, the first decades of the modern century were marked instead by the increasing restriction of modern forms of movement. Thus the unfettered mobility of nationals from Japan and China, countries seeking equal status on the world stage and for their citizens in other nations, was rejected on the grounds that racially unified (white) nation-states were the precondition of (world) democracy. But, as Lake and Reynolds bring to our attention, such restrictions and their implications for race equality did not go unopposed. For instance, Lowe Kong Meng, a Chinese resident of Australia, protested the restriction of Chinese migration to the Victorian gold fields in the 1850s. As the authors point out, transnational interconnections between white men's countries meant the Australian case came to provide a useful precedent for the resolution of similar contestations in California.

The circulation...

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