Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (review)

In this volume, two eminent Australian historians take an exciting new look at the late nineteenth-century growth of what they call the “colour line” that produced “white men’s countries” throughout the world. This is not a conventional history of the growth of racial thought. Rather, Lake and Reynolds follow the interwoven and interconnected strands of immigration restriction and “Anglo-Saxon”-ism as they spread from the gold fields of 1850s Australia to the post-Reconstruction United States, 1890s Natal, Mohandas K. Gandhi’s South Africa, and the “Pacific Slope” from British Columbia to California, before returning to a defiantly exclusionist Australia. It is rare to see a work that so deftly ties together this transnational racial discourse, especially one that places not Britain or the United States but Australia at the center of this “global” narrative. For Lake and Reynolds, a “white” Australia “pointed the way” to new “race solidarities,” in which all peoples were forced into a “dichotomy of white and not-white,” and of those fit and those not fit for self-rule (9, 237). Among the casualties of this fierce Australian stance, as they point out, were the long-time British commitment to unhindered migration throughout the Empire and, in 1919, an endeavor to insert a racial equality clause into the League of Nations covenant.

Lake and Reynolds hinge much of their argument on what they see as Charles Pearson’s “disturbing prophecy” in National Life and Character: A Forecast (New York, 1893) (75). Written in Australia, Pearson’s book not only called into question the permanence of Anglo-Saxon dominance in the face of a resurgent Asia; it also precipitated an ever-more insistent determination to secure territory for the white race. Lake and Reynolds recount many familiar episodes in the growth of late nineteenth-century racism, among them Gandhi’s negotiations in South Africa and President Theodore Roosevelt’s expansionist enthusiasms. Much, however, is fresh and original. Most stimulating is the careful analysis of the circumstances that led to the spread of literacy tests from the United States, where they were used to deter blacks from voting, to the British settler colonies, where they were employed to circumvent imperial restrictions on racially discriminatory immigration legislation.

The notion of “White Men’s Countries” is not the same as that of Rudyard Kipling’s famous “White Man’s Burden.” Lake and Reynolds make no attempt to situate the exclusionary racism that they discuss in the larger discourse of racial difference. These two contemporaneous racial ideologies—the one exclusionist and the other potentially assimilationist—are not identical, but since they are connected, they deserve to be considered together. Furthermore, Lake and Reynolds only ambivalently acknowledge the sometimes partial acceptance of the “whiteness” strategy even in settler colonies; in New Zealand, for instance, the Maori possessed a limited, but still recognized, place in the state.

An exceptional study that could find a place even in the classroom, Drawing the Global Colour Line should command attention from historians, sociologists, and political scientists alike.