Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transatlantic thinkers promoted the unification of Britain and the United States, envisioning a powerful "Anglo-Saxon" empire that would bring peace and justice to the world. Dreamworlds of Race explores this moment in intellectual history, focusing on four figures who reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest for global supremacy. The book argues that unionists on both sides of the Atlantic had competing claims and fantasies about race, imperialism, political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 488 pages
Publication date: 07 June 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, a transatlantic network of prominent individuals advocated for the unification of Britain and the United States. They envisioned a final consolidation of the Angloworld, a union that would bring peace and justice to the earth. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the "Anglo-Saxons" with extraordinary power, seeing them as a people destined to shape the twentieth century. While some had more modest visions, they all believed that the union of these two great powers was inevitable.

Dreamworlds of Race delves into 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 explores how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest for global supremacy. However, 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. Bell examines unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, juxtaposing them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. By tracing the ways in which intellectual elites promoted this ambitious project, Dreamworlds of Race sheds light on the complex and often contradictory visions of the future that shaped the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691235110