Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Critical Perspectives on Empire)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521707528 ISBN 13: 9780521707527

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

In 1900 W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the colour line would be the key problem of the twentieth-century and he later identified one of its key dynamics: the new religion of whiteness that was sweeping the world. Whereas most historians have confined their studies of race-relations to a national framework, this book studies the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century these countries worked in solidarity to exclude those they defined as not-white, actions that provoked a long international struggle for racial equality. Their findings make clear the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of both race and human rights.

Book Description:

This book studies the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. It reveals the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of race and human rights.

About the Author:

Marilyn Lake is Professor at the School of Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her publications include Creating a Nation (with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, 1994), Getting Equal: The History of Feminism in Australia (1999) and, as editor, Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (with Patricia Grimshaw and Katie Holmes, 2001).