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strategy and the sir michael howard
center for the history of war
duncan bell is professor of political
thought and international relations
at the university of cambridge his
research has been on the history of
modern political thought
and contemporary international political
theory
he is an incredibly prolific writer and
has published widely on questions of
empire race and injustice in political
theory
and international relations on
technology
and politics on political aesthetics
particularly with a focus on
architecture and speculative literature
talk is on his latest book or perhaps
more correctly
on one of his latest books as i
mentioned before dreamworks a phrase
published by princeton university press
just a few months
earlier in 2020
also last year duncan co-edited a book
on political theory and architecture
with bernardo zaka published by
bloomsbury
as duncan notes in the introduction to
the book
dreamworlds of race can be read as a
self-standing monograph
as well as the third book in a series on
the british empire
the previous two books were also
published by princeton university press
so the first one the idea of greater
britain
empire and the future of world order um
1860 to 900 and the second one
published um and done much earlier in
2019
reordering the world essays on
liberalism and empire
are both exploring imperial ideology and
the entanglements between liberal
political thought
and settler colonialism dreamworlds of
race tells the story of what duncan
calls
anglo utopia or the racial dream of
anglo-american union
at the end of the 19th century
it is also i would say a book that
advances conceptual engagements with
race and empire
for instance by proposing to understand
race as a biocultural assemblage
but also um by proposing to
again understand the technologization of
race
but you leave ample time to discuss
various aspects of the book
without further ado i would like to turn
to um
duncan who will speak for maybe 25 to 30
minutes
and then you will have the option of
writing your questions
in the question in the q a text box
and then we'll take the questions in
turn
but for the bowman for the time being
duncan the virtual floor i guess
is yours and welcome again
thank you very much uh claudia so thanks
for the kind invitation
um thanks for uh to claudia for uh
agreeing to to chair i did my
undergraduate degree in war studies
in the late 1990s so it's great to be
back even if only virtually
my talk today is going to be in two
parts uh since i'm assuming that
the vast majority of you probably all of
you haven't read the book i'll start
with a
brief outline of some of its main
arguments and themes
and then in the second part of the talk
i'll dig a bit deeper
into one of the chapters and since this
is a department of war studies i'll
focus on the chapter that addresses
arguments about war race and perpetual
peace
and then after that i look forward to
answering some of your questions
so dream worlds of race is a work of
intellectual history
understood in a broad sense it explores
a wide range of arguments
a discourse about visions of
anglo-american unification or
integration
at the turn of the 20th century
between roughly 1880 and 1914
a substantial number of thinkers and
political actors on both sides of the
atlantic
pushed for the union of britain in the
united states
with the aim of securing their joint
geopolitical domination and leadership
such projects assumed various forms
from loose inter-imperial cooperation
through alliances of one kind or another
to full political integration including
the creation of a new
federal or confederal state
nearly all such projects were grounded
in claims about the racial identity
of anglo-america this was usually
characterized
as anglo-saxon or english speaking
either way it was an expression of white
supremacism
it was claimed that the race needed to
be unified politically
to achieve its destiny to order the
world
now in an earlier book the claudia
mentioned the idea of greater britain i
explored projects for unifying britain
and its settler colonies
under the the label at the time imperial
federation
this book complements that analysis by
examining what i might think or
what i think of as the second axis of
the anglo world
so whereas that book looked at britain
and settler colonies
this book looked principally at britain
and the united states
there were some overlaps in these
projects some people supported both
simultaneously as it were
but there are also some notable
differences
one of the core arguments i make in the
book is that many of the visions of
anglo-world unity
can be seen as expressions of utopian
desire
indeed i call them instances of racial
utopianism
the core claim here was that unifying
the race
could create perpetual peace and some
form of global justice
so i set a high bar for what counts as
utopia here
and i suggest that this discourse or
many of the people in it pass that ball
this isn't a kind of set of global
reforms
it's the fundamental transformation of
an aspect of social reality the
abolition
of warfare once and for all
i chose the title of the book dreamworld
to refer to the common references
to social dreaming used by many
anglo-unionists at the time
and also because that notion is quite uh
common in utopian studies
at the field many of my protagonists
were well aware of the utopian character
of their project
but they didn't regard utopia as a
synonym for unrealistic
or impossible rather they thought that
racial utopia could be achieved
through concerted political action
and i suggest that to understand the
form of an affective force of such
claims
it's necessary to read them as an
integral part of the burst of utopian
thinking
proliferating on both sides of the
atlantic at the time
so this was a period as literary
historians have long told us
that we see an explosion of utopian
thinking
the most famous uh writers being edward
bellamy
william morris h.g wells but there were
hundreds of utopias published in the
late 19th and early 20th century
and my suggestion here my analytical
move
is to locate this geopolitical discourse
as part of this burst of utopian
thinking is animated by many of the same
concerns
as manifesting many of the same features
and drawing on many of the same tropes
uh images technological obsessions and
fantasies
another key theme in the book is the
role of technology in shaping visions of
race
i argue that many of the advocates of
anglo world union imagine the
anglo-saxon race
as a form of as a form of cyborg as a
translocal
fusion of humans and machines that
exhibited a form of agency
even consciousness so here i draw on
literature from
science and technology studies in
particular to make an argument about the
transformation of conceptions of race
through technological uh innovation
to explore the anglo world discourse i
adopt two main strategies
which i think or at least i hope
complement each other
so the first half of the book comprises
chapters in which i give an in-depth
interpretation
of a group of prominent individuals so i
sort of really dig deep into their
their writings to try and pull out
various aspects of their arguments
the second half of the book is composed
of chapters which give much more
wide-ranging analyses of some key
themes and concepts
so the the four individuals who stand at
the heart of the first part of the
volume
are andrew carnegie cecil rhodes wt
stead
and h.g wells of course it's notable
these figures rarely
uh apart from possibly wells can be
found in intellectual histories but i
argue that they can kind of stand the
the pressure here
in each chapter i offer a novel reading
of their ideas trace out the connections
between them
and embed their arguments in some wider
debates so for example i read carnegie
in relation
to debates about international law in
the late 19th century
and to debates around political theology
the second half of the book is composed
of three thematic chapters
the first of these reads late victorian
science fiction in britain and the
united states
especially so-called invasion literature
as a powerful vehicle for exploring some
of the radical racial futures
found in the anglo-world discourse and i
make an argument about how
anglo-tokenism is actually central to
the emergence of modern science fiction
following chapter looks at uh
a set of ideas around patriotism
and uh citizenship and how they were
unbundled from their traditional
uh connection to territoriality and
state sovereignty and re-articulated in
relation to
race so i look in particular at two
concepts
common or sometimes called isopolitan
citizenship which is a form of racial
citizenship
and the idea of race patriotism the idea
that one
can be and should be a patriot for the
race as well as
sometimes even instead of uh being a
patriot for the state
and the final chapter uh substantial
chapter looks at ideas about peace and
war and it's that i'll return to in a
minute
the conclusion of the book uh attempts
something different from
uh a conventional conclusion
firstly our her century forwards and
explore some prominent science fiction
writing from the 1980s and 1990s
uh especially so-called steampunk
writing
and i try and set up a trans temporal
dialogue about
temporality and historical progress the
reason why i do this is that
the people i'm interested in the end of
the late 19th early 20th century
suggested that their anglo-token vision
was realizable
by the millennium roughly a hundred
years
ahead if you look a hundred years ahead
ahead
some of their dreams came true many of
them didn't but you find a burst of
fictional writing looking back around
the century and rewriting
the history of anglo-american relations
and often drawing on
some of the same figures hg wells
figures and a lot of them cecil rhodes
even
and so i'm interested in how we can
think about time and history by
juxtaposing these two related
literatures
and in the final uh part of the
conclusion i explore some responses to
anglo-saxonism
from uh what robert gooding williams
terms afro-modern thinkers
so in a book dedicated to anatomising a
prominent strand of white supremacist
political writing
i wanted to end by looking at critiques
from the outside from very different
voices
from those that were in many ways
considered to be the subject of
such white supremacism and i focus here
on the writings of w.e.b du bois
and on a much less well-known figure the
jamaican pan-africanist
based in uh edinburgh and london
theophilus
scholes now both of these
discourses the science fiction discourse
from the end of the 20th century
and the afro-modern discourse a century
earlier too
have various things in common not least
that they challenge assumptions about
history time and progress
assumptions that underpin narratives
about racial domination
and destiny okay so that's a very brief
overview of what's
a long uh and pretty detailed book
in the remainder of the talk i'm going
to say some more
about one of the chapters and as i
mentioned because this is a
war studies department i'm going to talk
about chapter six
which is dedicated to what i think of as
the utopian core
project for anglo-american reunion the
idea of perpetual peace
i opened the chapter with a quote from
sir george gray a former colonial
governor
who said in the 1890s to all intents and
purposes
war would by degree die out from the
face of the earth
it would become impossible if the
anglo-saxons united that is
he continued if you had the anglo-saxon
race acting on common ground
they could determine the balance of
power for a fully peopled earth
that's this kind of claim which i term
the racial peace thesis
that i try and make sense of in this
chapter
and i do so firstly by contextualizing
racial peace arguments in relation to a
wider set of arguments about
peace democracy empire race and war
debates over future war at the time
contained many strands
some innovative others long established
what i call the empire peace thesis was
an example of the latter
whereas the democratic war thesis was an
example of the former
so i'll briefly discuss those democratic
war arguments
came in weak and strong versions i
suggest
the weaker and more common variant
contended that democracies offered new
channels for the expression of violence
democratic norms and structures neither
eliminated war
nor dampened its frequency so you'll see
here that this is an inversion of the
democratic peace thesis as we know it
today this is the argument
that democracies well either facilitate
war
or do even more than that so william
james in the
famous essay called the moral equivalent
of war gave an example
of this weak form he suggests that very
little changes by
uh democracy spreading why
because as he continues the popular
imagination fairly fattens on the
thought of wars
let public opinion once reach a certain
fighting pitch and no ruler can
withstand it
regime types are not going to affect the
incidents the frequency of war
but there's a stronger version of this
argument which is that democracies were
especially prone to violence they were
more war-like than other kinds of
regimes
this is the direct inversion of some
claims that have been made about
democracy
h.g wells adopted a version of this
argument
he contended that the spread of
representative democracy
would result in spirals of destruction
as democratic politicians
fueled anxiety about external threats to
retain
power so for wells the logic of
electoral competition
amplified by the enveloping mediocrity
of the political elite
meant the war was inescapable was an
inescapable outcome
of democratic politics in 1915 dubois
outlined an innovative imperial variant
of the democratic war argument he
suggested that the principal cause of
the unfolding
global conflagration was to be found in
intra-european imperial competition
but this competition had been shaped by
the growth of democratic politics
no longer able to exploit their workers
in the traditional manner
capitalists had formed a racialized
alliance with labour and looked outwards
for new spaces and populations to
exploit
and so for dubois late 19th century
burst of imperial expansion above all in
africa
was integrally related to the extension
of the franchise to the working classes
so there you have a set of arguments
that
move beyond or certainly or deny or even
invert
the longer standing claim traced back to
the 18th century and popular and peace
uh movements in the first half of the
19th century the democracies would help
to bring about war
by the late 19th century there was deep
skepticism about this
we also find something that i call the
empire peace thesis
and this posited that war could be
diminished or even eliminated in a world
managed by great empires
and again it came in two main variants
so the inter-imperial form claimed that
global stability
could be secured by a system of imperial
coordination
in which the dominant imperial powers in
the system maintained order by limiting
the number of autonomous polities
through both formal and informal
modalities of rule
in other words you can dampen the
security dialogue but maybe even
eliminated entirely
by reducing the number of units in the
international system
largely by conquering and ruling them
the alternative was a hegemonic imperial
argument which postulated that one
dominant empire was necessary to secure
peace and stability
and unsurprisingly british thinkers
typically assign this role
to themselves boasting of their unique
combination of strategic capacity and
political virtue
such arguments had internal and external
dimensions
internally it was argued that empires
had the capacity to impose peace on
territories
within their jurisdiction they pacified
previously or potentially warring
peoples and the larger the empire
the more of the earth it could pacify
internally it's kind of standard
argument for pax britannica
very common in british imperial
discourse at the time
but due to their size economic strength
and military capabilities
empires could also exert a pacifying
influence outside that territory
or so it was claimed they could either
balance other polities
or in the hegemonic fair into the
argument they could dominate the system
by outmatching opponents
deterring violence or intervening to
bring conflict to an end
so british imperial propagandists
routinely placed claims about peace at
the car
at the core of their justificatory
arguments however implausible it may
seem to us today
and it was in this context context of
arguments around democracy peace
empire race and war that we see claims
about anglotopia emerging
most proponents of the racial peace
thesis spent little time discussing how
anglo-america would abolish war
but it was a common claim all four of my
main protagonists for example adopted a
version of it
as did many others including many of the
science fiction writers who i
mentioned in another chapter
we can discern though two broad lines of
argument that were interwoven
one of them focused on brute
geopolitical power so the claim was that
the combined military and industrial
resources of anglo-america
when combined as a single unit would be
so overwhelming that no other policies
would seek to challenge it for each
other they would simply disarm or not
bother
to try to exert power
the other line of argument here focused
on moral suasion
the example that would be set by
anglo-america as a vast
progressive democratic industrial polity
would supposedly impress other peoples
throughout the world so much that they
would seek to imitate it
so rather than trying to compete with it
let alone try to fight it
they would simply imitate it they would
accept its leadership
these claims were underwritten by an
argument about legitimacy
anglo-america could and should claim a
privileged role
due to its unique political virtues
now as justificatory arguments varied so
too did institutional prescriptions for
realizing anglotopia
the specific mechanisms in other words
that were supposed to
turn a war-like world into one dominated
by peace
and again this was somewhat
underdeveloped shall we say uh in the
writings that i study but two popular
themes
uh that are apparent were international
arbitration and naval supremacy
so advocates of the former thought that
the creation of a system of arbitration
starting of a treaty between the united
states and britain
was vital for restricting interstate
conflict
once this system was put in place other
institutional connections could then be
built
so it was a kind of prerequisite for
many people that
britain and the united states would
themselves form a kind of legal bond
uh outlawing war or at least leading to
arbitration and then that could then
spiral out through the rest of the
system
the naval supremacy argument was pretty
straightforward if you combine the
navies of
britain and the united states it will
give you
dominant naval power in the world
considerably more powerful than the
others
and this could play a role in deterring
and or policing
the oceans of the world
now the racial utopians disagreed about
the role of violence
in fashioning peaceful world if anything
this was the major division that ran
between them
for many including carnegie instead the
transition
from a world of war to a world of peace
would itself be peaceful
though it ultimately of course depended
on the threat of violence held by
anglo-american military force
but nevertheless it wouldn't require war
it wouldn't require violence to bring
about peace
their utopianism thus encompassed both
the mechanisms and the talos
of transformation so carnegie was
convinced for example
that the unification of britain and the
united states would inaugurate
an unprecedented era of peace as he
wrote
the new nation would dominate the world
and banished from the earth its greatest
stain the murder of men by men
and this transition would be peaceful
because a united anglo america was
simply unassailable
as he wrote such a giant among pygmies
would never need to exert its power
but only to intimate its wishes and
decisions
global disarmament he suggested would
invariably follow as no other states
would need to maintain military forces
so in a racialized account of
unipolarity carnegie reasoned that the
united anglo polity
would simply deter all competitors
but other racial utopians notably h.g
wells
argued the war would be necessary to
secure peace
in fact he argued that war would
probably persist for decades to come
because many peoples around the world
would reject the kind of inherent logic
of overarching political communities of
which the anglo-token one would be the
key and most important
this then was the core anglo uh this
then was the core claim the core utopian
commitment of the anglo-unionists
racial interga integration could create
in fact was the only way of creating
perpetual peace so as well as being
expressed by carnegie stead roads and
wells
as i've suggested it was found
throughout the unionist discourse
including in the science fiction
literature that i mentioned earlier
and while it sounds absurd today at the
time white supremacism was tied closely
to
and was seen as the main vehicle for
many of long-standing dreams
perpetual peace okay i'll leave it there
for today
thanks very much for listening and i
look forward to your questions
excellent thank you so much duncan um i
think we have
already got a couple of questions um
so i think while others baby are kind of
writing down their notes i suggest
that we take maybe the first question
i'm not sure that you can see it as well
um so the first the first question comes
from julia hodgins
and i think to try to summarize
and to try to summarize it
she is
well she starts with the idea that every
society has and had a form of social
organization
generally manifested in a hierarchy
um however i'm
further down it is out of the mold
the way in which the white
anglo-european has been perpetuated for
many century and
keep resiliently surviving despite being
a demographic minority
on the planet um this fact is used by
white supremacists as the sign of
superiority i would like to ask you what
could be
the pivoting feature that underpins that
resilient survival
um i'm not quite sure what the white
anglo-european
is but um you know yeah i'm not sure
i've got a general answer to that
um i mean my project's very much kind of
intellectual history
rather than a kind of wider sweeping
kind of world historical
text about anglo-america the kind that's
something like jamie belich has written
so i would recommend looking at his work
if you're interested in the kind of
economic
drivers of um you know capitalism that
were involved in for example the
kind of by the late 19th century the
economic dominance of
uh anglo-american world but
the core argument there the core point
that the
people i'm interested in cited
particularly military superiority as
um legitimating their claims to rule
is pervasive in in the discourse that
i'm interested in i run it through
through the book uh they claimed that
because they
had the technological genius to invent
weapon systems which then allowed them
to suppress
imperial imperial subjects around the
world that wasn't only a kind of
brute military fact it actually gave
them some kind of moral superiority too
because it spoke to their claims for
technological and scientific
uh genius which were taken to be central
to national character
and racial character that then allowed
them
to to kind of dominate and rule the
world so
technology was never just seen as a kind
of instrumental
device that could be used to help rule
it was also used as part of the
justificatory argument for why some
people should rule others
in the first place
we've got a second question from angus
riley
which i think is asking you it's really
interesting
um it is asking you to reflect on how
the movement you write about so anglo
utopian movement
relates to other pan-national movements
of the late 19th century
in europe which manifested in wars and
revolutions for instance span italian
spawn
germany's pants levels yeah yeah it's a
good question so
um it's not a taller coincidence that
you get this pan movement emerging at
that time there are many pan movements
around the world
not just in europe and i see this as
one of those several animated by many of
the same particularly
technological fantasies about the
ability to create
massive social political communities
across space in a way that previously
hadn't been possible
it's also a period in which the future
territorial
ordering of the world is up for grabs in
a way
there's considerable anxiety about the
future of empire and its
uh ability to uh be maintained amongst
european
uh elites while at the same time there's
also those particular united states
pushing for
the creation of an empire it's not clear
yet whether the nation state will be
the normative model for politics that we
so often take it to be
today and so the kind of yeah
organizing principles were up for grabs
and that was reflected in a lot of the
political debate
so many of the people i'm looking at
were pretty skeptical about
the state as being the key um political
unit
of politics something like cecil rhodes
for example we might associate with a
very strong kind of british
nationalism perhaps was perfectly happy
to imagine
the future capital of this racial
political community
alternating between washington and the
united states and he thought british
constitution
was thoroughly obsolete that the
american constitution be much better
as a model for governing the politic so
it's not a surprise that you've got
plenty of people who are interested in
forms of aggregated political
communities confederations federations
world states so again one difference i
didn't talk about in my talk is that
some of the people i'm interested in
wells as an example saw
anglo union as a step on the road to a
world state
and wells himself was uh predicting that
there'd be a variety of other
agglomerations of peoples around the
world a pan latin community
pan-asian community which would all
eventually merge into
a world state but he happened to think
that the anglo-american one would be the
dominant one at least
for the for the meantime others
essentially saw an upscaling of
interstate competition so you would get
no world state at the end of this but
you'd get competition between massive
political communities and that the
anglos
would dominate but they were foreseeing
european
union they were foreseen potential
unions in asia
so it was yeah widely thought at the
time that the 20th century would see
a variety of different aggregated
communities emerging
and so quite often they were talking
about other forms of pan you know
pan-africanism being one but
pan-germanic political
uh entities would be another pan-asian
yet yet another
so this is part of that and what the
people i'm interested in
kind of particular white supremacist
vision was that they wanted to
to dominate this future system and they
thought that was possible by
joining together with the united states
but one of the reasons that they wanted
to join was because if they didn't join
some of these other political
communities might end up more powerful
so it provided an impetus for pushing
this particular kind of pound vision
i've got um i've got some more questions
they're just on two screens now because
some of them are on the chat and some of
them are on the q a
so um apologies i'm going to try
i'm going to try to take um greg's
question from the chat
so who says the need for racial
coherence and unity
is as is it as much about race for
racist sake
or does it act as a metaphor for
economic cohesion and supremacy
which leads to military slash naval
technological and market superior
superiority so is it race or is it
capitalism
a distinct form of capitalism or the
critical hub is the city of london
and wall street i guess that leak more
so than other intellectual connections
so i guess the question is about race
and capitalism right as far as i
understand it
well certainly for the people i'm
interested in um
race is not just a kind of instrumental
thing that can be
you know tied to capitalism it's kind of
reverse in a way
the success of angular american
capitalism is a function of racial
superiority so the people that i'm
interested in because again like
technological sophistication that they
uh boast about it's taken to be a
manifestation
of what it was that partially defined
the so-called genius of the race
so they're not separable but race is
fundamental to this not least because
for these people in particular the story
historical stories they tell about the
emergence of this
these racial formations precede the
emergence of capitalism
so they're not created by capitalism
capitalism emerges from them
so you know make of these claims what
you will
and i'm certainly not uh here to defend
them but that's the way in which they
kind of configured it so the way i put
it in the book is that for
the thinkers i'm interested in race is
the basic ontological unit of politics
and of social life more broadly race is
fundamental for them
but they do define race in a variety of
different ways and i've got a long
discussion in the
introduction and it reappears throughout
the book about differences between how
they conceptualized race
but there were also some overarching
similarities so while the way in which
they could define
english-speaking peoples might vary in
so far as
someone would emphasize the common law
ahead of
a shared history someone else would
prefer the history or the actual focus
on the language
it was bounded by a color line so there
was what you might think of as a kind of
mutable
cultural core to a vision of race which
was
um bounded by whiteness essentially so
on this kind of view
european immigrants to the united states
could become anglo-saxon or
english-speaking peoples
whereas african-americans will say
south asians and the british empire this
was not an option available to them
so race was both fluid to an extent but
also
fixed uh and it was this kind of
combination of features
which you find running through the
discourse but there is some variation
between individuals
but certainly i don't think that this is
something that kind of comes as it were
and that comes after capitalism i think
this is on their account
race is the fundamental feature not
capitalism and in fact one of the books
i spend quite a lot of
time looking at is an anti-capitalist
socialist uh science fiction novel
called the angel of the revolution
the image on the front cover of my book
is taken from that
it is it foresees or predicts or it
dreams of the end of capitalism
pushed by the anglo um kind of
white supremacist racial vision that i'm
looking at but that's unusual most of
the rest of the accounts tie
capitalism and this vision of race very
tightly together
suggesting that they're you know that
they're related in
as the best capitalists typically the
anglo-saxons
but there was no necessary connection
there it could also be tied to a form of
anti-capitalism as it was for
in george griffith's novel
it is indeed quite unusual to have an
anti-capitalist novel that somehow kind
of
um places you know race on the global
color line industry
an extraordinarily weird novel yeah
um like we have quite a lot of questions
so i'm gonna
i'm following the chat and i'm gonna um
you know if you've asked your question
on the q a uh please don't worry just
bear with us i'll come back to the q a
but i'll go through the chat and
can i ask everyone to maybe move to the
q a so we can have one
screen so i'm going to move now to
jason's question
why did this particular identity emerge
in this particular time but not earlier
yeah so it's a good question i mean
there are of course antecedents to this
uh but the argument i make in this book
and also in my
prior work is that there is something
quite distinctive about late 19th
century
and the thing that i focus on
principally is actually technology
so it's a cognitive revolution as i put
it precipitated
by the communications revolution of the
era
so there's a sense in which particularly
the electrical telegraph and it's
the undersea cables which allow it to go
global but also
imminent fantasies about flight and to
some extent also ocean traversing
steamships
lead to a perception that time and space
have been fundamentally transformed so
the collapse of time and space as a
phrase
which is often thought of as a 1990s
globalization
an anthony gidden style catchphrase is
actually prevalent in the late 19th
century
uh there's a real sense in which global
geography has been fundamentally
transformed
by these new technological developments
and that this allows for a sense of
thick political identity
across what previously would have seen
distances which disallowed
so just as an example in one of the most
influential books on the empire in the
second half of the 19th century jrc
leads the expansion of england
he refers to canada as the equivalent of
kent
an english and english county right the
atlantic ocean is now irrelevant
for thinking about political identity so
you know in the 18th century of course
there were settlers in the united states
and they were thought of in some sense
as being members of the same political
community as those in britain
but there's a real sense in the late
19th century a felt sense common amongst
the people i look at who reflect on this
all the time that there's something new
about that period in that era that
there's a way in which
political community political community
both can be rethought
but also needs to be rethought because
geography itself has been fundamentally
transformed by technology
so that's why i mean there's other
things too there's a whole series of
things going on in the late 19th century
unsurprisingly
but i think that's at the very core of
it it's that
there's a sense in which the world is
both shrinking and speeding up and that
new political forms
are needed to to make sense in this in
this emerging world
we might come back to the question of
technology later on but
now i want to move to ali crema taylor
um
who is placing um
you know your focus on the kind of four
feet key figures
in a kind of broader political question
so she's asking
to what extent were the ideas of the
individuals you
um you look at taken seriously by
mainstream political actors at the time
for instance the political leaders of
the british or american state were they
influential
in bristol so
i mean the most fantastical visions that
i'm interested in which is to say
the idea that britain and the united
states should form a new state together
obviously didn't get that much traction
amongst um
elected officials uh although
there was quite a lot of sympathy for
other slightly less radical visions and
so in the introduction to the book i
actually discussed theodore roosevelt
and aj balfour british prime minister
joseph chamberlain
secretary of state for the colonies all
of whom were
um i would suggest kind of
anglo-unionists but of a much more
institutionally modest kind
so the kind of thing they were proposing
was much closer
into imperial cooperation um various
forms of coordination
various treaty forms and various new
forms of military collaboration
but grounded in claims about racial
identity and
the superiority of the anglo-saxons and
so on
so that would be my my first point but
kind of properly fantastical visions
and for fairly obvious reasons i didn't
get much traction
amongst the political leaders in uh at
least elected leaders
in the united states and britain but
there was a much wider sense which did
include some of those
of this unionist discourse and of
fantasies of
the anglo-saxons as being the
peacemakers of the 20th century of being
those that were destined to govern
those that were destined to order that'd
be my first point my second point would
be that the figures that i'm looking at
and in particular rhodes
and carnegie are very very influential
figures so i'm not looking at a series
of kind of you know
stereotypical ivory tower philosophers
although i also look at some of those uh
you know carnegie was
the richest man in the world and he had
very easy access
to both u.s presidents and british prime
ministers and in fact quite a lot of his
private correspondence with these
figures
is trying ultimately failing to persuade
people who he's regularly hanging out
with who happens to be running both
countries
of the uh benefits of this kind of thing
wt stead was the most influential
journalist
in the british empire famously as the
headline in the newspaper had it the
most famous man to die on the titanic
he again had very significant political
access and influence well slightly less
so although
was by the time he was writing this kind
of stuff one of the best-known writers
in the world
and rhodes was the most infamous stroke
famous imperialist of the day
so these people were the political elite
in a sense with the partial exception of
wells there but it is true
that their most radical visions didn't
translate into policy for sure
so this is an intellectual history i'm
particularly interested in the bits that
didn't come true as it were
because plenty of historians have looked
at this period and these debates as part
of the kind of approach
between the united states and britain
which formed the basis for the
so-called special relationship in the
20th century there's plenty of
diplomatic and political history being
written about this
but i'm interested in particular about
these utopian fantasies and how these
tie in with wider cultural concerns
about
social dreaming about
world transformation and so on
as you as you ended with you know dreams
utopian history
i turned out to end use a question
andrew earhart
was um actually one of the panelists
uh who says thanks for your excellent
talk duncan i'm wondering about the way
in which these individuals were using
history to
inform their conceptions of the future
did they
idealize or romanticize certain periods
in antiquity
and a related point did any of these
figures harbor what you might call a
philosophy
of history i.e they see a purpose or
direction of history
yeah it's a it's a very good question
it's very hard one to answer briefly
but a simpler answer is yes there was an
awful lot of
philosophizing about history and they're
quite i mean so
the reason it's hard to answer is it
wasn't a single view on this
but there were a considerable number who
wrote extensively about history and in
fact quite a number of historians
particularly united states were part of
this discourse
and so material that's been written
about widely by other scholars on
tutanist and aryan visions of racial
history
underpinned quite a lot of these
arguments so for example
andrew carnegie drew a lot on ea
freeman's historical writings
freeman himself although not a full-on
um institutional utopian of the kind i'm
interested in
was very clearly uh attracted to the
view about the racial
identity of the anglo-american world the
tutanist vision
that underpinned actually the origins of
political sciences of discipline
and modern history writing as a
discipline in the united states and
britain at the time
so i have quite a lot in the book on
that so if you're interested there is a
fair amount about the role that history
plays
in underpinning these i mean the simple
idea here is that there is a kind of
directionality to history with race as
the key unit
that's driving it and that what you find
is a movement from the east to the west
of historical leadership essentially
particularly of the teutons
so the tutans originally from germany
and on that arianist vision of that
picture they're actually originally from
from asia but by the time they get to
europe and become manifest in the
medieval forest clearings of germany
where they supposedly invent freedom
they then keep moving westward they find
an expression in britain
and their ultimate destiny is the united
states manifested in this kind of anglo
vision
so there's a kind of historical picture
that moves across time and also across
space
that underpins quite a lot of this now
not everyone buys into that
so for example wells is very skeptical
about these kind of visions
but it's certainly there instead it's
certainly there some of them also had a
theological dimension to it
so yes there's an awful lot going on in
terms of philosophy of history
here as there is in the counter so what
i discuss when i'm discussing
particularly dubois
and scholes is how they write a
counter-historical narrative
so one of the things that they're both
interested in for example is arguing
that
the ancient egyptians were black
so an argument that's actually traceable
uh in african-american
historical writing to the late 18th
century but becomes particularly popular
again in the late 19th century
and is used as a counter narrative to
white supremacist visions of history
so history is employed repeatedly here
as a battleground for either
underpinning or challenging claims to
racial superiority and destiny so it's
actually a theme that runs through the
book
if you're interested in it it's
absolutely central to what's going on
at this period
yeah i just realized yeah um sorry about
that so i'm going to turn now to the
questions
in the um q a because we've got quite a
few and i realize we are
quickly running out of time so i'm going
to take meera samji's question
she says thank you for the sharing i'm
used to hearing about the civilizing
mission as the key justification for the
expansion in africa in particular
for instance looking at how the berlin
conference in 1884 was framed as part of
the liberal project and abolition of
slavery
is it fair to say that you feel this
justification has been
overstated and that naval slash military
slash
technological superiority was more
dominant than we realized
uh thanks thanks mira um no i i don't
think that they're
that different necessarily i mean i see
versions of what my
that my kind of cast in this book are
interested in
is a version of a civilizing mission um
so yeah i don't see these things as
completely separate it is worth saying
that
not all of the people that i'm
interested in were straightforward
imperialists
so for example carnegie called for the
immediate uh dissolution of the british
empire he thought that india should be
given independence immediately he was
deeply critical of
british imperialism with an important
footnote
the exception of colonialism but
nevertheless he thought that
britain shouldn't be um creating or
sustaining an empire in africa at the
caribbean or in india
and he was also one of the best-known
so-called anti-imperialists in the
united states
so he was one of the most high-profile
opponents of the
war in 1898 in the uh spanish-american
war
but he nevertheless was a racial
supremacist who thought
that this kind of project of unification
would help to order and police the world
so imperial arguments and these kind of
racial domination arguments often went
together
but they weren't identical they could
pull in slightly different directions
likewise you could justify imperialism
without buying into some of these
grandiose claims about racial identity
particularly the similarity between
britain and the united states you may
well actually see the united states as
the main threat that faces britain
rather than someone that should be
you know aligned with so so they're
overlapping discourses
but they're not identical it's one of
the themes i i explore throughout the
book is how
the the different people i'm interested
in saw the role of empire differently
and some and justified it somewhat
differently
so now i do think civilizing mission
arguments are central to
uh particularly liberal but the more
broad 19th century british
justification of empire and it overlaps
considerably of
what's going on here and technology is
central to the civilizing mission itself
because again it's one of the things
that's taken to make it
policy civilized is that it has
techno-scientific mastery of some kind
and that then ordains it with this role
to spread it elsewhere
let's move to um aaron dawson's question
so you mentioned cecil rhodes as one of
the main protagonists how i received was
his encouragement of germany's inclusion
within the anglo-saxon family
how did this differ from the status of
more closely related countries such as
ireland australia canada new zealand and
south africa
and can i add something here about um
you know race and the global color line
because i was wondering
how in this debates um races
kind of emerge as sort of hierarchies of
humanities right so you
where you didn't have um for instance
just the anglo-saxon kind of white race
versus
an idea of blackness but you have a more
um hierarchies type of
different races right at different
levels of more or less human or sub
people
yeah absolutely absolutely i mean
there's a fundamental hierarchical
vision at play here
and the hierarchy um intersects with the
color line at some point but it's not
identical because there's a hierarchy
within
whiteness here so the claim is typically
that the anglo-saxons are superior to
other europeans but that the other
europeans plus the anglo-saxons
broadly speaking constitute the
civilized world
and that the color line is then you know
drawn and below that
or arrayed the rest of the world's
population themselves in a hierarchy
so typically and again this has been
very widely studied by
by historians um you know at the very
bottom of this are supposed to be things
like
people are the indigenous populations in
australia so
who for most 19th century commentators
were kind of destined for
extinction and you know near the top of
that would be some of the so-called
war-like tribes in india
who were regarded as very fine soldiers
and so there's a hierarchy all the way
down but there's a hierarchy within
whiteness as well as
uh for other peoples the rhodes and
germany point
picks out a more general issue actually
which is the status of
germany within all of these debates so
germany
is the source for many of these people
of the teutonic race which they
themselves now
are the latest manifestation of and so
very few of them thought that germany
should be part of this picture
but there was a considerable degree of
sympathy with germany
up until the decade and a half before
the first world war
where it begins to switch so germany's
often seen as an ally potential ally
uh with the anglo world but then
as war begins to approach and many many
people were predicting all of germany
for quite a long time before it happened
states of germany switches quite a lot
and that's true in the rhodes
scholarships too so although it's there
in rhodes as well
at various points germans were excluded
from rhodes scholarships
so there's a kind of interesting history
as to how that kind of comes in and out
but it wouldn't have surprised many
people that rhodes was sympathetic to
the teutons uh as as the germans were
often seen
because they were seen as kind of racial
kin
not as part of the anglo world but is
very close to that as part of its
history in a way
i have um one question from ahu
fahani how important was the use of
literature
in expanding the ideas of the movement
uh it's a very good question i mean i
think it was vital
uh so i have a long chapter on fictional
writing in here
uh and this was not high high-end
literature shall we say i mean these
were kind of best-selling pulp
um science fiction texts and they were
used
i mean invasion literature was used as a
political commentary at the time
um some some of these novels were
extremely popular
now how much impact they had in changing
people's minds who knows it's not
something i investigate
but certainly there was a felt sense
amongst the people who are proposing
this
that fiction could be an extremely
useful vehicle for helping to propagate
their ideas but also to explore and
extrapolate and expand on the kind of
fantasies that they were having
separate from that their stories about
what made the anglos great
also emphasized literature a lot so
there's a lot of discussion about
shakespeare and
the bible and milton and paul what's
what was supposedly
great about being an anglo-saxon english
speaker is a literary heritage
and so again i have a discussion of that
in the in the book but this is
repeatedly emphasized
and above all it's a quote from tennyson
tennyson's the kind of
poet who's quoted the most in this
discourse um
about um one of one of his famous poems
is probably the most commonly
cited bitter fictional writing in in the
discourse so yeah
it's important literature's front and
center and a lot of this discussion
um shivan mcshane's question actually
ties in a little bit
um do you have any thoughts on how the
comparative method for instance
comparative linguistics mythology
etc fed in two days what the thoughts of
returning to some
kind of golden age of racial racial
linguistic unity
so that i mean these arguments were
justified in a variety of ways
not always compatible but one of the
strands was philological
uh and so the comparative method more
broadly speaking not just comparative
linguistics but the comparative method
associated with figures like henry mayne
and ea freeman was an important strand
of this
max mueller's linguistics was cited by
various people too
talking about the kind of aryan um
origins of language and so on so
there is a strand of this in there um
but someone like h.g wells for example
was utterly dismissive of these
philological justifications for race he
thought they were absurd pseudoscience
he justified it a different way and in
his case it was a specific focus on the
english language
as it was currently constituted not in
some historical story about its racial
development
and a series of economic and
technological and political
uh similarities and so i wouldn't want
to generalize to say that
linguistics was kind of constitutive of
this discourse
it wasn't but there was a strand of
this discourse group of thinkers who
looked heavily and lent heavily upon
some of the philological discourse and
more broadly upon
comparative studies yeah
um as we're running out of time we have
two questions i would like to take
together because they both kind of
link your talk to the present so first
from what kara zaidi
asks about how these visions by remain
place in modest modern steampunk revival
and the second question is actually
about cans like the kansas
partnership agreement that you have
written about so maybe i don't know
we can we can add a link actually to the
article so there is an article on this
um but we have a few minutes if you'd
like to to say something about
thanksgiving i mean it's an obvious kind
of question in a way it's like what
what happened to these ideas um i don't
discuss that huge amount in the book
partly because i have done this to some
extent elsewhere and so claudio
mentioned i i
published an article on kanzuk um with
sergi and
vaquetta which looks at a revival of
interest actually more specifically in
imperial federation arguments than this
wider
anglo discourse that that's more to do
with an anglo-sphere as a concept
um which is the latest incarnation of
of these kind of ideas so i've discussed
this um
elsewhere it's partly for that reason
that i didn't do that in the conclusion
to this book
so i briefly mentioned it obviously um
but i then switch
tack a bit and do this other stuff um
partly because i just didn't want to
repeat myself
and politics i thought there was some
interesting things to be said about the
science fiction literature and the kind
of afro-modern critique that i wanted in
the book
uh so there are clear similarities
not least this obsession with what you
might call like a settler imaginary
um the kind of conglomeration of
anglo-america australia canada new
zealand
but there are also differences i don't
want to suggest that what we see
now is identical to what we saw earlier
um as far as i'm concerned that the
biggest difference is actually that the
kind of utopian
dimension that i focus on so much in
this
has largely disappeared from
contemporary anglo discourses i mean you
could call them utopian in the sense you
might call it unrealistic
or you could call them utopian in so far
as they make some pretty bold claims
about
what angle what the anglosphere would
supposedly do
but nothing that i've read reaches the
kind of pitch of
utopianism that i discuss in relation to
the
earlier discourse so contemporary
anglosphere advocates i'm not suggesting
that it will bring about perpetual peace
for example so i do see continuities for
sure
but i also think that there are some
significant differences in the discourse
and so i don't want to suggest it'd be
very surprising if there weren't frankly
i mean this was a very long time ago
in many ways uh i think that the first
world war has a significant effect in
knocking out the
kind of most radical utopianism you do
find examples of it after that
going into the mid 20th century there
are a handful but
it's a much more concentrated pre-world
war one fantasy
and something similar happens to utopian
writing in general
so again it's something that i think
that's why it's important to locate this
within
that that broader discourse uh in terms
of steampunk what happens i mean very
very
quickly and crudely is that in a lot of
key a lot of key steampunk texts
certainly not all
anglo america is a central focus and so
i look at something like the difference
engine probably the most uh significant
steampunk text
and what happens is that the british
empire persists on these counter factual
reworkings of the 20th century
uh whereas the united states even never
gets off the ground or ends up being
destroyed or defeated or absorbed
and so you just have this intriguing
playing around with this notion of
temporarity
so decline and fall doesn't happen but
nor does the ascent of america
which would come to dominate the
anglosphere and virtually all these
other pictures i'm looking at so all of
my people saw that the us would actually
be the key
figure the key power within the future
anglo world
whereas the steampunk literature in this
first generation
kind of turns this on its head and the
british empire persists in the u.s
never really takes on that powerful role
so i explore that
and how it kind of slightly um
challenges some of these underlying
visions but the much more thorough going
critique of the temporality is is in the
afro-modern
discourse which takes a kind of
fundamental sledgehammer
to the historical claims about racial
destiny and superiority that are made
um that to underpin the white
supremacist discourse
so i'm not suggesting that they're
equivalent in the degree of their
critique
and in fact i don't see the steampunk
literature as making critique in
particular
i'm just interested in how that kind of
counter factual fictional reworkings
of this relationship that i've explored
allow us to say some things about the
importance of time and history
underpinning those narratives
and also the fact that fiction is again
taken to be the key source of it so
one of the fictional texts i look at
takes cecil rhodes as its key figure
and imagines him living long past his
death and playing a key role in shaping
the 20th century
so there's just some very neat
connections between some of the figures
that i'm interested in from the late
19th century
and how they were reimagined in
speculative literature towards the end
of the
20th century
excellent thank you so much duncan it's
been a tour de force and thank you to
everyone who has asked questions i am
aware that there are
you know a few points we haven't managed
to to touch
touch on and i had my own questions
particularly about methodology
um i wanted to bring about i think you
know your composite methodology as you
as you noted
in the beginning but i think um yeah an
absolutely amazing talk this is what
samuel
says i'm reading this out and because i
agree
there are other points around again
connections or the kind of
co-constitution of race and capitalists
that we've got some more questions
um on and as well a question that i
think we can
um close with uh quickly from julia
whether you would agree or the greed of
racist invented race
my answer will be quickly yes um
and i think yes that's um everyone you
can i'm not sure whether you can see in
the chat but basically there are a lot
of
thank yous and thank you to me and thank
you to the um thank you to the audience
as well and thank you really really for
um you know the reach questions that you
have asked and um
you know thank you very much for
listening in and
for asking your questions i'm sorry i
couldn't get to answer them all or
answer them in
as much length as they uh they no doubt
deserved but thank you very much
thank you thank you again dr for a
fascinating talk and for covering so
many aspects
um and so many questions so we'll say
goodbye to everyone who has joined us
tonight
and i guess we will just remain for a
couple of
minutes on here thank you

strategy and the sir michael howard

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arianist::noun | Spocien Dictionary

arianist

noun

an adherent of Arianism (the belief that Jesus Christ was not truly God)

Type	Words
Type of	christian
Derivation	arianism

How to pronounce arianist in English?

arianist::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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