Drawing the Global Colour Line: A Book Review

Introduction to the Book and Its Scope

Drawing the Global Colour Line is a groundbreaking account of the international making of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a work extraordinary both for its global extensiveness and for its sensitivity to local individuality, making it a model for the new global history. The authors, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, skillfully and creatively reconstruct how leading European intellectuals and policymakers in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain resisted calls for racial equality and mutually developed new doctrines of racial superiority. These doctrines were used to justify the preservation — and, in some cases, the reinvigoration — of white privilege across all parts of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had settled. Through reading this book, it proves to be an effective and sobering historical record, intelligently and sophisticatedly told.

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Prophecy of the Color Line

One of the first things that stands out is how the authors use W.E.B. Du Bois to anchor a compelling argument. Lake and Reynolds bring to light that in the early 1900s, Du Bois made a remarkable prophecy about color. He predicted that the color line would be the defining issue of the twentieth century, and he went on to identify one of its intrinsic dynamics — what can be interpreted as a new faith of whiteness that was sweeping across the world. The authors use this prophecy not merely as an epigraph but as a conceptual foundation for the entire study.

The White Australia Policy and Its Origins

Particularly intriguing is the authors' explanation of the White Australia Policy, a subject unfamiliar to many readers. The episode that initiated this code of racial segregation began when Australia's first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, rose to speak in support of the Immigration Restriction Bill in August 1901, clutching a copy of National Life and Character: A Forecast, a book published eight years earlier by Melbourne philosopher Charles Pearson. The book had already attracted a wide international readership, and among its admirers was Theodore Roosevelt, then President-elect of the United States — a connection that underscores how racial ideas traveled across national borders with remarkable speed.

Conclusion and Critical Assessment

Lake and Reynolds tell this story meticulously, employing a series of vivid biographical portraits to intertwine the lives of the advocates of a global color line with the lives of their determined adversaries. They pursue a thought-provoking argument by way of an engaging narrative. For the most part, they are skillful at maintaining narrative coherence across diverse national settings. However, in a rush toward the conclusion, they quickly stitch together a range of subjects covering the period between the two world wars, which is considerably less convincing than the earlier sections.

That Lake and Reynolds promise more than they can fully deliver is perhaps to be expected in such an ambitious and pioneering work, and this should not diminish the significance of what they have accomplished. In Drawing the Global Colour Line, these two leading scholars of Australian national history compellingly demonstrate the rich rewards of reading that history within an international context.

Works Cited

Reynolds, Marilyn Lake and Henry. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality. Sydney: [University] Press, 2008.