Drawing the Global Colour Line: Transnational Racism Review

Overview of the Book's Central Argument

Reference: Lake, M., & Reynolds, H. (2008). Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Lake & Reynolds, 2008) provides a vivid and troubling account of the degree to which racism and prejudice on the basis of skin color and national origin dominated some of the most important geopolitical events that shaped societies in the American continent, South Africa, and the Commonwealth of Australia. While the existence of contemporary racism and prejudice is hardly an unknown concept, what is substantially less appreciated today is the manner in which influential figures in Australian, American, and European history coordinated their ideas and fears about other cultures and races, and conspired to inject their atavism and xenophobia into the national cultures of their respective societies.

Transnational Networks of Racist Influence

The respective leaders of entirely sovereign nations shared the noxious racist literature of the most prominent race theorists of the period, provided one another with mutual support, and, rather than exerting any positive or humanitarian influence on each other, did the exact opposite. In doing so, they contributed both individually and in concert to the roughly simultaneous growth of segregationist national policies in North America — particularly in the southern states and in California — and in the Commonwealth of Australia, and they contributed directly to the evolution of apartheid in South Africa. In this respect, the authors thoroughly document the phenomenon of transnational racism and prejudice, correcting the inaccurate common assumption that racism in disparate sovereign nations evolved independently.

For example, by the time Edmund Barton, Australia's first Prime Minister, was lobbying against immigration shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, he relied substantially on the work of Charles Pearson, who had authored National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893) — a work already embraced by the newly elected U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Similarly, both leaders were also influenced by the parallel analyses published by the American author James Bryce.

Indentured Servitude, Labor Competition, and Immigration Restriction

These influences also pervaded the Indian subcontinent, where restrictions against outright slavery gave rise to the concept of indentured servitude instead. Compounding the moral depravity, British colonialists responded to labor competition and the resulting depression of white wages by resorting to restrictive immigration policies. In this respect, the authors also detail the influence of institutionalized racist policies pioneered in the American South in connection with thinly veiled, race-based restrictions on the voting rights of newly emancipated African American former slaves.

Conclusion: A Shared Legacy of Transnational Racism

Ultimately, the book provides a retrospective account illustrating that the overtly racist national policies and sentiments whose vestigial remains are still evident in the American continent, South Africa, and the Commonwealth of Australia today are the product of a shared form of transnational racism — the product of the mutual influence of sovereign nations more than a century ago — and not simply the result of "natural" ethnic or atavistic xenophobia, which, however unfortunate, has been a feature of human societies throughout recorded history.