Duncan Bell's Dreamworlds of Race examines the geopolitical, racial, and cultural imaginaries of Anglo-American Union in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is the third of what Bell terms a loose trilogy on the “settler imaginary” (3) of metropolitan British imperialism, following on his previous books Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (2016) and The Idea of Greater Britain (2007). The foundational chapters of Dreamworlds of Race interrogate the “racial utopianism” of four elite Anglo-Americans: the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie; the British journalist W.T. Stead; the South African magnate Cecil Rhodes; and the British writer H.G. Wells. Bell's subjects were neither unique—Anglo-American union ideas were as common in this era as sand on a beach—nor, with the exception of the futurism of Wells, original thinkers. Their historical significance lay in the ways in which their power and privilege allowed them to serve as vectors and amplifiers of utopian visions of Anglo-America. Examples of Anglo-American unionists' invocations of the “Parliament of Man” referenced in the poet Alfred Tennyson's “Locksley Hall” are braided throughout the book, demonstrative of the intertextual analysis Bell deploys as well as his subjects' shared assumptions of the benign and benevolent influence of the “Anglo-Saxon” race.

Dreamworlds of Race is a dialog between Anglo-American thinkers, publicists, and cheerleaders, some of whom were dreamers, others what might be termed racial architects who devised blueprints for political union. Bell follows historians such as James Belich (Reference Belich2009) who position the United States as a central, rather than peripheral, part of the “English speaking world.” He identifies “maximalist” and “minimalist” Anglo-American unionists, existing along a spectrum where racial identities, especially whiteness, functioned as a category of analysis. One of the book's most original contributions is its exegesis of fin-de-siècle Anglo-American science fiction as a literary mode that envisioned ideal social and political worlds in an age of mechanization. Wells himself was a pioneer of science fiction, and the genre that he helped shape often didactically expressed the affective bonds of Anglo-American kinship and white supremacy. Bell identities Wells as a “cyborg imperialist” who fictionalized the interlinkages between technology and humanity. Wells anticipated the fictional cyborg worlds of late twentieth century science fiction such as Ridley Scott's film Bladerunner (1982), with a perceptive awareness of the racial underpinnings of such societies. Bell sees the influence of late-Victorian Anglo-American science fiction in modern steampunk culture. The latter constitutes a set of “memory-texts” (372) that invoke an imaginative legacy of late-Victorian “electric dreams,” as well as a reckoning with the consequences of race and empire.

Some Anglo-American unionists favored forms of isopolitan citizenship, through which English-speaking peoples across the Atlantic (and in some visions, around the world) shared mutual political rights. Others saw in Anglo-American union the promise of peace (often through arbitration) and progress, a “racial romanticism” (336) that framed imperial expansion as pacification—what Bell slyly terms a “democratic empire thesis” (303). These visions were deeply racialized, and predicated on the existence, and continued subjugation, of “non-whites.” Thus, Bell concludes the book by examining the alternate global visions of Afro-modernists, some well-known such as the American civil rights activist and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, others deserving of greater historical attention such as Jamaican missionary, doctor, and activist Theophilus Scholes. Contemporary novels such as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (Reference Whitehead2016), Bell argues, conjure an Afropunk imaginary that indicts the white supremacy that underpinned much of the Anglo-American union tradition.

Bell contextualizes his subjects through a densely interwoven historicist analysis. He provides expert close reading of an exhaustive array of sources, and foregrounds his subjects' ideas and language through fulsome expository quotation. Dreamworlds of Race can be read as a history of ideas companion to political and cultural histories of Anglo-Americanism like Kathleen Burk's Old World, New World (Reference Burk2008). One of the blind spots of Bell's Anglotopian subjects was that they saw Anglo-American racial amity as immanent, rather than as an identity that needed to be fostered and rejuvenated over time. Except for Wells, the thinking of few of the figures Bell writes about evolved much, and they seemingly learned little from the failures of earlier Anglo-American union visions. Perhaps, this is evidence that racial utopias are by their nature ahistorical, proverbial “castles in the sky” that remain evanescent, but whose pursuit causes real harm to those groups excluded from the providential community. It would be interesting for other scholars to extend Bell's scholarship to look at how capital and class shaped visions of Anglo-American union—to what extent was this an elite, and furthermore a conservative, project, and to what extent was it a racial vision that manifested itself in different ways and forms in different parts of the late-Victorian global English-speaking society. One of the great merits of this book is how it suggests many fruitful further lines of inquiry on the nature of white supremacy and Anglo-Saxonism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.