Dreamworlds of Race is Duncan Bell's best work yet, setting out to reconstruct the transatlantic discourse of Anglo-American unionism between the 1880s and 1910s. A heterogeneous mesh of contexts made the political (re)unification of the United States and Great Britain attractive (to some) at this conjuncture. Both an acute sense of British imperial fragility and a conception of world order undergoing violent racialization helped to legitimize a utopian project of Anglo-Saxon world making from on high.
The intellectuals of this largely failed project, identified by Bell in the political, economic, and cultural elites of the contemporary British Empire and United States, form his subject matter in the first part of Dreamworlds of Race. Over three chapters Bell rereads Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil Rhodes, and H. G. Wells as Anglo-American unionists. Bell describes the network that formed among the four and their varied stances on the challenges to the common project to (re)unify Great Britain and the United States, such as the racial status of Anglo-America, the place of Britain's empire therein, and the constitutional difference between the American republic and British monarchy. What makes this group cohere within the wider discourse is their commitment to an actual political union of the two states—the “maximalist” (13) variation on the ideal of Anglo-America.
In the second part of the book, without leaving Carnegie, Stead, Rhodes, and Wells behind, Bell widens his scope in a double sense: first, shifting from individual thinkers using the discourse of Anglo-America to an examination of the themes of that discourse; and second, incorporating non-maximalist adherents into the discussion. These actors either belonged to the “minimalist” (13) variation (among them Arthur Balfour and Theodore Roosevelt), entrusting racial solidarity to sustain and develop Anglo-American unity without institutional supports, or held a position between the two extremes (as did A. V. Dicey), advocating significant institutional measures short of political union.
In chapters 5 to 7, Bell identifies three themes of the wider discourse, beginning with the widespread use of nascent science fiction as a generic vehicle for both the expression and promotion of Anglo-American unionism. He then turns to the peculiar interest of various British and North American unionists in isopolitan citizenship as a means to bind the United States to Britain (Dicey takes center stage here). A discussion of race patriotism follows, in which Bell reveals unionists critiquing national patriotisms for being too parochial relative not to a global identity with humanity, but to a transnational identity with the Anglo-Saxon race. The final theme Bell develops is the entwinement of Anglo-America with the aspiration to perpetual peace. Typically, through a combination of hard power and moral example, and sometimes (as with S. W. Odell in The Last War; or, The Triumph of the English Tongue [1898]) through open acceptance or embrace of racial genocide, Anglo-American union was routinely figured as the means to abolish war.
As reconstructed by Bell, the discourse of Anglo-America was vast and therefore fractious. Participants debated constitutive questions about institutional order, racial(ized) inclusion and exclusion and the relative status of Britain and the United States. But throughout Dreamworlds of Race, Bell keeps the unifying, outer limit of the discourse in view: W. E. B. Du Bois's global color line dividing white from nonwhite in a relation of hierarchy. Bell has two theoretical meditations going on throughout Dreamworlds of Race, one on utopianism as a mode of political thought, of which Anglo-American unionism was an instance, the other on racialization as its structuring device. From the outset, Bell adopts a malleable category of race as “biocultural assemblage” (28), to capture a Victorian intellect that could combine in various ways biological and cultural arguments to racialize and evaluate large groups of people. In this way, a foundationally racialized idea of Anglo-America as Anglo-Saxon could be plausibly made to include populations that were ambiguous in the late-nineteenth century context of Anglo-Saxon self-understanding. Some of Bell's thinkers argued forcefully for the (possible) membership of Irish, Latin American, and Central and Eastern European populations in Anglo-America—but only those among them who could be plausibly racialized as white. Even within the extant borders of Britain and, especially, the United States, “the color line delimited the space in which variability could be expressed. Not all whites were Anglo-Saxon, but all Anglo-Saxons were white” (35).
Dreamworlds of Race is a characteristically precise work of discourse reconstruction. Consequently, the clearest means to extend Bell's achievement is an increase in scale. On the temporal axis, the particular, Victorian discourse of Anglo-American unionism could be situated in a longue durée of international thinking about transatlantic political formations, leading both forward and backward from the late nineteenth century. Spatially, more consideration might be given to the terms Anglo-Saxondom and Anglo-America as understood from without, or just the fringes. One of the most engrossing passages in Dreamworlds of Race is Bell's closing discussion of the Jamaican-born black intellectual, Theophilus Scholes (1858–1940), who identified British efforts to court the segregated United States as a direct cause of worsening racism in the Empire.
As hinted, the relative lack of a longue durée and large(r)-scale dimension is, to a significant extent, a logistical necessity of Bell's exercise. To develop such a close and intricate account of Anglo-American unionism, at a low level of abstraction, takes up a monograph. In this sense, I am recommending an augmentation of Dreamworlds of Race, not its revision. But a more panoramic historical view also returns some corrections or, at least, important clarifications. For instance, the first post-1783 project for a significant and (variably) institutionalized rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States came in the context of the Spanish American independence struggle. From the 1790s onward, Spanish American thinkers such as Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Guzmán (1748–1798) were proposing Anglo-American cooperation as a framework for ending Spanish empire. Both the United States and Britain were invited to the Congress of Panama (1826), whose most ambitious proponents were hopeful it would produce a new federation of states.
And the longue durée also clarifies Bell's important achievement with Dreamworlds of Race for intellectual history more broadly. Whereas Bell identifies the discursive terminus of Anglo-American unionism in the 1910s, where he ends the book, its influence on the later and ongoing language of the special relationship is undeniable. For those skeptical of this sort of intellectual historical exercise, whereby failed dreamworlds are examined in depth, Bell's work is a riposte. While the specific effort of Anglo-American (re)unification did not succeed, its remains have been cannibalized by Atlanticism, an idea that has played a world-ordering role since the 1940s. In the long view, there are additional measures of failure—and success.
