The first book in a new series from Cambridge University Press (edited by Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, and Kathleen Wilson), Drawing the Global Colour Line provides an exemplary transnational history of the growth of racial exclusion legislation and of the conception of the “white man's country” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combining intellectual, social and political history, Lake and Reynolds have demonstrated how critical and nuanced histories of empire fit within the larger project of globally framed historical inquiry.

The authors use their first chapter to demonstrate their transnational approach, as they examine Californian and Australian responses to Chinese immigration in the mid-1800s. In particular, they emphasize the interactions of policy makers and anti-immigrant associations in both places as they developed a common vocabulary and case for Chinese exclusion and immigration restrictions. From this opening, Lake and Reynolds move to a wide-ranging discussion of the rise of influential publicists, politicians and academics who argued for the preservation of “white men's countries” in the face of significant migrations of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian workers, specifically in and around the Pacific region, and as a response to development of a powerful, reformist, and expansionist Japan. Especially significant were works by the British academic James Bryce and the Australian politician Charles Pearson, that were publicly embraced by no less a committed Anglo-Saxonist as Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, Lake and Reynolds demonstrate convincingly how widespread the work of Bryce and Pearson became. Proponents of the “White Australia” policy cited Pearson's arguments repeatedly in introducing their idea in 1901. In a separate chapter, Lake and Reynolds also note the impact this racial rhetoric had on M. K. Gandhi during his years in South Africa, driving his initial forays into civil disobedience against the government of Natal over restrictions on Indian migrants and ultimately convincing him of the impossibility of Indians’ attaining recognition as, in his words, part of “an Imperial brotherhood” (133).

In this first half of the book, Lake and Reynolds take great care not only to show how these ideas made their way around the world, but also to demonstrate the diversity of the arguments made for insuring the survival of white-ruled states. Bryce, Pearson, and others argued that political and national survival rested ultimately on racial homogeneity, but they came to this conclusion from different angles. Bryce saw the impossibility of multiracial democracy, predicting that the influx of “primitive” nonwhite peoples would fatally weaken a uniquely Anglo-Saxon capacity for self-government (64). On the other hand, Pearson, in his National Life and Character, argued in 1893 that white-run states would provide sanctuary and security to a race already threatened by nonwhite peoples and ultimately destined to lose global influence power as Asian states like China asserted themselves ever more vigorously. Pearson's argument influenced Roosevelt especially. Though the latter did not agree with Pearson's vision of a white race already in decline, Roosevelt certainly initiated efforts at the “re-invigoration of American manhood” and the expansion of American influence, largely through Pacific adventures and conflict in the 1890s, so as to insure against any potential future degradation of the state and its people (107).

The second half of the book traces the impact this racial thinking had on policy and legislation throughout what might be considered the Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking world. Interestingly, the authors also consider the ways in which the Japanese government sought equal footing with these other powers, especially in the aftermath of the First World War. The early twentieth century in fact saw a surge in restrictions on migration, notably in the Pacific, as well as the promulgation of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Both Canada and New Zealand emulated the “White Australia” model in cutting off almost all Asian immigration by the 1920s. As Natal had in the 1890s, both Canada and New Zealand turned to the American example of a literacy test as a means of restricting immigration, before simply banning it altogether. The American government's embrace of such tests for immigration control, in turn, represented an expansion of the strategy Southern states like Mississippi had already adopted by 1890 in order to disenfranchise African Americans after Reconstruction. In response to these measures designed to exclude Asian migrants especially, the Japanese government lobbied energetically for some redress, though, as the authors point out, Japan's representatives wavered at times between arguing for universal human rights and presenting Japan as far too advanced to rank alongside China or Korea.

Historians of empire will find much to take from this book, especially concerning Anglo-American relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Lake and Reynolds demonstrate just how influential the United States had become in the British Dominions and how much these colonial territories looked to America for precedent and guidance on issues of race. London's failure to sympathize sufficiently with Dominion desires for racial restrictions at times led Australian and Canadian leaders to muse aloud about bringing their states into even closer partnership with the Americans; such threats seemed to work at times, for the Dominions got British acquiescence in their “whites only” policies in the end. This work also suggests further avenues for historical investigation, particularly in regard to the idea of “imperial citizenship” and the related issue of the anomalous role the Government of India played as sometime-advocate for the Indian migrant community in the empire. The Rhodesian example of white rule is also worth further inquiry, for in the postwar world it and South Africa continued to draw economic and political support, and even some migration, from other white Dominions. It is to the great credit of the authors, and of the editors of this welcome new series, that they have not only provided us with such a detailed work, but that they also have suggested so many intriguing matters to consider and pursue in the future.