Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality Book

After the recent mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, a number of journalists have written about the 'unprecedented' global transmission of white power ideology enabled by new technologies that resulted in the radicalization of the Australian man who carried out those heinous attacks. However, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show in Drawing the Global Colour Line, white identity politics throughout the Anglo-American world have been shaped by transnational networks of politicians, activists, and intellectuals for a very long time. The book focuses largely on the Pacific world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when steamships lowered costs of travel and agrarian distress in large parts of Asia led many Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and others to seek work in the white settler societies of the US, ANZAC, and South Africa. It shows how white politicians, intellectuals, and activists learned from each other and encouraged each other to restrict non-white immigration and prevent the integration of so-called 'Asiatics.' The authors suggest that anti-Asian legislation contributed to the rise of Japanese nationalism and hostility towards the US and UK. In light of the connections between far-right activists in the US, Europe, Brazil, and other white settler societies who are collectively promoting Islamophobia, indigenous dispossession, and cultural chauvinism with thinly veiled (or sometimes entirely unveiled) racial undertones, this book feels very timely and relevant, unfortunately.