Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell, and: Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era by Oded Y. Steinberg

Reviewed by: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell, and: Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era by Oded Y. Steinberg Michael Ledger-Lomas (bio) Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell; i–xi and pp. 465. Princeton UP, 2020. $53.45 cloth. Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era by Oded Y. Steinberg; pp. 271. U of Pennsylvania P, 2019. $111.77 cloth. Race in recent scholarship is becoming the Copernican point around which the nineteenth-century world revolved. It has long been evident that many Victorians were guilty of reflexive colour prejudices, even when they resisted biological racism or were ostensibly committed to various forms of moral universalism. Yet historians now compete to ascribe ever-greater explanatory power to race, arguing that it dominated how Victorians thought about the past or imagined the national and imperial communities of the future. In modern scholarship, a racial hierarchy with whiteness at its apex increasingly fulfills the role once allocated to class, gender, or religion in explaining how Victorians carved up the world and why. If other sources of social distinction retain their interest, they often now do so on terms subordinate to that of race—as "racialized discourses." Two new books, by Duncan Bell and Oded Steinberg, are impressive contributions to this burgeoning historiography, but they also provoke doubts about whether nineteenth-century racial thought was sufficiently coherent or powerful to be the shaping force that historians now routinely claim it was. Duncan Bell's previous histories of Victorian political thought have laid bare its imperial passions. They exposed the "public moralists" who constitute the canon of nineteenth-century liberalism as enthusiasts for a "greater Britain" in which settlers planted the virtues of their homeland in the waste spaces of the earth. These ethnocentric liberals were in thrall to a "settler imaginary" that celebrated the displacement or subjugation of Indigenous peoples by roving Britons. But for that very reason they hoped to pull the various bits of the British world closer, promoting schemes of imperial federation that would durably realize global British supremacy. Yet Bell's latest book, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (2020), argues that what one observer called "Ethnological Chauvinism" (34) could blur as well as etch the boundaries of the British Empire in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on an Edwardian quartet of British utopians—the millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the newspaperman W.T. Stead, the adventurer Cecil Rhodes, and the literary futurologist H.G. Wells—who proposed to unite the Empire and the United States on the basis of their shared racial stock, which was "Anglo-Saxon" and "white," two terms that tended to coalesce in their speech. Although [End Page 299] these figures interest Bell as institutional "maximalists" (13) who sought to create concrete forms of Anglo-Saxon or anglophone unity ranging from constitutional confederation to binding arbitration in conflict, he suggests that the more numerous "minimalists," who contented themselves with vaguer talk of Anglo-American affinities (16), shared their racial utopianism. As he plausibly argues, the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a halcyon time to engage in "social dreaming" (1) of this kind, one in which technological advances, such as the telegraph, made hitherto unfeasible, far-flung forms of political community theoretically possible. Of course, new technology often does not work as it was supposed to do. Bell's fascinating chapter on "isopolitan" citizenship—a status shared across states and empires—presents it as a "constitutional technology" (267), which appealed to lawyer intellectuals such as Alfred Dicey or James Bryce as a way of explaining how one could be Canadian or Australian but also British. But the idea that it could be used to link Britain and the United States turned out to be mere political science fiction. Bell even devotes an entire chapter to analyzing some science fiction novels that seem to have been justly forgotten but nonetheless gave pungent popular expression to the more soberly expressed, but just as fantastical, ideas of his quartet. Bell's portraits of his...

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