 to G. and the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War. Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His research has been on the history of modern political thought and contemporary international political theory. He's an incredibly prolific writer and has published widely on questions of empire, race and injustice in political theory and international relations, on technology and politics, on political aesthetics, particularly with a focus on architecture and speculative literature. Tonight's talk is on his latest book, or perhaps more correctly, on one of his latest books, as I mentioned before, Dream World's A Phrase, published by Princeton University Press just a few months earlier in 2020. Also last year, Duncan co-edited a book on political theory and architecture with Bernardo Zaka, published by Bloomsbury. As Duncan notes in the introduction to the book, Dream World's A Phrase can be read as a self-standing monograph, as well as the third book in a series on the British Empire. The previous two books were also published by Princeton University Press. So the first one, The Idea of Greater Britain, Empire and the Future of Old Order, 1860 to 900. And the second one, published not much earlier in 2019, Reordering the World, Essays on Liberalism and Empire, are both exploring imperial ideology and the entanglements between liberal political thought and settler colonialism. Dream World's A Phrase tells the story of what Duncan calls Anglo-Etopia, or the racial dream of Anglo-American Union at the end of the 19th century. It is also, I would say, a book that advances conceptual engagements with race and empire, for instance, by proposing to understand race as a bio-cultural assemblage, but also by proposing to, again, understand the technologization of race. But to leave ample time to discuss various aspects of the book, without further ado, I would like to turn to Duncan, who will speak for maybe 25 to 30 minutes. And then you will have the option of writing your questions in the question in the Q&A text box, and then we'll take the questions in turn. But for the moment, for the time being, Duncan, the virtual floor, I guess, is yours. And welcome again. Thank you very much, Claudia. So thanks for the kind invitation. Thanks to Claudia for agreeing to chair. I did my undergraduate degree in War Studies in the late 1990s, so it's great to be back, even if only virtually. My talk today is going to be in two parts, since I'm assuming that the vast majority of you, probably all of you haven't read the book, I'll start with a brief outline of some of its main arguments and themes. And then in the second part of the talk, I'll dig a bit deeper into one of the chapters. And since this is a Department of War Studies, I'll focus on the chapter that addresses arguments about war, race, and perpetual peace. And then after that, I look forward to answering some of your questions. So Dream Worlds of Race is a work of intellectual history, understood in a broad sense. It explores a wide range of arguments, discourse about visions of Anglo-American unification or integration at the turn of the 20th century. Between roughly 1880 and 1914, a substantial number of thinkers and political actors on both sides of the Atlantic pushed for the Union of Britain in the United States, with the aim of securing their joint geopolitical domination and leadership. Such projects assumed various forms, from loose inter-imperial cooperation through alliances of one kind or another, to full political integration, including the creation of a new federal or confederal state. Nearly all such projects were grounded in claims about the racial identity of Anglo-America. This was usually characterized as Anglo-Saxon or English speaking. Either way, it was an expression of white supremacism. It was claimed that the race needed to be unified politically to achieve its destiny to order the world. Now, in an earlier book that Claudia mentioned, The Idea of Greater Britain, I explored projects for unifying Britain and its settler colonies under the label of the Time Imperial Federation. This book complements that analysis by examining what I think of as the second axis of the Anglo-World. So whereas that book looked at Britain and its settler colonies, this book looked principally at Britain and the United States. There were some overlaps in these projects. Some people supported both simultaneous lives at work, but there are also some notable differences. One of the core arguments I make in the book is that many of the visions of Anglo-World unity can be seen as expressions of utopian desire. Indeed, I call them instances of racial utopianism. The core claim here was that unifying the race could create perpetual peace and some form of global justice. So I set a high bar for what counts as utopia here, and I suggest that this discourse or many of the people in it pass that bar. This isn't a set of global reforms. It's the fundamental transformation of an aspect of social reality, the abolition of warfare once and for all. I chose the title of the book, Dream World, to refer to the common references to social dreaming used by many Anglo-Unionists at the time, and also because that notion is quite common in utopian studies at the field. Many of my protagonists were well aware of the utopian character of their projects, but they didn't regard utopia as a synonym for unrealistic or impossible. Rather, they thought that racial utopia could be achieved through concerted political action. And I suggest that to understand the form and affective force of such claims, it's necessary to read them as an integral part of the burst of utopian thinking, proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. So this was a period as literary historians have long told us that we see an explosion of utopian thinking, the most famous writers being Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells, but there were hundreds of utopias published in the late 19th and early 20th century. And my suggestion here, my kind of analytical move, is to locate this geopolitical discourse as part of this burst of utopian thinking, as animated by many of the same concerns, as manifesting many of the same features and drawing on many of the same tropes, images, technological obsessions and fantasies. Another key theme in the book is the role of technology in shaping visions of race. I argue that many of the advocates of Anglo-World Union, imagine the Anglo-Saxon race as a form of as a form of cyborg, as a translocal fusion of humans and machines that exhibited a formal agency, even consciousness. So here I draw on literature from science and technology studies in particular to make an argument about the transformation of conceptions of race through technological innovation. To explore the Anglo-World discourse, I adopt two main strategies, which I think, or at least I hope, complement each other. So the first half of the book comprises chapters in which I give an in-depth interpretation of a group of prominent individuals. So I sort of really dig deep into their writings to try and pull out various aspects of their arguments. And the second half of the book is composed of chapters which give much more wide-ranging analyses of some key themes and concepts. So the four individuals who stand at the heart of the first part of the volume are Andrew Carnegie, Cecil Rhodes, W.T. Stead and H.G. Wells. Of course it's notable that these figures rarely, apart from possibly Wells, can be found in intellectual histories, but I argue that they can kind of stand the pressure here. In each chapter I offer a novel reading of their ideas, trace out the connections between them and embed their arguments in some wider debates. So for example, I read Carnegie in relation to debates about international law in the late 19th century and to debates around political theology. The second half of the book is composed of three thematic chapters. The first of these reads late Victorian science fiction in Britain and the United States, especially so-called invasion literature, as a powerful vehicle for exploring some of the radical racial futures found in the Anglo-world discourse. And I make an argument about how Anglo-topianism is actually central to the emergence of modern science fiction. The following chapter looks at a set of ideas around patriotism and citizenship and how they were unbundled from their traditional connection to territoriality and state sovereignty and rearticulated in relation to race. So I look in particular at two concepts, common or sometimes called isopolitan citizenship, which is a form of racial citizenship and the idea of race patriotism, the idea that one can be and should be a patriot for the race as well as sometimes even instead of being a patriot for the state. And the final chapter, substantial chapter looks at ideas about peace and war and it's that I'll return to in a minute. The conclusion of the book attempts something different from a conventional conclusion. Firstly, I jump per century forwards and explore some prominent science fiction writing from the 1980s and 1990s, especially so-called steam punk writing. And I try and set up a trans-temple dialogue about temporality and historical progress. The reason why I do this is that the people I'm interested in the end of the late 19th, early 20th century suggested that their Anglotopian vision was realizable by the millennium, roughly 100 years ahead. If you look 100 years ahead, some of their dreams came true, many of them didn't, but you find a burst of fictional writing looking back around a century and rewriting the history of Anglo-American relations and often drawing on some of the same figures, H.G. Wells figures and a lot of them Cecil Rhodes even. And so I'm interested in how we can think about time and history by juxtaposing these two related literatures. And in the final part of the conclusion, I explore some responses to Anglo-Saxonism from what Robert Gooding-Williams terms Afromodern thinkers. So in a book dedicated to an atomizing a prominent strand of white supremacist political writing, I wanted to end by looking at critiques from the outside, from very different voices, from those that were in many ways considered to be the subject of such white supremacism. And I focus here on the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and on a much less well-known figure, the Jamaican pan-Africanist based in Edinburgh and London, Theospliss Scholes. Now both of these discourses, the science fiction discourse from the end of the 20th century and the Afromodern discourse a century earlier too, have various things in common, not least that they challenge assumptions about history, time and progress, assumptions that underpin narratives about racial domination and destiny. Okay, so that's a very brief overview of what's a long and pretty detailed book. In the remainder of the talk, I'm going to say some more about one of the chapters. And as I mentioned, because this is a war studies department, I'm going to talk about chapter six, which is dedicated to what I think of as the utopian core project for Anglo-American reunion, the idea of perpetual peace. I opened the chapter with a quote from Sir George Gray, a former colonial governor, who said in the 1890s, to all intents and purposes, war would by degree die out from the face of the earth. It would become impossible if the Anglo-Saxons united about it. He continued, if you had the Anglo-Saxon race acting on common ground, they could determine the balance of power for a fully peopled earth. That's this kind of claim, which I term the racial peace thesis that I try and make sense of in this chapter. I do so firstly by contextualizing racial peace arguments in relation to a wider set of arguments about peace, democracy, empire, race and war. Debates over future war at the time contain many strands, some innovative, others long established. What I call the empire peace thesis was an example of the latter, whereas the democratic war thesis was an example of the former, so I'll briefly discuss those. Democratic war arguments came in weak and strong versions, I suggest. The weaker and more common variant contended that democracies offered new channels for the expression of violence. Democratic norms and structures neither eliminated war nor dampened its frequency. So you'll see here that this is an inversion of the democratic peace thesis as we know it today. This is the argument that democracies either facilitate war or do even more than that. So William James in the famous essay called The Moral Equivalent of War gave an example of this weak form. He suggests that very little changes by democracy spreading. Why? Because as he continues, the popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch and no ruler can withstand it. Regine types are not going to affect the incidence, the frequency of war. But there's a stronger version of this argument which is that democracies were especially prone to violence. They were more war-like than other kinds of regimes. This is the direct inversion of some claims that have been made about democracy. H. G. Wells adopted a version of this argument. He contended that the spread of representative democracy would result in spirals of destruction as democratic politicians fueled anxiety about external threats to retain power. So for Wells, the logic of electoral competition amplified by the enveloping mediocrity of the political elite, meant that war was an inescapable outcome of democratic politics. In 1915, Du Bois outlined an innovative imperial variant to the democratic war argument. He suggested that the principal cause of the unfolding global conflagration was to be found in intra-European imperial competition. But this competition had been shaped by the growth of democratic politics. No longer able to exploit their workers in the traditional manner, capitalists had formed a racialized alliance with labor and looked outwards for new spaces and populations to exploit. And so for Du Bois, late 19th century burst of imperial expansion, above all in Africa, was integrally related to the extension of the franchise of the working classes. So there you have a set of arguments that move beyond or deny or even invert the longer standing claim traced back to the 18th century and popular and peace movements in the first half of the 19th century that democracies would help to bring about war. By the late 19th century, there was deep skepticism about this. We also find something that I call the empire peace thesis. And this posited that war could be diminished or even eliminated in a world managed by great empires. And again, it came in two main variants. So the inter-imperial form claimed that global stability could be secured by a system of imperial coordination, in which the dominant imperial powers in the system maintained order by limiting the number of autonomous polities through both formal and informal modalities of rule. In other words, you can dampen the security dilemma, maybe even eliminate it entirely, by reducing the number of units in the international system, largely by conquering and ruling them. The alternative was a hegemonic imperial argument, which postulated that one dominant empire was necessary to secure peace and stability. And unsurprisingly, British thinkers typically assign this role to themselves, boasting of their unique combination of strategic capacity and political virtue. And such arguments had internal and external dimensions. Internally, it was argued that empires had the capacity to impose peace on territories within their jurisdiction. They pacified previously or potentially warring peoples. In the larger the empire, the more of the earth it could pacify internally. It's kind of a standard argument for Pax Britannica, very common in British imperial discourse at the time. But due to their size, economic strength and military capabilities, empires could also exert a pacifying influence outside their territory, or so it was claimed. They could either balance other polities, or in the hegemonic fair into the argument, they could dominate the system by outmatching opponents, deterring violence, or intervening to bring conflicts to an end. So British imperial propagandists routinely placed claims about peace at the core of their justificatory arguments. However, implausible it may seem to us today. And it was in this context, context of arguments around democracy, peace, empire, race and war, that we see claims about anglotopia emerging. Most proponents of the racial peace thesis spent little time discussing how Anglo-America would abolish war. But it was a common claim, all four of my main protagonists, for example adopted a version of it, as did many others, including many of the science fiction writers who I mentioned in another chapter. We can discern though two broad lines of argument that were into oven. One of them focused on brute geopolitical power. So the claim was that combined military and industrial resources of Anglo-America, when combined as a single unit, would be so overwhelming that no other polities would seek to challenge it or each other. They would simply disarm or not bother to try to exert power. The other line of argument here focused on moral suasion. The example that would be set by Anglo-America as a vast progressive democratic industrial polity would supposedly impress other peoples throughout the world so much that they would seek to imitate it. So rather than trying to compete with it, let alone try to fight it, they would simply imitate it. They would accept its leadership. These claims were underwritten by an argument about legitimacy. Anglo-America could and should claim a privileged role due to its unique political virtues. Now as justificatory arguments varied, so too did institutional prescriptions for realising Anglotopia. The specific mechanisms, in other words, that were supposed to turn a warlike world into one dominated by peace. And again, this was somewhat underdeveloped, shall we say, in the writings that I studied. But two popular themes that are apparent were international arbitration and naval supremacy. So advocates of the former thought that the creation of a system of arbitration, starting of a treaty between the United States and Britain, was vital for restricting interstate conflict. Once this system was put in place, other institutional connections could then be built. So it was a kind of prerequisite for many people that Britain and the United States would themselves form a kind of legal bond outlawing war, or at least leading to arbitration. And then that could then spiral out through the rest of the system. The naval supremacy argument was pretty straightforward. If you combine the navies of Britain and the United States, it will give you dominant naval power in the world, considerably more powerful than the others. And this could play a role in deterring and policing the oceans of the world. Now the racial utopians disagreed about the role of violence in fashioning these four world. If anything, this was the major division that ran between them. For many, including Carnegie instead, the transition from a world of war to a world of peace would itself be peaceful. Though it ultimately, of course, depended on the threat of violence held by Anglo-American military force. But nevertheless, it wouldn't require war, it wouldn't require violence to bring about peace. Their utopianism thus encompassed both the mechanisms and the telos of transformation. So Carnegie was convinced, for example, that the unification of Britain and the United States would inaugurate an unprecedented era of peace. As he wrote, the new nation would dominate the world and banish from the earth its greatest stain, the murder of men by men. And this transition would be peaceful because the United Anglo-America was simply unassailable. As he wrote, such a giant among Pygmies would never need to exert its power, but only to intimate its wishes and decisions. Global disarmament, he suggested, would invariably follow as no other states would need to maintain military forces. So in a racialized account of unipolarity, Carnegie reasoned that the United Anglo-Polity would simply deter all competitors. But other racial utopians, notably H.G. Wells, argued that war would be necessary to secure peace. In fact, he argued that war would probably persist for decades to come, because many people's around the world would reject the kind of inherent logic of overarching political communities of which the Anglo-Topian one would be the key and most important. This then was the core claim, the core utopian commitment of the Anglo-Unionists. Racial integration could create, and in fact, was the only way of creating perpetual peace. So as well as being expressed by Carnegie, Stead, Rhodes and Wells, as I suggested, it was found throughout the Unionist discourse, including in the science fiction literature that I mentioned earlier. And while it sounds absurd today, at the time white supremacism was tied closely to Racine as the main vehicle for many of long-standing dreams for perpetual peace. Okay, I'll leave it there for today. Thanks very much for listening, and I look forward to your questions. Excellent. Thank you so much, Duncan. I think we have already got a couple of questions. So I think while others maybe are kind of writing down their notes, I suggest that we take maybe the first question. I'm not sure that you can see it as well. So the first question comes from Julia Hodgins. And I think to try to summarize it, to try to summarize it, she is, well, she starts with the idea that every society has and had a former social organization generally manifested in a hierarchy. However, I'm going further down, it is out of the mold the way in which the white Anglo-European has been perpetuated for many centuries and keep resiliently surviving despite being a demographic minority on the planet. This fact is used by white supremacists as the sign of superiority. I would like to ask you what could be the pivoting feature that underpins that resilient survival? I'm not quite sure what the white Anglo-European is, but you know. Yeah, I'm not sure I've got a general answer to that. I mean, my project is very much a kind of intellectual history rather than a kind of wider sweeping, kind of world historical text about Anglo-America of the kind that some of my Jamie Belich has written. So I would recommend looking at his work if you're interested in the kind of economic drivers of capitalism that were involved in, for example, the kind of by the late 19th century, the economic dominance of Anglo-American world. But the core argument there, the core point that the people I'm interested in cited particularly military superiority as legitimating their claims to rule is pervasive in the discourse that I'm interested in. I run it through the book. They claimed that because they had the technological genius to invent weapon systems, which then allowed them to suppress imperial subjects around the world, that wasn't only a kind of brute military fact. It actually gave them some kind of moral superiority too, because it spoke to their claims for technological and scientific genius, which were taken to be central to national character and racial character, that then allowed them to kind of dominate and rule the world. So technology was never just seen as a kind of instrumental device that could be used to help rule. It was also used as part of the justificatory arguments for why some people should rule others in the first place. We've got a second question from Angus Riley, which I think is asking you, it's really interesting. It is asking you to reflect on how the movement you write about, so Anglo-Utopian movement, relates to other pan-national movements of the late 19th century in Europe, which manifested in wars and revolutions. For instance, Pan-Italianism, Germanism, Pan-Slavism. Yeah, it's a good question. So it's not a taller coincidence that you get this pan movement emerging at that time. There are many pan movements around the world, not just in Europe. And I see this as one of those several animated by many of the same, particularly technological fantasies about the ability to create massive social and political communities across space in the way that previously hadn't been possible. It's also a period in which the future territorial ordering of the world is up for grabs in a way. There's considerable anxiety about the future of empire and its ability to be maintained amongst European elites, while at the same time, there's also those United States pushing for the creation of an empire. It's not clear yet whether the nation state will be the normative model for politics that we so often take it to be today. And so the kind of organizing principles were up for grabs and that was reflected in a lot of the political debate. So many of the people I'm looking at were pretty skeptical about the state as being the key political unit of politics. Some of that Cecil Rhodes, for example, who might associate with a very strong kind of British nationalism perhaps, was perfectly happy to imagine the future capital of this racial political community alternating between Washington and the United States. And he thought the British constitution was thoroughly obsolete and the American constitution would be much better as a model for governing the politics. So it's not a surprise that you've got plenty of people who are interested in forms of aggregated political communities, confederations, federations, world states. So again, one difference I didn't talk about in my talk is that some of the people I'm interested in, Wells as an example, saw Anglo Union as a step on the road to a world state. And Wells himself was predicting that there'd be a variety of other agglomerations of peoples around the world, Pan-Latin community, Pan-Asian community, which would all eventually merge into a world state. He happened to think that the Anglo-American one would be the dominant one, at least for the meantime. Others essentially saw an upscaling of interstate competition. So you would get no world state at the end of this, but you'd get competition between massive political communities and that the Anglo would dominate. But they were foreseeing European Union, they were foreseeing potential unions in Asia. So it was widely thought at the time that the 20th century would see a variety of different aggregated communities emerging. And so quite often they were talking about other forms of Pan-Africanism being one, but Pan-Germanic political entities would be another, Pan-Asian, yet another. So this is part of that. And what the people I'm interested in, kind of particular white supremacist vision was that they wanted to dominate this future system. And they thought that that was possible by joining together with the United States. But one of the reasons that they wanted to join was because if they didn't join, some of these other political communities might end up more powerful. So it provided a kind of impetus for pushing this particular kind of vision. I've got some more questions. They're just on two screens now because some of them are on the chat and some of them are on the Q&A. So apologies. I'm going to try to take Greg's question from the chat. So who says the need for racial coherence and unity is as much about race for racist's sake or does it act as a metaphor for economic cohesion and supremacy, which leads to military slash naval, technological and market superiority? So is it race or is it capitalism? A distinct form of capitalism or the critical hub is the city of London and Wall Street, I guess that link more so than other intellectual connections. So I guess the question is about race and capitalism as far as I understand it. Well, certainly for the people that I'm interested in, race is not just a kind of instrumental thing that can be tied to capitalism. It's kind of a reverse in a way. The success of Anglo-American capitalism is a function of racial superiority for the people that I'm interested because again, like technological sophistication that they boast about, it's taken to be a manifestation of what it was that partially defined the so-called genius of the race. So they're not separable, but race is fundamental to this, not least because for these people and particularly the historical stories they tell about the emergence of this, these racial formations precede the emergence of capitalism. So they're not created by capitalism. Capitalism emerges from them. So make of these claims what you will and I'm certainly not here to defend them, but that's the way in which they kind of configured it. So the way I put it in the book is that for the thinkers I'm interested in, race is the basic ontological unit of politics and of social life more broadly. Race is fundamental for them, but they do define race in a variety of different ways and I've got a long discussion in the introduction and it reappears throughout the book about differences between how they conceptualized race, but there were also some overarching similarities. So while the way in which they could define English-speaking peoples might vary in so far as someone would emphasize the common law ahead of a shared history, someone else would prefer the history or the actual focus on the language, it was bounded by a color line. So that was what you might think of as a kind of mutable cultural core to a vision of race which was bounded by whiteness essentially. So on this kind of view European immigrants to the United States could become Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking peoples whereas African Americans or say South Asians and the British Empire this was not an option available to them. So race was both fluid to an extent but also fixed and it was this kind of combination of features which you find running through the discourse, but there is some variation between individuals. But certainly I don't think that this is something that kind of comes as it were and that comes after capitalism. I think this is on their account, race is the fundamental feature, not capitalism. And in fact one of the books I spend quite a lot of time looking at is an anti-capitalist socialist science fiction novel called The Angel of the Revolution. The image on the front cover of my book is taken from that. It foresees or predicts or dreams of the end of capitalism pushed by the Anglo white supremacist racial vision that I'm looking at. But that's unusual. Most of the rest of the accounts tie capitalism and this vision of race very tightly together suggesting that they're related in so far as the best capitalists typically the Anglo-Saxons. But there was no necessary connection there. It could also be tied to a form of anti-capitalism as it was in George Griffith's novel. It is indeed quite unusual to have an anti-capitalist novel that somehow kind of places, you know, race on the global color line in the sense of anti-capitalism. Yeah, so it's extraordinary and extraordinarily weird novel. We have quite a lot of questions. So I'm following the chat and I'm going to, you know, if you've asked your question on the Q&A, please don't worry, just bear with us. I'll come back to the Q&A, but I'll go through the chat and can I ask everyone to maybe move to the Q&A so we can have one screen. So I'm going to move now to Jason's question. Why did this particular identity emerge in this particular time but not earlier? Yeah, so it's a good question. I mean, there are of course antecedents to this, but the argument I'm making this book and also in my prior work is that there is something quite distinctive about late 19th century. And the thing that I focus on principally is actually technology. So it's a cognitive revolution, as I put it, precipitated by the communications revolution of the era. So there's a sense in which particularly the electrical telegraph and it's the undersea cables which allow it to go global, but also imminent fantasies about flight and to some extent also ocean traversing steamships lead to a perception that time and space have been fundamentally transformed. So the collapse of time and space is a phrase which is often thought of as a kind of 1990s globalization and Anthony Giddens style catchphrase is actually prevalent in the late 19th century. There's a real sense in which global geography has been fundamentally transformed by these new technological developments and that this allows for a sense of thick political identity across what previously would have seen distances which disallowed it. So just as an example in one of the most influential books on the empire in the second half of the 19th century J.R.C. leads the expansion of England, he refers to Canada as the equivalent of Kent, an English county. The Atlantic Ocean is now irrelevant for thinking about political identity. So in the 18th century of course there were settlers in the United States and they were thought of in some senses being members of the same political community as those in Britain, but there's a real sense in the late 19th century, a felt sense common amongst the people I look at who reflect on this all the time that there's something new about that period in that era that there's a way in which political community both can be rethought but also needs to be rethought because geography itself has been fundamentally transformed by technology. So that's why I mean there's other things too there's a whole series of things going on in the late 19th century unsurprisingly but I think that's at the very core of it. It's that there's a sense in which the world is both shrinking and speeding up and that new political forms are needed to make sense in this emerging world. We might come back to the question of technology later on but now I want to move to Ely Kramer Taylor who is placing you know your focus on the kind of full key figures in a broader political question. So she's asking to what extent were the ideas of the individuals you look at taken seriously by mainstream political actors at the time. For instance the political leaders of the British or American state were the influential It's a good question. So I mean the most fantastical visions that I'm interested in which is to say the idea that Britain and the United States should form a new state together obviously didn't get that much traction amongst elected officials. Although there was quite a lot of sympathy for other slightly less radical visions and so in the introduction to the book I actually discussed Theodore Roosevelt and A.J. Balfour at British Prime Minister, Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies all of whom were I would suggest kind of Anglo Unionists but of a much more institutional modest kind. So the kind of thing they were proposing was much closer interimperial cooperation various forms of coordination, various treaty forms and various new forms of military collaboration but grounded in claims about racial identity and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and so on. So that would be my first point the kind of properly fantastical visions for fairly obvious reasons I didn't get much traction amongst the political leaders in or at least the elected leaders in the United States and Britain but there was a much wider sense which did include some of those of this Unionist discourse and of fantasies of the Anglo-Saxons as being the peacemakers of the 20th century of being those that were destined to govern those that were destined to order. That'd be my first point my second point would be that the figures that I'm looking at and in particular Rhodes and Carnegie are very very influential figures so I'm not looking at a series of kind of you know stereotypical ivory tower philosophers although I also look at some of those you know Carnegie was the richest man in the world and he had very easy access to both US presidents and British prime ministers and in fact quite a lot of his private correspondence with these figures is trying ultimately failing to persuade people who he's regularly hanging out with who happen to be running both countries of the benefits of this kind of thing. W.T. Stead was the most influential journalist in the British Empire famously as the headline in the newspaper had it the most famous man to die on the Titanic. He again had very significant political access and influence well slightly less so although it was by the time he was writing this kind of stuff one of the best known writers in the world and Rhodes was the most infamous stroke famous imperialist of the day so these people were the political elite in a sense with the partial exception of Wells there but it is true that their most radical vision didn't translate into policy for sure so this is an intellectual history I'm particularly interested in the bits that didn't come true as it were because plenty of historians have looked at this period and these debates as part of the kind of rapprochement between the United States and Britain which formed the basis for the so-called special relationship in the 20th century there's plenty of diplomatic and political history being written about this but I'm interested in particular about these utopian fantasies and how these tie in with wider cultural concerns about social dreaming about yeah world transformation and so on. As you as you ended with you know dreams utopian history I turn now to Andrew's question Andrew Earhart was actually one of the panelists who says thanks for your excellent talk Duncan I'm wondering about the way which these individuals were using history to inform their conceptions of the future did they idealize or romanticize certain periods in antiquity and a related point did any of these figures harbor what you might call a philosophy of history i.e. did they see a purpose or direction of history? Yeah it's a very good question it's very hard one to answer briefly but a simple answer is yes there was an awful lot of philosophizing about history and there are quite I mean so the reason it's hard to answer is it wasn't a single view on this but there were a considerable number who wrote extensively about history and in fact quite a number of historians particularly in the United States were part of this discourse and so material that's been written about widely by other scholars on tutanist and Aryan visions of racial history underpinned quite a lot of these arguments so for example Andrew Carnegie drew a lot on EA Freeman's historical writings Freeman himself although not a full-on institutional utopian of the kind I'm interested in was very clearly attracted to the view about the racial identity of the Anglo-American world the tutanist vision that underpinned actually the origins of political science as a discipline and modern history writing as a discipline in the United States and Britain at the time so I have quite a lot in the book on that so if you're interested there is a fair amount about the role that history plays in underpinning these I mean a simple idea here is that there is a kind of directionality to history with race as the key unit that's driving it and that what you find is a movement from the east to the west of historical leadership essentially particularly of the tutans so the tutans originally from Germany and on an Aryanist vision of that picture they're actually originally from from Asia but by the time they get to Europe and become manifest in the medieval forest clearings of Germany where they supposedly invent freedom they then keep moving westward they find an expression in Britain and their ultimate destiny is the United States manifested in this kind of Anglo vision so there's a kind of historical picture that moves across time and also across space that underpins quite a lot of this now not everyone buys into that so for example Wells is very skeptical about these kind of visions but it's certainly there instead it's certainly there some of them also had a theological dimension to it so yes there's an awful lot going on in terms of philosophy of history here as there is an encounter so what I discuss when I'm discussing particularly Du Bois and Scholes is how they write a counter historical narrative so one of the things that they're both interested in for example is arguing that the ancient Egyptians were black so an argument that's actually traceable in African American historical writing to the late 18th century but becomes particularly popular again in the late 19th century and is used as a counter narrative to white supremacist visions of history so history is employed repeatedly here as a battleground for either underpinning or challenging claims to racial superiority and destiny so it's actually a theme that runs through the book if you're interested in it it's absolutely central to what's going on at this period so you're on yeah I just realized yeah um sorry about that so I'm going to turn now to the questions in the Q&A because we've got quite a few and I realized we are quickly running out of time so I'm going to take Mira Somji's question she says thank you for the sharing I'm used to hearing about the civilizing mission as the key justification for the expansion in Africa in particular for instance looking at how the Berlin conference in 1884 was framed as part of the liberal project an abolition of slavery is it fair to say that you feel this justification has been overstated and that naval slash military slash technologically superiority was more dominant than we realize uh thanks thanks Mira um no I don't think that they're that different necessarily I mean I see versions of what my that my kind of cast in this book are interested in is a version of a civilizing mission um so yeah I don't see these things as completely separate it is worth saying that not all of the people that I'm interested in were straightforward imperialists so for example Carnegie called for the immediate dissolution of the British Empire he thought that India should be given independence immediately he was deeply critical of British imperialism with an important footnote the exception of settler colonialism but nevertheless he thought that Britain shouldn't be um creating or sustaining an empire in Africa the Caribbean or in India and he was also one of the best known so-called anti-imperialists in the United States so he was one of the most high-profile opponents of the war in 1898 in the Spanish-American war but he nevertheless was a racial supremacist who thought that this kind of project of unification would help to order and police the world so imperial arguments and these kind of racial domination arguments often went together that they weren't identical they could pull in slightly different directions likewise you could justify imperialism without buying into some of these grandiose claims about racial identity particularly the similarity between Britain and the United States you may well actually see the United States as the main threat that faces Britain rather than someone that should be you know aligned with so so they're overlapping discourses but they're not identical it's one of the themes I explore throughout the book is how the different people I'm interested in saw the role of empire differently and some and justified it somewhat differently so now I do think civilizing mission arguments are central to particularly liberal but the more broad 19th century British justification of empire and it overlaps considerably with what's going on here and technology is central to the civilizing mission itself because again it's one of the things that's taken to make a polity civilized is that it has techno scientific mastery of some kind and that then ordains it with this role to spread it elsewhere let's move to Aaron Dawson's question so you mentioned Cecil Rhodes as one of the main protagonists how I received was his encouragement of Germany's inclusion within the Anglo-Saxon family how did this differ from the status of more closely related countries such as Ireland Australia Canada New Zealand and South Africa and can I add something here about you know race and the global color line because I was wondering how in this debates races kind of emerge as sorts of hierarchies of humanities right so you where you didn't have for instance just the Anglo-Saxon kind of white race versus an idea of blackness but you have a more hierarchized type of different races right at different levels of more or less human or sub human yeah absolutely I mean it's a fundamental hierarchical vision at play here and the hierarchy intersects with the color line at some point but it's not identical because there's a hierarchy within whiteness here so the claim is typically that the Anglo-Saxons are superior to other Europeans but that the other Europeans plus the Anglo-Saxons broadly speaking constitute the civilized world and that the color line is then you know drawn and below that are arrayed the rest of the world's population themselves in a hierarchy so typically and again you know this has been very widely studied by historians you know at the very bottom of this are supposed to be things like people like the indigenous populations in Australia so who for most 19th century commentators were kind of destined for extinction and you know near the top of that would be some of the so-called warlike tribes in India who were regarded as you know very fine soldiers and so there's a hierarchy all the way down but there's a hierarchy within whiteness as well as for other peoples the roads and Germany point picks out a more general issue actually which is the status of Germany within all of these debates so Germany is the source for many of these people of the Teutonic race which they themselves now are the latest manifestation of and so very few of them thought that Germany should be part of this picture but there was a considerable degree of sympathy with Germany up until the decade and a half before the First World War where it begins to switch so Germany is often seen as an ally potential ally with the Anglo world but then as war begins to approach and many many people were predicting war with Germany for quite a long time before it happened states of Germany switches quite a lot and that's true in the road scholarships too so although it's there in roads as well at various points Germans were excluded from road scholarships so there's a kind of interesting history as to how that kind of comes in and out but it wouldn't have surprised many people that roads was sympathetic to the Teutons as the Germans are often seen because they were seen as kind of racial kin not as part of the Anglo world but as very close to it and as part of its history in a way. I have one question from Ahu Kuches Fahani how important was the use of literature in expanding the ideas of the movement? It's a good very good question I mean I think it was vital so I have a say a long chapter on fictional writing in here and this was not high high end literature should we say I mean these were kind of best selling pulp science fiction texts and they were used I mean invasion literature was used as a form of political commentary at the time some some of these novels were extremely popular now how much impact they had in changing people's minds who knows it's not something I investigate but certainly there was a felt sense amongst the people who were composing this that fiction could be an extremely useful vehicle for helping to propagate their ideas but also to explore and extrapolate and expand on the kind of fantasies that they were having separate from that their stories about what made the Anglos great also emphasised literature a lot so there's a lot of discussion about Shakespeare and the Bible and Milton and what was supposedly great about being an Anglo-Saxon or English speaker is a literary heritage and so again I have a discussion of that in the in the book but this is repeatedly emphasised and above all is a quote from Tennyson Tennyson's the kind of poet who's quoted the most in this discourse about one of one of his famous poems is probably the most commonly cited bit of fictional writing in in the discourse so yeah it's important literature's front and centre in a lot of this discussion. Schiffon McShane's question actually ties in a little bit do you have any thoughts on how the comparative method for instance comparative linguistics mythology etc are fed in today's what are the thoughts of returning to some kind of golden age of racial racial linguistic unity. So that I mean these arguments were justified in a variety of ways not always compatible but one of the strands was philological and so the comparative method or broadly speaking not just comparative linguistics but the comparative method associated with figures like Henry Main and B.A. Freeman was an important strand of this. Max Muller's linguistics were cited by various people too talking about the kind of Aryan origins of language and so on so there is a strand of this in there but similar H.G. Wells for example was utterly dismissive of these philological justifications for race he thought they were absurd pseudo-science he justified it in a different way and in his case it was a specific focus on the English language as it was currently constituted not in some historical story about its racial development and a series of economic and technological and political similarities and so I wouldn't want to generalize to say that linguistics was is it what kind of constitutive of this discourse it wasn't but there was a strand of this discourse group of thinkers who looked heavily and lent heavily upon some of the philological discourse and more broadly upon comparative studies yeah um as we're running out of time we have two questions I would like to take together because they both kind of link your talk to the present so first from Wakara Zaidi asks about how these visions by remain in place in modern modern steampunk revival and the second question is actually about Kenzak the Kenzak partnership agreement that you have written about so maybe I don't know we can we can add the link actually to the article so there is an article on this but we have a few minutes if you'd like to to say something about thanks no I mean it's an obvious kind of question in a way it's like what what happened to these ideas um I don't discuss that huge amount in the book partly because I have done this to some extent elsewhere as I Cloudy mentioned I've published an article on Kenzak with Serjan Faketec which looks at a revival of interest actually more specifically an imperial federation arguments than this wider kind of Anglo discourse that that's more to do with the kind of Anglosphere as a as a concept which is the latest incarnation of of these kind of ideas so I've discussed this elsewhere it's partly for that reason that I didn't do that in the conclusion to this book so I briefly mentioned it obviously but I then switch tack of it and do this other stuff partly because I just didn't want to repeat myself and partly because I thought there was there was some interesting things to be said about the the science fictional literature and and the kind of Afro modern critique that I wanted in the book so there are clear similarities not least this obsession with what you might call a kind of settler imaginary the kind of conglomeration of Anglo-America Australia Canada New Zealand but there are also differences I don't want to suggest that what we see now is identical to what we saw earlier as far as I'm concerned that the biggest difference is actually that the kind of utopian dimension that I focus on so much in this has largely disappeared from contemporary Anglo discourses I mean you could call them utopian in the sense you might call unrealistic or you could call them utopian in so far as they make some pretty bold claims about you know what angle what the Anglesfield supposedly do but nothing that I've read reaches the kind of pitch of utopianism that I discuss in relation to the earlier discourse so contemporary Anglesphere advocates are not suggesting that it will bring about perpetual peace for example so I do see continuities for sure but I also think that there are some significant differences in the discourse and so I don't want to suggest and it'd be very surprising if there weren't frankly I mean this was a very long time ago in many ways I think that the first world war has a significant effect in knocking out the kind of most radical utopianism you do find examples of it after that going into the mid 20th century there are a handful but it's a much more concentrated pre-world war one fantasy and something similar happens to utopian writing in general so again it's something that I think that's why it's important to locate this within that broader discourse in terms of steampunk what happens I mean very very quickly and crudely is that in a lot of key a lot of key steampunk texts certainly not all Anglo-America is a central focus and so I look at something like the difference engine probably the most significant steampunk text and what happens is that the British Empire persists on these counterfactory workings of the 20th century whereas the United States even never gets off the ground or ends up being destroyed or defeated or absorbed and so you just have this intriguing playing around with this notion of temporality so decline and fall doesn't happen but nor does the ascent of America which would come to dominate the Anglosphere on virtually all these other pictures I'm looking at so all of my people saw that the US would actually be the key figure the key power within the future Anglo world whereas the steampunk literature in its first generation kind of turns this on its head and the British Empire persists and the US never really takes on that powerful role so I explore that and how it kind of slightly challenges some of these underlying visions but the much more thoroughgoing critique of the temporality is in the Afro-modern discourse which takes a kind of fundamental sledgehammer to the historical claims about racial destiny and superiority that are made that underpin the kind of white supremacist discourse so I'm not suggesting that they're equivalent in the degree of their critique and in fact I don't see the steampunk literature as making critique in particular I'm just interested in how that kind of counterfactual fictional reworkings of this relationship that I've explored allow us to say some things about the importance of time and history underpinning those narratives and also the fact that fiction is again taken to be the key source of it so one of the fictional texts I look at takes Cecil Rhodes as its key figure and imagines him living long past his death and playing a key role in shaping the 20th century so there's just some very neat connections between some of the figures that I'm interested in from the late 19th century and how they were reimagined in speculative literature towards the end of the 20th century. Excellent thank you so much Duncan it's been a tour de force and thank you to everyone who has asked question I am aware that there are you know a few points we haven't managed to touch on and I had my own questions particularly about methodology I wanted to bring about I think you know your composite methodology as you as you noted in the beginning but I think yeah an absolutely amazing talk this is what Sam went and says I'm reading this out because I agree there are other points around again connections or the kind of co-constitution of race and capitalism that we've got some more questions on and as well a question that I think we can close with quickly from Julia whether you would agree or the greed of races invented race might as well be quickly yes so and I think yes that's everyone you can I'm not sure whether you can see in the chat but basically there are a lot of thank yous and thank you to me and thank you to the thank you to the audience as well and thank you really really for you know the rich questions that you have asked and thank you very much everyone for listening in and for asking your questions I'm sorry I couldn't get to answer them all answer them in as much length as they they no doubt deserved but thank you very much thank you thank you again Duncan for a fascinating talk and for covering so many aspects and so many questions so we'll say goodbye to everyone who has joined us tonight and I guess we will just remain for a couple of minutes on here okay thank you