An apex of the racialization of the world

Duncan Bell’s Dreamworlds of Race is the conclusion of his loose trilogy on British metropolitan settler-imperial imaginaries in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. In The Idea of Greater Britain (2007) Bell explored various projects for unifying the transoceanic British settler empire conceived by an array of notable figures, including J.R. Seeley, J.A. Froude, E.A. Freeman, Charles Dilke and James Bryce. Reordering the World (2016) was his attempt to broadly situate in a liberal tradition many of the figures and projects analyzed in The Idea of Greater Britain, highlighting the fraught or complicit relationship between British liberalism, colonial rule and racism. In this second work of his trilogy, he investigated the subject of a liberal ambivalence about the British Empire: the position that exalted the perceived civilizational benefits of settler colonialism accompanied by a dilemma of intraracial equality and interracial exclusivism, but also that condemned other forms of imperial expansion. J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism, which attacked British capitalist warlike imperialism in search of a new colonial market while nevertheless applauding the spread of the white settler empire as “genuine Colonialism,” would be a stellar example of this ambivalence (1902: 131–3). Dreamworlds of Race overlaps with the preceding two titles in its coverage of thinkers, themes and time period. With respect to themes dealt with, Dreamworlds of Race is parallel to The Idea of Greater Britain and Reordering the World in addressing the transformative capacity of technoscience, British settler-imperial unification, Anglo-Saxon supremacism and the power of historical narrative to shape political ambition. The book’s time frame focused on the turn of the nineteenth/ twentieth centuries—an apex of modernity stricken with fears of British imperial decline—also chimes in with the previous two titles. However, Dreamworlds of Race is unique in its main spatial focus. Unlike the previous two books, it foregrounds the

turn-of-the-centuries debate and network about the integration of the transatlantic axis of the Angloworld, namely, Britain and the United States. It demonstrates the various patterns of Anglo-American unificatory proposals with a specific attention to four celebrities: the billionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the controversial journalist W.T. Stead, the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and the visionary novelist H.G. Wells (chapters 2, 3 and 4).
It is also notable that in Dreamworlds of Race, Bell applies Reinhart Koselleck's argument to explicitly frame up those Anglo-American unificatory proposals with an idea of futuristic utopianism (Koselleck 2002). Bell thus claims that they represented a critical moment in the development of modern utopian thought, which marked the era of "racial utopianism." Some exponents of Anglo-American union even offered the view of "Anglotopia"-the idiosyncratic belief that perpetual peace could be brought about through Anglo-Saxon supremacy (2020: 4, 25). While such Anglo-American utopian imaginaries were an extraordinary phase in the history of international thought of the English-speaking countries, they may come to be awkward and problematic from a twentieth-first-century perspective, appearing to entail some limitations of Western modernist conceptions. For instance, the Anglo-American unionists examined in this book eulogized and relied on the advancement of industrial technologies. This attitude will be ill matched with the current Anthropocenic questions of climate change and the destruction of the earth. Such backlash or a kind of hypocrisy of modern liberalism is suggested more clearly in Nivi Manchanda's review.
As is always the case with his other works, Bell's analysis in this book of the imaginaries of Anglo-American union is meticulous and thoroughly documented. He suitably avoids a monolithic account and demonstrates their internal diversities, dynamics, competitions and conflicts without sacrificing elaborated unifying frameworks. He highlights the tensions and cleavages between advocacies of the four protagonists, while simultaneously piercing such polyphony with a range of conceptual artifacts, including race as a "biocultural assemblage" and the "programmatic" concept of utopia, and with a stock of more subtle devices, such as a quote from Alfred Tennyson's prevalent verse: "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." In accordance with Bell's account, the internal variations between the protagonists can be exemplified by two disagreements. First, the Anglo-American unionists divided over the geographic boundaries of their envisaged racial polity. Some, such as Carnegie, asserted the necessity for dissolving the British settler empire, insisting that effort be dedicated to ensuring the integration of the majority of the English-speaking race: Britain and the United States. Others, including Wells and Stead, however, indicated the importance for combining the whole Angloworld. Wells labelled such overarching Anglo leviathan as "the New Republic." Second, the Anglo-American unionists diverged on the mode of agency through which their imagined Anglo polity could be realized. Stead was faithful to the power of the media network-where he situated himself as a great node-to imbue the public and the high level of leaders with the gospel of the English-speaking race's destiny. Rhodes and Wells were peculiar, both embracing the role of a secret society. Specifically, to create the New Republic, Wells counted on a technocratic group of "efficients," who constituted, in his own words, an "informal and open freemasonry." Despite such differences, all the four protagonists were institutional "maximalists," similarly promoting the establishment of a formal political union. They deviated from an array of "minimalists," who were convinced of the sufficiency of racial affinity to knit Britain and the United States together. With respect to the extent of institutionalization, the maximalists were also at variance with the "intermediate" groups, including the proponents of racialized isopolitan citizenship such as A.V. Dicey and John Randolph Dos Passos (chapter 6).

Cyborg, science fiction and afro-modernism
Considering the character of Dreamworlds of Race as the (final) component of Bell's trilogy, here I delve into its important differences from the other titles-The Idea of Greater Britain and Reordering the World-to help elucidate its features. Besides its primary focus on Anglo-American union, Dreamworlds of Race deviates from those two books in three key respects: the introduction of the concept of cyborg, the analysis of speculative literature like science fiction and a consideration on fin-de-siècle Afro-modern thought.
The techno-futuristic conception of cyborg, which Bell attributes to turn-of-thecenturies British and American intellectuals in Dreamworlds of Race, may be one of the most conspicuous aspects of the book that bears a direct relevance for today's world. Ricardo Villanueva's review invites the clarification of such an association of the imperial thought of those intellectuals with the present-day reality. Bell carefully defines his usage of cyborg, distinguishing its two modes: "additive" and "integrative." His emphasis is placed on the latter mode, and here Andrew Pickering's account of cyborg as the "constitutive coupling" of the machine and the human works as a clue for him. Bell, then, stresses the centrality of the "integrative" mode of cyborg to the fin-de-siècle visions of the Angloworld, arguing that the protagonists of Anglo-American union, specifically Carnegie, Stead and Wells, imagined an Anglo polity as a living body with its brain and nervous system. This body would be vitalized by the instantaneous flow of information and knowledge through communications technologies, above all the telegraph, which intrinsically penetrated such a body itself. For the Anglo protagonists, thus, their envisaged polity constituted a collective Anglo-Saxon (or English-speaking) race inseparably merged with technoscientific artifacts. Such race and technologies together composed a distinct pulsating entity. Until the publication of Dreamworlds of Race, Bell's argument about the impact of Victorian technological innovations has focused on their exogenous force. They enabled thinkers to envisage a vast political community by radically transforming their perception of time and space. However, his introduction of the cyborgian view in this book flags up a different aspect of technoscience: its endogenous character. For, in the cyborgian view, a political community is made up partly yet inherently and decisively by technologies. In the last piece of his trilogy, Bell's approach to the topic takes on a new stripe.
Such concern about technoscience brings him to examining late-Victorian and Edwardian science fiction. Bell argues that to some authors believing in the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, this literary genre served as an experimental site for speculating on the interpenetration between new technologies and humans under the theme of their imperial destiny (chapter 5). His enchantment with the genre appears to be symbolized by the cover image of this book: an illustration from George Griffith's novel The Angel of the Revolution (1893), the picture showing a hovering airship at the end of a destructive war that led to peace through a global Anglo-Saxon federation (thus, an Anglotopia). Dreamworlds of Race is notable for conjoining multiple textual lenses, going beyond the traditional source material of thinkers' tracts and articles by simultaneously analyzing such fictional literature. To highlight this point with a quote from the book, "The future exerted a hypnotically powerful attraction." "The line between fictional extrapolation, political manifesto, and social analysis was blurred, even dissolved, in a genre-straddling Anglo-America intertext" (2020: 22). Indeed, the material-traversing approach of the book suggests that there still remain broad fields to be analyzed by the historians of Victorian and Edwardian political thought.
Particularly fascinating about this topic will be the projection of a cyborgian vision and Anglo historical destiny onto a space opera. William Cole's The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 (1900) is among the most typical examples. Bell interprets this novel as an ambivalent critique of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a challenge to a hubris of the Anglo-Saxonsnamely, their (mis-)conduct of separating technology from its proper moral reins. The novel did this by depicting resultant nefarious, bloodthirsty and nauseating battles in space. However, this ethical challenge did not go so far as to fundamentally question the legitimacy of the imperial hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon race, argues Bell. The fact that Anglo racial utopias were inscribed in the popular speculative genre of science fiction suggests the existence of a certain demand for them by the contemporary growing masses in Britain and other English-speaking countries. Imagining racial dreamworlds was thus undergirded not only by technoscientific development, but also by mass consumption in print capitalism. The dreamworlds would be illusional goods for the emergent political actor.
The fundamental challenge to Anglo supremacism that Cole's The Struggle for Empire did not successfully pose came from outside the white man's world. Dreamworlds of Race differs from the previous two titles of the trilogy in containing a consideration on the counterargument of "colored" thinkers. In the concluding section (chapter 8), Bell juxtaposes fin-de-siècle Afro-modernism-especially, the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Jamaican-born black metropolitan missionary Theophilus Scholes-to Anglo imperial thought. His description of such black alternatives to Anglo racial imaginaries brings a relativizing perspective on the subject explored throughout the book. While this foray into black critics, placed at the end of the book, may not be sufficient, as Vineet Thakur points out in his review, it nonetheless can provide readers with a chance to critically reflect on the historical significance, limitations and perhaps complacency of Anglo-American unionism.
Significantly, Bell's juxtaposition of Anglo-centric racial visions and Afro-modernist counter-imperial discourse contours two contrasting strands of the academic field of International Relations (IR) developed in the early twentieth century. One was IR cultivated for white world order and centered around Chatham House in London as well as its sister institution, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. As I will flesh out in the next section, many exponents of this strand can be regarded as ideological heirs to Anglo-American unionism examined in this book. The other strand was the Howard School of IR, which composed a much-neglected yet seminal counternetwork against the prevailing white epistemic community of IR. Formed by a collection of Afro-American theorists, such as Alain Locke and Ralph Bunche, the Howard School decried the imperialist injustice and dogmatism of whites, while exposing racism embedded in "mainstream" Anglophone IR (Vitalis 2015). Seo-Hyun Park's review criticizes the myopic character of the argument of Anglo-American unionists in a similar fashion. Du Bois's and Theophilus Scholes's critiques in the turn-of-the-centuries "Black Anglosphere" (to use Marina Bilbija's phrase)-the ones aimed at emancipating the grasp of world history from whitecentrism-can be situated as a pre-history of the Howard School.

A backdrop of anglophone IR
Dreamworlds of Race is a distinguished contribution to multiple fields of research. I pick up two among them. One is the study of transatlantic intellectual history. So far this research area has mainly focused on the intellectual resonances between Britain and the United States in the development of social democracy, the making of social policy and the formation of political science. This trend is exemplified by the works of James Kloppenberg (1986), Daniel Rodgers (1998), Mark Stears (2002 and Robert Adcock (2014). Dreamworlds of Race, which demonstrates similarities and reverberations in racial utopian imaginaries across the North Atlantic, is a new, unique input to the research area in question.
Second, this book contributes to the revisionist historiography of IR by enriching the understanding of the early phase of the academic field in English-speaking countries. Many early twentieth-century Anglophone proponents of IR cultivated this field at the same time as promoting the creation of a closer union, if not always a formal integration, between Britain and the United States. Indeed, their academic attempt to shape the discipline of IR and their ideological advocacy of such Anglo-American unification were profoundly interconnected. The protagonists of the Round Table, who played a crucial role in establishing Chatham House, were the paradigmatic example. The dynamo of this powerful pro-imperial group, Lionel Curtis sought the retrieval of the former "great schism" through the Chatham House project, while simultaneously becoming a frequent contributor to its journal International Affairs as well as guiding the management of the group's organ Round Table-two important IR journals that have survived to date. For him, one of the primary purposes of greater Anglo-American solidarity was to realize a form of inter-imperial global governance, that is, joint and effective tutelage over "the backward races of the world." Similarly, Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), once the editor-inchief of the Round Table, also endorsed the project for a reunion between Britain and the United States. In Pacifism Is Not Enough, Nor Patriotism Either (1935) he depicted his call for the federation of democracies with Anglo-America at its core as that "once dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes." Dreamworlds of Race enables us to comprehend a key ideological backdrop for this early twentieth-century Anglo-centric internationalism developed in tandem with IR.
Moreover, some striking concepts advanced in this book, including cyborg, will also be useful in understanding global visions of such early twentieth-century Anglo-centric internationalists. For example, Alfred Zimmern, a staunch advocate of the British Commonwealth of Nations and one of the most prominent early IR academics, who became a supporter of transatlantic unification in the mid-1930s, proffered his view of global community as an organically animating entity (see Baji, 2021: ch. 4). All people on earth are integrally amalgamated with "a single, world-wide, nervous system" energized by communication and transportation technologies, such as steam-power, electricity, the railway and the telegraph. " [O]ne Great Society" it composes, Zimmern went on, is acting and feeling together at the same time. "Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders." Not only big business, but also every single citizen "finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network" (1918: 22-3). This appears to be a cyborgian account of a global commonwealth.
In conclusion, this book incisively reveals an intellectual history of the formative period of the Anglosphere. It reminds us of how deeply affected by racial ideas and racism the contemporary world and even the discourse of IR are, something that is currently challenged by both non-Anglophonic countries, such as China and by global movements seeking racial justice.
Funding Open access funding provided by The University of Tokyo.

Conflict of interest
The author confirms that there is no conflict of interest.
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