Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America

Speaker: Duncan Bell, Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.

Chair: Claudia Aradau, Professor of International Politics, Department of War Studies, King's College London.

This event is co-hosted by the Centre for Grand Strategy and the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. 

Professor Duncan Bell joins us to discuss how transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States. 

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order.

Bio:

Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. He is the author of Reordering the World and The Idea of Greater Britain (both Princeton).