Introduction: Duncan Bell’s Dreamworlds of Race—A Conversation

I bought my copy of Duncan Bell’s The Idea of Great Britain (2007) over a decade ago. I did not realize then that I was taking a first step on what would become a long journey into a fascinating world that I thought I knew. In his introduction to Dreamworlds of Race, Bell positions the book as the third in a loose trilogy that also includes Reordering the World (2016). While Dreamworlds can easily be read without the other two, Bell’s admission of the link between the three works underscores the important interlocking threads that have crisscrossed his research. One of the great strengths of his work lies in how this lattice has touched so many different areas of scholarship. For me (as it is for Ricardo Villanueva and Tomohito Baji. See their reviews below), it has been Bell’s exploration of international thought before 1914, and especially in the early nineteenth century, that has been particularly valuable for my own research. Indeed, my most recent piece of published research, on race in pre-1914 international thought, owes a debt to Bell’s work (Ashworth 2022).

The five reviews of Dreamworlds that follow this introduction are a tribute to the breadth of Bell’s work. While there is much overlap on the topics covered, each one has focused on different aspects of the work. I was particularly struck by Vineet Thakur’s metaphor here, where he compares the book to a sumptuous feast. To continue this image, if Dreamworlds is a feast, it is a themed buffet of many courses. While every review is supportive, the authors do have constructive criticisms that suggest new ways in which we could look at this period and its ideas of global order. All, in different ways and to different extents, come away with a sense of the fragility and the limited vision of the Anglotopian ideas presented by Bell. This is, as Seo-Hyun Park points out, a privileged world view that is carelessly oblivious to other forces. What is more, its racism, as Nivi Manchanda shows, runs deep. Given that these ideas feed into the intellectual roots of much of the current ideas of global order, this has profound implications for current international politics.

Since Bell’s work is so adept at bringing together a wide range of topics through the weaving of interconnections, one concern I had for these reviews was that getting a group of people together to write disconnected reviews would not do Dreamworlds justice. Instead, it was important for me that we should have points of connection, while also giving each reviewer the space to read the book in the way that they wanted. Consequently, while the reviews were initially written separately, we shared our ideas in two ways. First of all, the reviews were shared with all the reviewers. After that we arranged to meet for a short virtual workshop, where we shared our impressions of the book. After that, the reviews were rewritten to reflect on this sharing of information.

In a way, our virtual workshop will forever anchor this project in the learning curves of the current pandemic. So many of us have become used to the online conference, workshop or seminar as a result of COVID-19 that we were able to make full use of its possibilities. At the same time, and perhaps in keeping with the subject matter, the greatest challenge was the spread of time zones—ranging as we did over fifteen hours, so that one participant was staying up late, while another had to get up in the small hours of the morning. Interestingly, the conversation between participants not only suggested synergies between the reviews, but also helped sharpen many of the constructive criticisms of Dreamworlds.

Thus, while the five reviews have often emphasized different aspects of the book, each has been in conversation with the others. The result is a set of narratives about Dreamworlds that mirror the book’s range over a series of interconnected subjects. All the reviews explore the central theme of the book: the predominantly liberal Anglotopian ideas proposing a world order based on some form of British and American cooperation, and the racist content of these dreams. Seo-Hyun Park emphasizes how very limited this liberal vision is, while both Tomohito Baji and Vineet Thakur explore the link between these dreams and a sense of decline. Finally, Nivi Manchanda points out how these liberal dreams end in nightmares, as the promises of the dreams actually translate into dystopic realities. Both Nivi Manchanda and Tomohito Baji mention the direct link between the promises of technological development and the realities of climate change and our current ecological crisis.

On racism, Vineet Thakur applauds Bell’s idea of seeing race as a biocultural assemblage—especially in relation to the role of the English language—and also points out the important role of the color line in liberal Anglotopian racial imaginaries. In a similar vein, Nivi Manchanda points out how, despite the variety of this thought, all are implicated in a rigid racial hierarchy. Seo-Hyun Park uses Bell’s discussion of the centrality of race and ethnicity to subject the common division of nationalism into ethnic and civic forms to scrutiny. She points out that the difference between the two are more apparent than real, and that a nationalism that we now regard as civic has past roots in ethnic nationalisms.

The reviews also explore the implications of the argument in Dreamworlds for the field of International Relations (IR), and particularly its subfield of the history of international thought, with Tomohito Baji and Ricardo Villaneuva particularly concentrating on how Bell upsets cozy common-sense interpretations of IR’s past. Tomohito Baji also explores how the emphasis in these Anglotopias on technology leads to an imagining of a world order as a cyborg imperium. He mentions how a similar logic can be found in the work of Alfred Zimmern, and I have also noticed it myself in the pre-1914 work of Norman Angell. An interesting contrast with this idea can be found in the contemporary German-led geopolitical analogy of society as a living organism (found in the work of Friedrich Ratzel, and reinterpreted in Rudolf Kjellén). These similar ideas, but with their different emphases on machine and organic elements, need to be explored more in the history of international thought literature.

Although all the reviewers were strongly supportive of Dreamworlds, there were points of criticism and departure. While Tomohito Baji recognizes the importance of the inclusion of Afro-modernism as an alternative to Anglotopia, Vineet Thakur and Nivi Manchanda see the discussion as tacked on. Ricardo Villaneuva is more concerned about an omission. The four figures that Bell chooses to explore in depth in the first part of the book are all men. One of the issues to come out of the recent work of Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (2021), among others, is that there were plenty of women engaged in different aspects of international thought in the past, and that their absence from the history of international thought—even from the ranks of the guilty—is a serious omission. Both of these points—not enough coverage of one group, and the omission of another—suggest that there might yet be room for Bell to expand on the story that he tells in his trilogy.

Criticisms aside, I would like to end this introduction on two personal notes. The first is directed to the reviewers, who have been a pleasure to work with. Each one is a top-notch scholar in their own right, and their engagement with Dreamworlds helped me to get more out of the text. Each of the five, in their own research agenda, have already added their own critical analyses to IR, and to the criticisms of the deeply flawed way that IR remembers its history. Through their criticisms of IR, they help develop new ways of interpreting the field in a way that moves it on from the parochialisms of racist Anglotopian thought. The second is directed to the author of Dreamworlds. Duncan Bell’s work, as these reviews show, has been an inspiration to many of us seeking to untangle the intellectual roots of global politics. The critical engagement found in this special review section is also a tribute to the importance of Bell’s scholarship.

Declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.