Marilyn Lake. Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform.

Abstract

Marilyn Lake’s Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform is a fascinating story of exchanges and collaborations between reformers in the United States and Australasia (Australia and New Zealand, but mostly the former) who embarked on creating a new social order based on progressive ideals. What they envisioned was a more expanded democracy in which the state promoted social, political, and economic justice. The self-governing Australasian colonies’ state initiatives inspired American reformers to work for an active state, electoral reform, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and children’s services. What bound the reformers across the Pacific was a sense of themselves as frontier pioneers in charge of planting “novel kinds of democratic societies” in the New World that were superior to the Old World class system they morally abhorred (6). But this is only half of the story. What makes Progressive New World stand out...