White man's country: The trans‐national history of a national project

Abstract

Understandings and explanations of historical processes have been constrained and distorted by nationalist frameworks of analysis. In this article I suggest that the founding idea of Australia as a ‘white man's country’ can only be fully understood in the context of the trans‐national circulation of knowledge in the late nineteenth century, especially historical knowledge. The chief authors of the White Australia project—Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins and Edmund Barton—drew explicitly on American history lessons, most notably concerning the ‘failure’ of the multi‐racial experiment of Radical Reconstruction. And they drew especially on the writings of historians James Bryce, Charles Pearson, John W. Burgess and William Dunning. The idea of the ‘white man's country’ was a defensive trans‐national response to new global dynamics—in Africa, North and South America and Asia.