More colours than red, white and blue: race, ethnicity and Anglo-American relations
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More colours than red, white and blue: race, ethnicity and Anglo‑American relations Clive Webb1 Published online: 1 September 2020 © The Editor of the Journal 2020
Abstract Although scholars have produced a copious literature on Anglo-American relations, the racial and ethnic aspect of that history is comparatively understudied. This article provides a critical overview of the key texts that have evaluated the role of ethnicity and race in promoting kinship and conflict between Britain and the United States, from the transatlantic debate over slavery in the nineteenth century to postSecond World War international politics. Keywords Race and ethnicity · Anglo-American relations · Slavery · American Civil War · Reconstruction · Imperialism · Second World War · Civil rights movement Thumb through the index of many histories of Anglo-American relations for ‘race’ and the word will appear only with reference to Cold War nuclear arms competition. This omission is reflective of the marginalisation of race and ethnicity from foreign policy scholarship more generally. To take one example, in 1990 the Journal of American History featured a roundtable, ‘Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations’. Contributors to the forum focused on nine analytical categories including bureaucratic politics, corporatism and gender. Race and ethnicity were not among them.1 Both, however, have been of great significance as sources of co-operation and conflict between Britain and the United States. The transatlantic crusade against slavery is one of the most important chapters in the history not only of Anglo-American relations, but also of global humanitarianism. Conversely, the Anglo-Saxon racial cult around which the two countries formed a common transatlantic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped 1 ‘A Round Table: Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations’, Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (June 1990): 93–180.
* Clive Webb [email protected] 1
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Vol:.(1234567890)
Journal of Transatlantic Studies (2020) 18:434–454
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legitimise their imperialist conquest and subjugation of millions of people of colour. Although scholars have scrutinised both of these subjects, the racial and ethnic dimension of Anglo-American relations remains in many other respects understudied. From the 1950s, the African American freedom struggle inspired the proliferation of research and writing on race and ethnicity within the historical profession. Yet, with the particular exception of transatlantic slavery and abolition, scholarship on Anglo-American relations has largely been immune to these developments, not least with regard to its principal area of focus, twentieth-century war and diplomacy. How to account for this lacuna necessitates a certain amount of speculation. Whether it is the unconscious bias of a field dominated by white male scholars is one possible explanation. The traditional methodological focus on formal diplomatic interaction also marginalise
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