ABSTRACT
This book is about a nineteenth-century obsession: the reproduction of whiteness in settler colonies. Specifi cally, the study focuses on how nineteenth-century Americans and colonial Australians understood the biological reproduction of whiteness, and the cultural meaning ascribed to white identity. The United States and Australia were each founded by English settlers, and it was English legal, political, economic, social, and cultural traditions that rationalized the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ land, the exploitation of indentured laborers, convicts, and slaves, and structured the formation of white identity. These shared traditions meant that the United States and Australia featured prominently in popular literature and international scholarly debates about the biological and cultural meaning of whiteness. Nineteenth-century writers, such as the American novelist Herman Melville, devoted an entire chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the meaning of whiteness. Melville defi ned whiteness in monolithic terms, explaining that whiteness “refi ningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls.”1 According to Melville, the association of whiteness with beauty, intelligence, and culture penetrated the minds of even the most savage human beings. Melville explained, “various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title ‘Lord of the White Elephants’ above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion.”2 This book analyzes whether nineteenth-century Americans and colonial Australians truly believed that whiteness possessed racially transformative and homogenizing powers, or if it embodied something less robust and powerful.
