ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which late Victorian debates over the unity of Britain, and its settler colonies chiefly in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were the product of assorted anxieties about the trajectory of the modern world. It discusses some utopian themes that can be discerned in this wide-ranging discourse. The chapter suggests that a range of arguments projected Anglo-America as a unified racial-political order. On one hand, many observers feared that the unconstrained spread of democracy threatened manly virtue of the British imperial state, raising concern about geopolitical emasculation. To create a global political community, centered on a powerful Anglo-Saxon bond, in which mass participation and the active pursuit of global supremacy could be reconciled. If the Anglo-Saxon states could be properly aligned, and if the destabilizing potential of democracy could be controlled, it would be possible to bring about the reign of peace and justice.
