‘United by blood’: race and transnationalism during the Belle Époque

Abstract

The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan-racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan-Africanism and pan-Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.