I n 1902 James Bryce delivered the prestigious Romanes lecture in Oxford. He was a man of many talents-historian, jurist, and politician; world traveler and author of the magisterial study The American Commonwealth. Bryce's lecture "The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind" was inimitably global in its sweep and sober in its song. Bryce had, for many years, been considering the social consequences of the revolution in communications brought by the trains, steam ships, and the telegraph, and by the contemporaneous expansion of the great European empires. The situation was unprecedented. All parts of the world had been explored and all the races of mankind were in contact. The early twentieth century stood "eminent and peculiar in this" because it marked the completion of a process by which all the races had been effected, and all the backward ones placed in a more or less complete dependence on the more advanced. The new and radical closeness of contact-"so much closer and more widespread than ever in the past"-had created a unique situation. The, by now, inescapable contact between the races had created a "crisis in the history of the world," which would "profoundly effect the destiny of mankind."

Item Type:	Research Book Chapter
Keywords:	miscegenation, politics, Twentieth Century
Research Division:	History, Heritage and Archaeology
Research Group:	Historical studies
Research Field:	Historical studies not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Culture and Society
Objective Group:	Understanding past societies
Objective Field:	Understanding past societies not elsewhere classified
UTAS Author:	Reynolds, H (Professor Henry Reynolds)
ID Code:	121072
Year Published:	2009
Deposited By:	Office of the School of Humanities
Deposited On:	2017-09-08
Last Modified:	2017-11-09
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