Trama e riassunto di La marea montante di colore contro la supremazia mondiale bianca

A chi è rivolto

Readers of intellectual history, students of empire and the First World War, and anyone curious how racial theory shaped politics in 1920 will find the fears of that age laid bare.

Che cos’è questo libro

What happens when a writer decides that race, not politics, is the master force in history? In 1920 the American author Lothrop Stoddard did exactly that, and his book sold widely and shaped arguments about immigration and empire.

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy says the map of 1914 is an illusion. Beneath the white flags, he claims, people of color outnumber whites by more than two to one. He pictures the white world as dikes holding back a flood. This is racial propaganda. It ranks human groups, a claim modern science rejects. Read with care, it shows how fear of decline became a theory.

Questions about La marea montante di colore contro la supremazia mondiale bianca

What is The Rising Tide of Color about?

It argues that world politics is driven by race. Stoddard surveys the yellow, brown, black and red peoples, the weakening of Europe in the Great War, and what he calls defenses for the white world. Modern scholars treat it as racial propaganda.

Who was Madison Grant and why is he in the book?

Madison Grant was an American writer on conservation and race who wrote the introduction. He supplied the biological and historical background for Stoddard's claims, using a scheme of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean types that scholars later discarded.

What does the dikes metaphor mean in the book?

Stoddard pictures the colored peoples as a rising tide. Outer dikes are political dependencies; he places the true ones in Africa and Latin America. Inner dikes are lands settled by whites, which he says must be guarded by strict immigration bars.

Is the book scientifically accurate?

No. Its ranking of races rests on assumptions that genetics and anthropology have rejected. Some of its facts, such as war casualty figures and quoted news items, come from real sources, but the conclusions drawn from them are prejudice.

When was it written and what effect did it have?

Stoddard wrote it in 1920, just after the First World War. It was widely read in the United States, supported the campaign for immigration limits in 1924, and is cited by historians as an example of scientific racism.