Hannah Forsyth. Virtue Capitalists

Global history often renders down the histories of modern British settler colonies into generic settler colonialism. In works with a global scope, it’s easy to lose the particularities of the interactions between the social, cultural, and environmental circumstances of a place, especially when settlers seem to be broadly British in their cultural and political aspirations. In contrast, each modern former British settler nation’s local history-writing traditions deal with the consequences of the specific encounter between what settlers and immigrants bring, and Indigenous institutions and environments. Here, the opposite is at stake: national historiographies seek what marks them out from neighbors, antecedents, and the rest of the world. This contrast between a totalizing global history of modern settler colonialism and the parochial historiographical traditions of modern settler colonies is often frustrating for those of us with an interest in both. Because of this, Hannah Forsyth’s book Virtue Capitalists is a refreshing, fun, and interesting book that integrates the local with the global without losing track of what is important about local detail or global scope. Forsyth argues that, far from being extensions or the margins of fundamental changes in modern work and class structures, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States were where the modern professional-managerial class (defined broadly and vaguely) was born. This was not an accident or coincidence; in fact, Forsyth argues, setter colonialism was central to the processes that created modern work and class, because of the settler need to marginalize Native claims to sovereignty, autonomy, and stewardship. The experiences of Anglo settlers, the experiences of the Native and non-Native groups whom they exploited and alienated, and the process of settler colonialism, therefore, made the professional-managerial class and modern bureaucratic institutions. To understand the dominant class dynamics of the twentieth century, Forsyth suggests, historians must invert the traditional perspective and provincialize Britain.

Class (philosophy) · Epistemology · Sociology · Virtue · World class · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies