Debating Worlds is a survey of modern global narratives, comprising nine sweeping chapters by political scientists and historians. The introduction, authored by the editors, opens by observing that the seeming global convergence toward liberal capitalist democracy has splintered into a “narrative plurality” (2). Understanding the world order, then, requires us to map these “narratives of the global” (16) that have jostled for discursive influence over the past two centuries.
Most of the narratives explored in the first half of the book are supranational. In chapter 1, Duncan Bell surveys ideas of an “Anglosphere” (28) of English-speaking peoples. Emerging in the Victorian era under in the racialized discourse of Anglo-Saxonism, it mutated over the twentieth century in the context of empire through ideas of imperial federation and Greater Britain, and it dealt with America's rise through notions of Anglo-American union. The twentieth century saw successor proposals that “placed the British-American connection...
