Introduction
This introductory chapter explores some of the most ambitious ideas about the unification of Anglo-America, concentrating on the years between 1880 and the First World War. During that tumultuous period, numerous members of the intellectual elite on both sides of the Atlantic — scholars, journalists, novelists, preachers, and politicians — encouraged closer cooperation, even political integration, between the two powers. The chapter analyzes the boldest arguments about Anglo-America, the dreams that motivated and shaped them, and the discourses in which they were embedded, with the intention of illuminating a pivotal moment in both the intellectual history of world order and the development of modern utopian thought. Ultimately, the chapter sketches the political and geopolitical context in which the debates occurred, considers the self-consciously visionary character of many unionist claims as well as the conceptual elusiveness of racial categorization.