This edited volume complicates both the history and historiography of race and racism in the field of global history. In contrast to dominant paradigms on the development of racism within the framework of Western states, Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt have gathered an interesting collection of essays that explore the historical significance of race and racism though alternative lenses that highlight ‘the complex processes of diffusion, transfer, adaptation, and transformation of racial ideas in various parts of the world, including their interaction with indigenous traditions’ (p. 2). The contributors to the volume employ a range of approaches – global, transnational, comparative, case study – to ask a number of complicated questions about the nature of race and racism: what is racism and should it be broadly or narrowly defined? Is race a Western or Eurocentric ideology? What is the relationship between race and similar antecedents such as culture or nationalism? By examining the complex interplay between ideology and social practice, this book not only demonstrates that there are no easy answers but also raises many more, perhaps unanswerable, questions.

The first four essays of the volume draw the ‘big picture’ of racism as a global phenomenon. In Chapter 1, Frank Dikötter argues that explanatory models about the spread of the race concept and racism are overly simplistic, touting a uniform conceptualization of racism and replicating a Eurocentric bias by ignoring the extent to which actors outside Europe and North America have actively adapted racial discourse in different historical circumstances. He instead proposes an interactive model of interpretation, emphasizing the role of local agents in constructing racial worldviews and analysing the complex cognitive, social, and political dimensions that drive the appropriation and adaptation of racist belief systems (p. 24). Subsequent chapters by Benjamin Braude (Chapter 2), Christian Geulen (Chapter 3), and Boris Bath (Chapter 4) also problematize the universality of race and racism. Contra Dikötter, Braude conceptualizes racism as a Western phenomenon and argues that several crucial sociohistorical elements, such as colour indifference, pre-continental notions of space, religious traditions, identities, and authority, alongside slavery economies and weak bureaucratic autonomy enabled racism in the West while obstructing its development in the Near East. Geulen explores the complicated relationship between race and culture, arguing that they share a wide semantic field: the emphasis on cultural difference arose in direct response to concerns about the appropriateness of racial discourse, and contemporary ideas about cultural essentialism envelop, rather than replace, racist tenets. Barth argues that genocide is a narrow phenomenon, which encompasses an intention to annihilate a large and self-defined group of people, an aim of doing so without exception and without any alternative paths to surrender, and explicit state initiation and involvement. While racism does not automatically lead to genocide, racist ideas (especially about ethnic cleansing), racial pan-ideologies, a crisis in conservative elite structures and bourgeois liberalism, and social Darwinism, are necessary preconditions for genocide.

Each of the remaining chapters substantiates Dikötter's interactive model of the interpretation and adaptation of racial ideologies across the globe, albeit in different ways. Michael Zeuske's chapter on the intersection of race, class, and nationalism in nineteenth-century Cuba (Chapter 5); Claudia Bruns's biographical account of Wilhelm Marr's encounters with slavery, segregation, and indentured servitude and their influence on the development of his anti-Semitic worldview (Chapter 6); John David Smith's careful tracing of the transatlantic dimensions of racial ideologies through the travels and research of Felix von Luschan (Chapter 7); and Paul Kramer's elucidation of the important role of Spanish colonialism, colonial warfare, imperial/colonial collaboration, state-building efforts, American immigration policies, and, most importantly, Filipino actors in shaping discourses and strategies of American colonialism in the Philippines (Chapter 8) all provide transnational perspectives on race and racism in the Americas without reducing race to an Americanized phenomenon.

Additional chapters by Gita Dharampal-Frick and Katja Götzen and Harald Fischer-Tiné demonstrate the malleability of racial ideas in India through the colonialist conflation of caste and race (Chapter 9) and the difficulties that criminals posed to the construction of whiteness in the nineteenth century (Chapter 10). Turning to China and Japan, Gotelind Müller details how Chinese reformers of the late nineteenth century appropriated and ‘glocalized’ Western racial ideas (Chapter 11), while Urs Matthias Zachmann argues that Japan adapted Western conceptions of racial hierarchy strategically to meet political aims, rejecting the racism in international relations that prevented the country's rise to ‘great power’ but adapting assimilative policies toward Korean and Taiwanese colonials and crafting exclusionary immigration policies toward the Chinese (Chapter 12).

The final three essays explore the different institutionalizations of white settler racism. In Chapter 13, Christopher Marx details the logic of Hendrik Verwoerd's technocratic racism, which he used to build and justify the system of apartheid in South Africa after the Second World War. Gregory Smithers compares the construction of whiteness in the United States and Australia in Chapter 14, arguing that, whereas American anxiety about the fragility of whiteness manifested in restrictive immigration policies and legalized segregation, Australia's unwavering belief in racial superiority enabled some to advocate a strategy of eradicating the Aborigine problem through managed education and intermarriage. Finally, in the only chapter that is more contemporary than historical, A. Dirk Moses explores the transformation of white Australia into a multiracial, multicultural society, bringing the heterogeneity of anti-racist discourses, particularly conceptualizations of indigeneity, to the foreground.

Together, the essays demonstrate that there is no singular, uniform mechanism through which global racial ideologies are translated or adapted into different social, historical, or national contexts. It is clear, however, that Western ideas about the nature of race or the function of racism were never adopted wholesale, nor transported without themselves changing through the course of their travels. Similarly, the authors take great pains to demonstrate that racial ideologies are fundamentally transnational, existing beyond the control of any one nation-state, and are also complex, contradictory, malleable, and incoherent. This volume is a wonderful contribution to a growing body of scholarly work and will appeal to audiences interested in transnational history, international relations, and cultural studies.