'All the Marks of a Swindle': Walter Sidney Bromhead and the dividends of whiteness.

Between his birth in 1873 and his death in 1944, Walter Sidney Bromhead lived an eventful life. He owned land on four continents, sat on the board of several fraudulent insurance companies, published in the Eugenics Review, was mocked in Australia's parliament, briefly ran colonial Kenya's largest white veterans' association, and claimed he met nearly every notable person of the twentieth century from Shackleton to Lenin. Yet his life's work centred around his obsession with starting a global social movement he dubbed 'Fedrity'. By binding Britain's colonies into a global federation of farming cooperatives, Bromhead claimed that Fedrity would inaugurate a new supranational currency, abolish wage labour, and ensure global white supremacy. A closer study of this globetrotting confidence trickster's life and lies expands the boundaries of British imperial history, revealing how those who lived at the margins of legality generated new understandings of law, space, and race. His life demonstrates how Britain's colonial frontier served as a laboratory for new understandings of whiteness, developed in response to the exigencies of Britain's chaotic interwar years. He synthesized Victorian settlerism, interwar radicalism, and eugenics into a demand that the British Empire's political economy be reoriented around the reproduction of whiteness. His ideas, and the tricks he used to sell them, are uniquely reflective of the tensions that ran through the late British Empire, and which led eventually to its collapse.