Stanley Bruce: Australian Internationalist

Stanley Bruce: Australian Internationalist

by David Lee (Author)

Synopsis

Australia's Prime Minister and premier diplomat in the 1930/1940s, this new biography presents him as a consistent internationalist and places him in a global context. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist. Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire. Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism. While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.

$214.81

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Publisher: Continuum Publishing Corporation
Published: 10 May 2010

ISBN 10: 0826445667
ISBN 13: 9780826445667

Media Reviews
'Three writers have previously written complete or partial biographies of Bruce. All have had some value, but none has been adequate, and historians have long been conscious of an important gap in Australia's political history. David Lee has filled that gap with a biography that is likely to remain a standard work for many years.'--Sanford Lakoff
'The great strength of this book is the successful way Lee has compressed such a rich and diverse life into a relatively short account. The research is thorough but the pace never slackens... one of the best single volume biographies written of an Australian Prime Minister.'--Sanford Lakoff
Author Bio
David Lee is the Director of the Historical Publications and Information Section of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He is author inter alia of Australia and the World in the Twentieth Century, Melbourne, 2005