Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Australian Internationalist

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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.

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. -- Australian Book Review
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.' -- The Australian Journal of Politics and History
David Lees biography of Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce (1883-1967) has been reviewed and discussed in online media, in the daily press and in scholarly journals... Lees book has coincided with an expansive interplay of writing and researching on contemporary issues that also preoccupied Bruce. These include the implications of international investment and trade for unequal distributions of wealth between nations; the struggles between trade unions and employers over the regulation of the labour market; the roles of politicians and economists in the battles between neo-classical, monetarist and Keynesian ideas; and the historical lessons from the 1930s for sustained recovery from the global financial crisis. -- Kosmas Tsokhas * Journal of Australian Political Economy *

Author Bio

David Lee is the Director of the Historical Publications and Information Section of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an Adjunct Professor in History at Deakin University, Australia.