The burden of white supremacy : containing Asian migration in the British Empire and the United States / David C. Atkinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Atkinson, David C., 1975- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Asians--Migrations.

Asians.

Immigrants--Great Britain--Social conditions.

Immigrants.

Immigrants--United States--Social conditions.

White nationalism--Great Britain.

White nationalism.

White nationalism--United States.

Asia--Emigration and immigration.

Asia.

Great Britain--Emigration and immigration.

Great Britain.

United States--Emigration and immigration.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (pages cm)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, North Carolina : University of North Carolina Press, [2016]

Summary:

From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asian migration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their position of global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringent legislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration. Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaboration between these movements, but in this compelling study, David C. Atkinson highlights the differences in these campaigns and argues that the main factor unifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions they caused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, Atkinson traces how these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic, and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncratically in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that the so-called white man's burden was often white supremacy itself, Atkinson demonstrates how the tenets of absolute exclusion--meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy--only inflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the British Empire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of international cooperation that followed the First World War.

Contents:

Introduction : the politics of Asian mobility in the British Empire and the United States

The language of immobility in Australasia

Mobility and indenture in southern Africa

The politics of Asian labor mobility in North America

The limits of Anglo-American solidarity and collaboration

The politics of Asian restriction in a world at war

Making peace with Asian immobility : London, Paris, and Washington

Reinforcing Asian immobility on the Pacific Rim

Conclusion : the burdens of white supremacy.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Description based on print record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

979-88-908498-8-5

979-88-908498-9-2

1-4696-3028-1

1-4696-3029-X

OCLC:

962411331