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.