Burden of White Supremacy

From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asianmigration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their positionof global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringentlegislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration.Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaborationbetween these movements, but in this compelling study, David C. Atkinsonhighlights the differences in these campaigns and argues that the main factorunifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions theycaused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, GreatBritain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, Atkinson traceshow these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic,and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncraticallyin the first decades of the twentieth century.

Arguing that the so-called white man’s burden was often white supremacyitself, Atkinson demonstrates how the tenets of absolute exclusion—meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy—onlyinflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the BritishEmpire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of internationalcooperation that followed the First World War.