The Burden of White Supremacy

The Burden of White Supremacy by David C. Atkinson redirects our thinking about mobility, globalism, and anti-Asian rhetoric at the turn of the twentieth century. This dense monograph uses many unique approaches, including the “immobility, disconnection, and disjuncture” of the late nineteenth century, instead of the connectivity and movement often highlighted by other works of this time (p. 1). Studying the rhetoric around limiting the movement of Japanese and Indian migrants is also a newer perspective than the typical concentration on the era's Chinese restrictions. Atkinson explores how U.S. and British “state and dominion leaders, legislators, and even implacable racial activists ... constantly destabilized imperial and foreign policy,” starting in the 1890s and culminating in the most stringent anti-Asian restrictions by 1924 (p. 221). While British officials and the U.S. federal government tried to maintain diplomatic relations with Japan and India through the pretense of non-race-based immigration restrictions, white settler communities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and the western United States maintained “a commitment to white mobility and nonwhite immobility” (p. 10). Throughout this book, Atkinson shows that anti-Asian fears were continually expressed locally, resulting in the consistent application of immigration restrictions that minimized Japanese and Indian movement to British and American territories

Development economics · Dominion · Economic history · Empire · Government (linguistics · Immigration · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · White supremacy · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society

• The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage

  Open Access•Hardeep Dhillon•Law and History Review•2023

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