Circulating race and empire: Transnational labor activism and the politics of anti-asian agitation in the anglo-American pacific world, 1880-1910

Journal of American History

Volumn 96, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 678-701

  Chang, Kornel ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 76249103045     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/96.3.678     Document Type: Article

References (165)

1. Washington State Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Annual Convention (Tacoma, 1907), 23.
2. Proceedings of the Annual Convention, 1907, 23, Ibid.
3. On the ways imperialism mapped new geographies of imagination, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005).
4. On whiteness, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991).
5. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990).
6. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).
7. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993).
8. Matthew Frye Jacob-son, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
9. Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001).
10. Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York, 2004).
11. Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 171.
12. On the need to internationalize the study of whiteness, see David R. Roediger, "Whiteness and Its Complications," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2006, B8.
13. For perhaps the most blistering critique of whiteness studies, see Eric Arnesen, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32.
14. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, 2006), 3.
15. Paul R. Spickard argues similarly that "Race making is done in the context of colony making," although in his work, colonialism tends to inform racial formation rather than being mutually constitutive processes. See Paul R. Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York, 2007), 23.
16. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
17. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America's Present Predicament, along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (New York, 1980).
18. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993).
19. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1890-1917(Chicago, 1995).
20. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, 1996).
21. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 2000).
22. Most of this colonial and postcolonial scholarship builds on the seminal text, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979).
23. See also Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Encounters in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), 1-56.
24. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (London, 2002).
25. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago, 2002).
26. Although W. E. B. Du Bois alerted us to the connections between whiteness and empire building a century ago, most scholars have overlooked this important insight. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Souls of White Folk," Independent, Aug. 18, 1910.
27. revised and republished in W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater, Voices from within the Veil (New York, 1920).
28. On how anti-Chinese racism unified the white working class in California, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy. Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971).
29. On how empire building and white supremacy bound together the Anglophone colonial world, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, Eng., 2008).
30. Gerald Home, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu, 2007).
31. John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney, 2007).
32. For transnational studies of Asian migration and exclusion on slightly different spatial scales, see Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot, "Atlantic and Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire, and 'the Labor Problem' in the Late Nineteenth Century," Radical History Review, 91 (Winter 2005), 40-61.
33. Erika Lee, "The 'Yellow Peril' and Asian Exclusion in the Americas," Pacific Historical Review, 76 (Nov. 2007), 537-62.
34. For examples of how race operated in other colonial settings and contact zones, see Neil Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1998).
35. Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
36. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, 2000).
37. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, 2006).
38. Arif Dirlik, "Introduction: Pacific Contradictions," in What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Lanham, 1998), 5.
39. See also Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, 2000).
40. According to some scholars, contemporary trends in globalization signal the demise of the nation-state. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996).
41. For complex readings of the relations between the global and national, see Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, 1999).
42. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2006). I am grateful to Mae Ngai for helping me think about how working people and their ideas were incorporated and articulated through anti-Asian movements through a process that also defined the global and the national.
43. Patricia E. Roy, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver, 1989).
44. Peter W Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal, 1978).
45. Marie De Lepervanche, Indians in a White Australia: An Account of Race, Class, and Indian Immigration to Eastern Australia (Sydney, 1984).
46. Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Champaign, 1991).
47. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (St. Lucia, 1999).
48. There are comparative studies of anti-Asian, movements and policies, but they generally do not take up the question of how the different movements and policies might be connected. See Charles Archibald Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia, 1836-1888 (Canberra, 1974).
49. Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California, 1850-1901 (Sydney, 1979).
50. Sean Brawley, The White Peril- Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America, 1919-1978 (Sydney, 1995).
51. James G. Swan, The North-Wat Coast; Or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory (New York, 1857), 402.
52. James J. Hill to Thomas Burke, April 4, 1898, accession 2808, box 8, folder 4, Thomas Burke Papers, 1875-1925 (Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle).
53. The revolution in transportation included the completion of two transcontinental rail lines: The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1885 and the Great Northern Railroad in 1893. The CPR opened a north-south feeder line from Seattle to Vancouver shortly thereafter. The railroad companies also began to provide regular steamship service to Pacific ports in China, Japan, and the Hawaiian Islands. On the central place of railroads in imperial imaginings, see Beth Ladow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York, 2001).
54. Donald MacKay, The Asian Dream: The Pacific Rim and Canada's National Railway (Vancouver, 1986).
55. See Saxton, Indispensable Enemy.
56. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987).
57. Henry Yu, "Los Angeles and American Studies in a Pacific World of Migrations," American Quarterly, 56 (Sept. 2004), 531-43.
58. Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris, 1980).
59. See also Barbara J. Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, 181 (May-June 1990), 95-118.
60. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
61. See Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West (Norman, 1991), 433.
62. Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000).
63. This process of cultural formation was akin to what Yen Le Espirtu has called "panethnicity," in which different ethnic groups were congealed together, frequently in new geographical settings where no critical mass of a single group existed. See Yen Le Espirtu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia, 1992).
64. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographic Change (Vancouver, 1997), 160.
65. See also Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto, 2001).
66. Harris, Resettlement of British Columbia, 273.
67. On the development of American Anglo-Saxon ideology, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
68. John Higham, Strangers in the Land-Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, 1955).
69. See minutes of die mondily meeting, December 1910, in Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League, 1907-1913 (New York, 1977), 80.
70. Everett Labor Journal, May 6, 1910.
71. B.C. Saturday Sunset (Vancouver), Oct. 7, 1911. N. Lascelles Ward, "The Oriental Problem," typescript, [1915?], file 9309, vol. 83, series 1-A-l, rg 76 (National Archives of Canada, Ottawa).
72. See Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley, 1998).
73. Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, 2005).
74. John Sutton Lutz, Maktik: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Seattle, 2007).
75. See minutes of the monthly meeting, June 1908, in Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
76. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. Ernest Crawford reprinted in Everett Labor Journal, May 6, 1910.
77. B.C. Federationist (Vancouver), Jan. 20, 1912.
78. By "black races," the editorial was referring to South Asian immigrants from British India rather than people of African descent, although white nativists commonly conflated the ethnoracial status of Asian "coolies" with blacks in the American South. This association was unsurprising given that mid-nineteenth-century political debates over Asian "coolie" labor led inevitably to comparisons to African Americans and chattel slavery. On this relationship, see Jung, Coolies and Cane, 11-38.
79. Seattle Union Record, Nov. 3, 1900, May 10, 1902.
80. Seattle Union Record, Feb. 22, 1907.
81. As Dana Frank has observed, "To be a 'worker' in the Seattle A.F.L. was to be not only a wage earner but also white." See Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 9.
82. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor. Foley, White Scourge.
83. On how etiinic differences shaped the immigration and settlement experiences of southern and eastern Europeans in the North American West, see Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca, 1984).
84. Patricia K. Wood, Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia (Montreal, 2002).
85. On non-English-speaking immigrants, see Philip Dreyfus, "The I.W.W. and the Limits of Inter-Ethnic Organizing: Reds, Whites, and Greeks in Grays Harbor, Washington, 1912," Labor History, 38 (Fall 1997), 450-70.
86. On how sexuality and gender constructed a class of "suspect whites" in die Pacific Northwest, see Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley, 2003).
87. Interethnic differences, however, never resulted in the explicit exclusion of European immigrants from the labor movement or concerted opposition to their migration. See John Rowe, The Hard-Rock Men: Cornish Immigrants and the North American Mining Frontier (New York, 1974), 246.
88. On how a sense of Britishness and pride in its symbols animated the making of a white working class in Britain and abroad, see Alastair Bonnett, "How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)Formation of Racialized Capitalism," Journal of Historical Sociology 11 (Sept. 1998), 316-40.
89. Jonathan Hyslop, "The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself 'White': White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa before the First World War," Journal of Historical Sociology, ibid., 12 (Dec. 1999), 398-421.
90. Carlos A. Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885-1917 (Moscow, Idaho, 1994).
91. Seattle Union Record, Sept. 14, 1907.
92. On the Asiatic Exclusion League, see Eldon R. Penrose, California Na-tivism: Organized Opposition to the Japanese, 1890-1913 (San Francisco, 1973), 16.
93. See minutes of the monthly meeting, Dec. 1907, in Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League. Vancouver World, Aug. 26, 1907.
94. For a more detailed account of this Japanese labor-trafficking scheme, see Kornel Chang, "Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and die Formation of the U.S.-Canadian Boundary," American Quarterly, 60 (Sept. 2008), 671-97.
95. Seattle Times, Sept. 22, 1907.
96. Vancouver World, Aug. 26, 1907.
97. Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, 1988), 42-56.
98. American Reveille, May 23, 1907.
99. American Reveille, Sept. 6, 1907.
100. Robert E. Wynne, "American Labor Leaders and the Vancouver Anti-Oriental Riot," Pacific Northwest Quarterly!, 57 (Oct. 1966), 172-79.
101. Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1976).
102. Seattle Union Record, Sept. 7, 1907.
103. Roy, White Man's Province, 185-226.
104. On the international implications of the riots, see Howard H. Sugimoto, "The Vancouver Riots and Its International Significance," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 64 (Oct. 1973), 163-74.
105. Ottawa Free Press, Sept. 10, 1907.
106. American Reveille, Sept. 11, 1907.
107. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Report by W.L. Mackenzie King, C. M. G., Deputy Minister of Labour, Commissioner Appointed to Investigate into the Losses Sustained by the Chinese Population of Vancouver, B.C., on the Occasion of the Riots in That City in September 1907 (Ottawa, 1908).
108. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Report byW. L. Mackenzie King, C.M.G., Deputy Minister of Labour, Commissioner Appointed to Investigate into the Losses Sustained by the Japanese Population of Vancouver B. C, on the Occasion of the Riots in That City in September 1907 (Ottawa, 1907).
109. By elaborating these new forms of sovereignties against Asian migration, white settler societies in the Pacific world established precedents from which an international system of identity documentation and migration controls would later emerge. See Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008).
110. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York, 1990), 71-72.
111. For a more detailed account of the process of border formation in the Pacific Northwest, see Chang, "Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity," 671-97.
112. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998), 184.
113. American Reveille, Sept. 13, 1907.
114. British Columbia newspaper quoted in Roy Ito, Stories of My People: A Japanese Canadian Journal (Hamilton, 1994), 59.
115. On Scandinavian workers, see Dreyfus, "The I.W.W. and the Limits of Inter-Ethnic Organizing," 450-70.
116. American Reveille, Sept. 17, 1907.
117. On racial conflicts between Scandinavian and South Asian immigrants in the Pacific Northwest, see minutes of the monthly meeting, Sept. 1908, in Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
118. American Reveille, Sept. 11, 1907.
119. Vancouver World, Sept. 10, 1907'.
120. American Reveille, Sept. 24, 1907.
121. B.C. Saturday Sunset (Vancouver), July 16, 1907.
122. This metaphor, Tony Ballantyne writes, "draws our attention to the crucial, but generally overlooked, horizontal linkages between colonies," allowing us to see the "important flows of capital, personnel, and ideas between colonies [that] energized colonial development and the function of the larger imperial system." Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 15-16.
123. Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830-1910 (Ithaca, 1976).
124. Robert H. Davies, Capital, State, and White Labour in South Africa, 1900-1960: An Historical Materialist Analysis of Class Formation and Class Relations (Brighton, 1979).
125. Walker, Anxious Nation.
126. Rowe, Hard-Rock Men.
127. John Douglas Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Montreal, 2002).
128. Francis Wilson, Labour in the South African Gold Mines, 1911-1969 (Cambridge, Eng., 1972).
129. Frederick A. Johnstone, Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa (Lanham, 1976).
130. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York, 1989), 63.
131. Peter Richardson and Jean Jacques, Van-Helten, "The Gold-Mining Industry in the Transvaal, 1886-1899," in The South African War: The Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902, ed. Peter Warick (Harlow, 1980), 21.
132. Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines, The Mining Industry: Evidence and report of the Industrial commission of enquiry, with an appendix containing the Utter of Chamber of mines to the Commission, the principal laws of the republic affecting the mining industry, and other documents of interest appertaining to the evidence given at the enquiry (Johannesburg, 1897), 124.
133. Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, Report of Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration (Ottawa, 1902), 77.
134. Report of Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 81-87.
135. B.C. Saturday Sunset (Vancouver), July 16, 1907.
136. B.C. Saturday Sunset (Vancouver), July 16, 1907, Ibid.
137. Marilyn Lake, "The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia," History Workshop Journal, 58 (Autumn 2004), 41-62.
138. Surendra Bhana, Indentured Indian Emigrants to Natal, 1860-1902: A Study Based on Ships Lists (New Delhi, 1991).
139. B.C. Fcderationist (Vancouver), Jan. 20, 1912.
140. B.C. Fcderationist (Vancouver), Jan. 20, 1912, Ibid.
141. Worker, June 6, 1907.
142. The Natal discourse in the Pacific world played roughly the same role as an imagined Haiti did in the Atlantic world. On die symbolic importance of Haiti in the white racial imagination in the Atlantic world, see Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill, 1999).
143. On the triangular relations between whites, Asians, and black Africans in South Africa, see Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot in their co-authored article "Atlantic and Pacific Crossings".
144. Elaine N. Kara, A Trade Union Aristocracy: A History of White Workers in the Transvaal and the General Strike of 1913 (Johannesburg, 1976).
145. Davies, Capital, State, and White Labour in South Africa.
146. On the American West, see Saxton, Indispensable Enemy; and Frank, Purchasing Power.
147. On British Columbia, see Schwantes, Radical Heritage.
148. On William Lane, see Walker, Anxious Nation, 41-44.
149. Lloyd Ross, William Lane and the Australian Labor Movement (Sydney, 1935), 43-44, 71, 69-70.
150. Joseph Lee, "Anti-Chinese Legislation in Australasia," Quarterly Journal of Economics (Jan. 1889), 222-23.
151. On Australians looking to California for precedents, see Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 38-39.
152. David Walker, "Shooting Mabel: Warrior Masculinity and Asian Invasion," History Australia, 2 (Dec. 2005), 89.1-89.11.
153. Worker, Jan. 3, 1907.
154. Benedict Anderson has emphasized the role of print capitalism in the constitution of nations, but for white workers, print facilitated the imagining of communities that were not necessarily congruent with the boundaries of nation-states. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991).
155. Worker, June 6, 1907.
156. Jonathan Hyslop, The Notorious Syndicalist: J. T. Bain; A Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg, 2004), 162-66, esp. 164, 165.
157. On the Australian influence on the South African labor movement, see also Kan, Trade Union Aristocracy.
158. See R. D. Dawe, Cornish Pioneers in South Africa: 'Gold and Diamonds, Copper and Blood'(St. Austell, 1998), 197.
159. On the British diasporic labor movement, see Hyslop, "The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself 'White, '" 398-421.
160. James Riley quoted in Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 64.
161. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 3.
162. Roger Rouse, "Thinking through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States," Public Culture, 7 (no. 2, 1995), 353-402, esp. 358.
163. Michelle Stephens writes similarly about blackness, arguing that black consciousness emerged from the interplay between the global and the national. Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, 2005), 5.
164. On how struggles over Asian migration in the Pacific world conferred the prerogative of border and migration controls to the nation-state, see Aristide Zolberg, "The Great Wall against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885-1925," in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern, 1999).
165. McKeown, Melancholy Order; and Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line .