Chinese Migration and ‘White’ Networks, c.1850–1902

Abstract

In 1902 the idea that a British administration would organise the migration of tens of thousands of Chinese to a ‘white colony’ seemed impossible to imagine. The entire controversy over Chinese migration, and why the scheme in South Africa seemed so unlikely, related to the development of overlapping, but often conflicting ideas of democracy, whiteness, and Britishness which developed in the settler colonies and the United States. As Bridge and Fedorowich have explained, ‘being British anywhere meant exercising full civil rights within a liberal, pluralistic polity, or at least aspiring to that status. “Whiteness” was a dominant element’.1 The development of identifications and networks based upon whiteness and Britishness, and the occasional conflict between these identities, largely depended on an African or Asian ‘other’. While indigenous peoples were the ‘others’ of the early nineteenth century,2 each colony had a distinct, and in most colonies a decreasing, ‘native problem’, whereas Asian migration increasingly became the issue which could unite disparate parts of the settler colonies around a network of exclusionary whiteness. While the African ‘other’ remained predominant in southern Africa because they made up the majority of the population there, the debate over Chinese labour importation into the Transvaal briefly transcended local racial issues and created a unique inter-colonial dialogue about the relationship between the settler colonies and Britain. It is thus essential to explain the con-troversy surrounding Asian migration within the burgeoning ‘white’ colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to understand both why the Transvaal Chinese indentured labour scheme was considered and why it became a major global news story.KeywordsChinese ImmigrationAfrican UnionChinese MigrationSettler ColoniChinese LabourThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.