IMPERIAL OPENINGS: CIVILIZATION, EXEMPTION, AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF MOBILITY IN THE HISTORY OF CHINESE EXCLUSION, 1868–1910

Abstract

By most measures, Daniel Augustus Tompkins was a highly unlikely opponent of totalized Chinese exclusion. The owner of three cotton mills and a New South booster editor, Tompkins presided over a racially segregated labor force and had much to say about the necessity of white supremacy for the progress of the South, the nation, and the world. So why, on March 14, 1906, did he testify before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressing his opposition to immigration officials' overzealous enforcement of legal barriers against Chinese immigration? Existing approaches to the racial politics of migration to the United States, which have emphasized the interchangeability of anti-black and anti-Chinese racisms in the nineteenth century, make it difficult to account for Tompkins' actions: they would lead us to expect that he would defend both complete Chinese exclusion and black subordination on similar racial grounds. This essay presents a new framework for conceptualizing migration, empire, and the politics of social differentiation that, among other things, will make sense of this seemingly unlikely intervention by a New South industrialist and racial ideologue in U.S. immigration politics. This framework brings together two traditionally separated fields of inquiry: migration history and imperial history. By revisiting Chinese exclusion (and its seemingly odd critics) through an imperial lens, it hopes to demonstrate the value—indeed, the necessity—of connecting these two approaches in the larger effort to entangle U.S. and global histories.