University of Leeds

Modern History Seminar Series

27 November 2013

“The Blind Forces Rising in the East of Asia”: Britain, the Dominions, and Asian Immigration, 1894-1924

In the late summer of 1908, Halford Mackinder, former Director ofthe London School of Economics, made a long and extensive tour ofCanada, first participating to the solemn celebrations for thetercentenary of the foundation of Quebec City and then movingwestward by train to the wide plains of Manitoba and the mountainousfjords of British Columbia. This was not a pleasant holiday from thehardness of academic work, but it was instead a confidential missionon behalf of the main imperialist circles of Great Britain, designedto foster the traditional sentimental and political relationsbetween the North American Dominion and the mother country. Fundedby the Rhodes Trust, Mackinder had in fact to collect social,economic, and geographical data on the recent development of theCanadian nation, preparing later detailed reports in support of thecause of imperial union. Moreover, he had to give several politicalspeeches in various Canadian cities, preparing the imminent visit ofLord Milner to North America in the autumn of 1908. The scheme wasthe product of the brilliant mind of Leo Amery, an old friend andfellow tariff reformer of Mackinder, and it was probably designed asa means to influence the result of the future Canadian generalelection, favouring the imperialist Conservative Party of RobertBorden against the imperial sceptic Liberals of Prime Minister SirWilfrid Laurier.1 Apparently Mackinder performed quite well his taskand he constantly tried to emphasize in his speeches the strongeconomic and political ties within the British Empire, receivingoften warm round of applauses from his local audiences. In Winnipeg,however, his public intervention was much more appreciated than inother parts of Canada, due to the special subject touched by theBritish geographer in his passionate imperial peroration. On thatparticular occasion, in fact, Mackinder insisted on the importanceof British sea power for the security of Canadians, claiming thatthe Monroe Doctrine was not a solid guarantee against the ‘great

1 On Amery’s scheme and its implementation, see Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men: the “Kindergarten” in Edwardian Imperial Affairs (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), p. 144, and Brian Blouet, Halford Mackinder: A Biography (Austin, TX: A&M University Press, 1987), pp. 144-5.

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oriental problems’ knocking at the door of their Pacific gate.2 Itwas only through ‘imperial strength’ that Canada could solve them,using all the diplomatic and military power of Great Britain toenforce its immigration policies on Japan and other Asian nations.The United States could not be trusted as an alternative help onsuch a delicate issue, because it had ‘vulnerable’ frontiers and itsnaval power could not match that of the British fleet, which hadsuccessfully settled all the major international crises from the‘Fashoda incident’ to the Russo-Japanese War. Therefore a solidimperial union built on a common naval force was the best way toprotect ‘the free nations of the world’ against Russian or Germanautocracy and ‘the blind forces rising in the east of Asia’,securing a new era of stability and prosperity for all the membersof the British Empire. There were loud applauses among the presentand the Manitoba Free Press defined Mackinder’s speech as a ‘weightyaddress on vital imperial problems’, praising the vigour andeloquence of his political vision.3

In touching the issue of Asian immigration, Mackinder had struck animportant chord with his audience, using skilfully this advantage topromote his fervent belief in imperial unity. Nevertheless, thingswere not as smooth and easy as depicted in his speech, and it wasquite unlikely that Canada would have renounced to its cherishednational autonomy to pursue the visionary project of a great Britishimperial federation, ‘defended by a united Navy and an efficientArmy.’4 From trade policies to relations with Washington, in fact,the Ottawa government seemed to follow different paths from those ofthe mother country, and on the thorny subject of Asian immigrationAnglo-Canadian views were even more divergent than usual, due to theopposed interests and necessities of the two countries in thematter. The same Mackinder recognized this divergence, reproachinghis compatriots for their ‘ignorant and unsympathetic’ attitudetoward colonial feelings, but his patriotic remarks on the LondonTimes were less successful than his Winnipeg utterance, showing allthe limitations of his ambitious imperial ideas.5 Indeed, as wellnoticed by Daniel Gorman, the question of Asian immigrationperfectly illustrated the growing tension within the British Empirebetween ‘proponents of a “wider patriotism” and those of “colonialautonomy”’, resulting in the final failure of the concept of2 ‘Talked of Great Issues of Empire’, Manitoba Free Press, 11 September 1908, p. 6.3 Ibid.4 H.J. Mackinder, ‘The Warwick Election’, The Times, 22 October 1903, p. 8. 5 H.J. Mackinder, ‘What London Thinks’, The Times, 8 September 1908, p. 6.

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imperial union and in the establishment of a pragmatic equilibriumbetween the ‘centralist imperatives’ of the British government andthe ‘independent actions’ of its overseas Dominions.6 Unable toreach a common consensus on how to deal with immigration issues,both at a legislative and diplomatic level, Britain and theDominions ended up to renounce to a shared notion of imperialcitizenship, preferring the relative security of national autonomyto the uncertainties of imperial federation. Ironically, this choiceallowed the survival of the British imperial system during thestormy years of the First World War and its peaceful transformationin the Commonwealth of Nations after 1919, reinforcing material andsentimental bonds between the self-governing colonies and the mothercountry. But it came at a price because the endless quarrels overAsian immigration in the Dominions damaged British foreign andimperial policy in the Far East, encouraging revolutionarynationalism in India and putting in jeopardy Britain’s strategicpartnership with Japan. Moreover, the controversy revealed theexistence of a much more appealing geopolitical vision for thesettler colonies than the imperial one suggested by Amery andMackinder, a vision that Erika Lee has recently identified as the‘White Pacific’, a racial and geographical construct in which‘Orientalism and anti-Asian policies’ were ‘shared and replicated’among all the white nations of the Pacific basin.7 It was a powerfulconstruct that seemed to create an alternative identity forCanadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, challenging theirtraditional relation with the British imperial centre and pushingthem toward a closer partnership with the United States, therecognized political and military leader of the ‘White Pacific.’8

6 Daniel Gorman, ‘Wider and Wider Still?: Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration and the Absence of an Imperial Citizenship in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3 (2002). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v003/3.3gorman.html> [accessed: 26 September 2013] 7 Erika Lee, ‘The “Yellow Peril” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas’, Pacific Historical Review, 76 (2007), p. 550.8 South Africa was also part of this wider movement of transnational white solidarity with the United States, adopting harsh discriminatory laws against Asian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, it cannot properly be considered as a Pacific nation, at least geographically speaking, and its tough anti-Asian legislation must also be seen in relation with its own peculiar racial problems, which were much more complex than those of the self-governing colonies in the Pacific.Moreover, the country was not touched by the Great White Fleet during its global tour of 1907-09, confirming its marginal position in the broader calculations of American foreign policy at the time. For all these reasons

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And it was a construct from which Britain was substantiallyexcluded, due to its relatively moderate view of imperialimmigration policies and its paramount imperial role in Asia, whichdid not allow it the adoption of the same harsh racial attitudes ofthe Dominion governments. This situation created a serious rift inAnglo-Dominion relations which could not be easily reconciled, evenafter the great patriotic gathering of the British Empire during theFirst World War years.

This rift, however, has partially been neglected by modern imperialhistorians, who have focused more their attention on the economic,constitutional, and defence aspects of Anglo-Dominion relations,ignoring the large and complex issue of imperial immigrationpolicies.9 With some notable exceptions, like R.A. Huttenback andAvner Offer, the popular mobilization of Dominion societies againstAsian coolies has remained an overlooked subject in the historicalanalysis of the British Empire, while its overt racial connotationshave sometimes been dismissed in favour of a more nuanced discussionabout the rise of colonial nationalism in the early twentiethcentury.10 Moreover, the widespread phenomenon of Asian exclusionacross the Pacific basin has often been explored along strictnational lines, looking only at what was happening in a determinedcountry without further references to the international dimensionsof the matter. As well argued by Erika Lee, the various anti-Asianpolicies of Canada, Australia, and the United States were in factnot closed separate cases but the direct result of a transnationalset of beliefs and attitudes that ‘flourished and moved acrossnational boundaries’, creating a global conversation on race andimmigration stretching from British Columbia to the farthest corner

I decided to not include it into this discussion of the ‘White Pacific’ vision, although I will mention briefly the influence of South African events on the immigration policies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.9 The issue, for example, is barely touched in the companion volume of the Oxford History of the British Empire dedicated to Canada. See John Herd Thompson, ‘Canada and the ‘Third British Empire’ ‘, in Canada and the British Empire, edited by Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 93-4.10 Gorman is a good example of this trend, focusing more his analysis on theconcept of imperial citizenship rather than the racial politics behind the Asian immigration debate. See ‘Wider and Wider Still?’ and Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 146-77. For a different view of the subject, see R.A. Huttenback,Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830-1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) and Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 178-212.

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of Latin America.11 However, even her transnational approach hasremained limited to the Western hemisphere, focusing mainly on theinter-American dynamics of Asian immigration and keeping out BritishAustralasia from the big picture of the phenomenon.12 The impact ofanti-Asian legislation in the Pacific on international relations isalso relatively untouched in Lee’s analysis, and this is somehow aserious omission considering the importance of diplomaticinitiatives and strategic calculations for the adoption orimplementation of these discriminatory measures in the first half ofthe twentieth century. Immigration laws, for example, were at thecentre of long American-Japanese and Canadian-Japanese negotiationsuntil the late 1920s, while the ability of Germany and the UnitedStates in using the rhetoric of the “Yellow Peril” for the promotionof their imperialist ambitions in the Asia-Pacific regionrepresented a pesky problem for Britain, who had to preserve vitalties in the area both with Japan and the Dominions.13 When Japan alsobegan to use a similar but opposed rhetoric in the 1910s and 1920s,calling all Asian peoples to unite against white imperialism, thesituation became even more critical for London, leading to thedissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1922 and to theinauguration of the highly controversial Singapore strategy in theFar East. Caught between the hammer of white nationalism and theanvil of Asian nationalism, the British imperial government did notknow what to do, following a path of diplomatic clumsiness andpolitical expediency which led ultimately to the fatal disasters ofthe Second World War.

Thus this paper aims to present a general outline of the issue ofAsian immigration in the Dominions from the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s, following the transnational suggestions recently advanced byAsian American scholars like Erika Lee and integrating them with adiplomatic/strategic reading of the Pacific situation in thoseturbulent years. In this sense, particular attention will be givento the concept of the ‘White Pacific’ and its cultural-politicalchallenge to the traditional relationship between Britain and theDominions, revealed explicitly in such dire incidents like theVancouver riots of 1907 and the Komagata Maru controversy of 1914.This geopolitical vision will also be seen in the broader context of11 Lee, ‘ “Yellow Peril” ’, p. 538.12 Erika Lee, ‘Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to AsianAmerican History’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 8 (2005), pp. 235-56. 13 On the international dimension of the “Yellow Peril” myth, see especiallyUte Menhert, Deutschland, Amerika, und die Gelbe Gefahr: Zur Karriere eines Schlagworts in der Grossen Politik, 1905-1917 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995).

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contemporary international relations, with the rise of the UnitedStates as a great Pacific power and the increasing political-military importance of Japan in the Far East. Of course, there is nopretension to be exhaustive on such a big topic, but simply toindividuate some possible avenues for a further exploration of theproblem of Asian immigration in Anglo-Dominion relations, giving itits rightful place in the new historiography of the British Empire.

The clash between the ‘White Pacific’ and ‘Greater Britain’, as thecause of imperial union was popularly known at the time, beganmainly in the 1890s, although the issue of Asian immigration wasalready a lively one in the Dominions since the late 1870s.14 It wasin those years, in fact, that the ‘Yellow Peril’ myth became apopular and influential international discourse, spreading anirrational fear and hatred of Asian societies across all Westerncountries. First expressed by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wasprobably inspired by racial stereotypes already circulating inEurope in the mid-nineteenth century, the myth saw Asian peoples,especially the Chinese, as a deadly threat to white nations, due totheir high demographic numbers and their ability to competesuccessfully in a modern capitalist system, thanks to the extremecheapness of their workforce. Capable of overflowing internationalmarkets with their low standard products, wiping out the competitionof their Western rivals, Asians were thus destined to take over theworld economy, replacing the traditional supremacy of Europeancountries. Moreover, their ‘degrading’ social and moral values could‘infect’ white societies, leading to the ultimate destruction ofWestern civilization. Finally, though absent in its earlyformulations, the ‘Peril’ had also a military dimension, perceivinga resurgent and modernized Chinese Empire as a formidable foe, readyto unleash endless hordes of yellow-skinned soldiers against thewhite nations. This dimension acquired special prominence afterJapan’s unexpected victories over Russia in 1904-5, which put incrisis old ideas of ‘white superiority’, generating great anxiety inWestern intellectual and political circles.15 For the Kaiser, the

14 See for example Patricia Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989), pp. 35-63, and Phil Griffiths, ‘The Strategic Fears of the Ruling Class: The Construction of Queensland’s Chinese Immigrants Regulation Act of 1877’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 58 (2012), pp. 1-19.15 On the various aspects of the “Yellow Peril” discourse, see Menhert, Deutschland, pp. 35-59. On the global impact of the Russo-Japanese War, especially at a cultural level, see instead David Wells and Sandra Wilson, eds., The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-05 (Basingstoke: Palgrave

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future of humanity was going to be dominated by ‘a fight for life &death’ between the ‘white’ and the ‘yellow’ nations, requiring allthe members of the ‘White Race’ to join ‘in common defense [sic]against the coming danger.’16 Popularized by novelists like EmileDriant and Jack London, who imagined horrible wars of exterminationagainst the ‘yellow nations’, such an apocalyptic view of worldpolitics was by the mid-1900s a well-established political andcultural trend in many European countries, affecting theirdiplomatic behaviour in the Far East, while in the United States theAsiatic Exclusion League (AEL) used it as a powerful rhetoricaldevice in support of its own campaign against Asian immigration,underlining the impossible ‘Americanization’ of the ‘yellow’peoples.17 Based in San Francisco, the League boasted in 1908 to haveprovided its literature to almost 7000 educational institutionsacross the country, reaching the Atlantic coast and far southernstates like Virginia.18 The message of the organization was simpleand uncompromising: regardless of the universalist views of‘philosophers and philanthropists’, there was ‘no common tiewhatever’ between Asians and white Americans, while ‘the characterof an Oriental population’ degraded social and economic conditionsin the United States, creating an underclass of ‘alien’ immigrants‘unable to properly perform the duties of American citizenship.’19

These views were shared by powerful politicians like Senator HenryMoore Teller of Colorado, who warned about the imminent conquest ofthe American market by Chinese manufacturers, and they helped toframe a system of harsh discriminatory laws against Asianimmigrants, reaching its peak with the xenophobic Immigration Actsof 1917 and 1924.20

Macmillan, 1999). 16 Wilhelm II to Theodore Roosevelt, 4 September 1905, quoted in Menhert, Deutschland, p. 135.17 Emile Driant (Capitaine Danrit), L’Invasion Jaune (Paris: Flammarion, 1905); Jack London, ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ (1914), The Jack London Online Collection <http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/StrengthStrong/invasion.html> [Accessed:7 November 2013] 18 Asiatic Exclusion League, Third Annual Meeting of the Asiatic Exclusion League, San Francisco, May 1908 (San Francisco: Organized Labor Print, 1908), p. 4. 19 Ibid., pp. 33-4.20 Menhert, Deutschland, p. 38. On American legislation against Asian immigration, see Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962) and Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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The British self-governing colonies in the Pacific were also deeplyinvolved in this anti-Asian frenzy, which revealed their anxiousdesire of building strong independent societies based on racial andcultural homogeneity, seen as the best guarantee of representativegovernment and economic prosperity. From this point of view, thepresence of large Indian and Chinese labour colonies in BritishColumbia and Northern Australia, where they were mainly employed inthe agricultural and mining sector, was perceived as a seriousthreat to the future of these territories, harming the project of aunited Canadian and Australian nation. Following a reasoning notdissimilar from that of the AEL in the United States, thesecommunities were in fact deemed as ‘unassimilable’ in the developingsocial and political body of their residing countries, engaging inunfair economic competition against their white neighbours ormaintaining an ‘alien’ culture opposed to the more ‘civilized’values of the British tradition. Coupled with the broader fear ofthe ‘Yellow Peril’, all these concerns led to the steady adoptionfrom the 1890s of harsh discriminatory legislation against Asianimmigrants, designed to discourage or prevent their arrival in thewhite settler colonies. There had already been restrictiveimmigration laws in the previous decades, especially in Queenslandand British Columbia, but they had proven ineffective or they hadeven been contested by colonial or national authorities on politicaland economic grounds.21 Indeed, there were some serious obstaclesthat militated against the kind of total exclusion pursued byDominion governments: the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, for example,guaranteed formal protection to all Chinese citizens living in theBritish Empire, while the limitation of movement for Indian cooliesrepresented a negative counterpoint to the idea of imperialequality, officially endorsed by British imperial authorities.Although this idea was often instrumental, justifying the expansionor consolidation of British imperial power around the world, it wasalso genuinely professed by many politicians and intellectuals inthe mother country, making them less sympathetic to the cause ofracial discrimination pursued in the settler colonies. Localauthorities in the Dominions were also divided about the problem ofAsian immigration, with some more intransigent in their restrictive

21 In Canada, for example, the Ottawa government had initially resisted the exclusionary policies promoted by British Columbia, due to the vital importance of Chinese labour for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. See Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 173-5.

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action and others instead more lenient for economic reasons.22 Allthese facts limited the extent and efficacy of immigrationrestrictions in the 1880s, but in the following decade events likethe federation of Australia and the appointment of JosephChamberlain at the Colonial Office gave new strength to theexclusion cause, leading to the New Zealand Immigration RestrictionAct of 1899 and to the Australia Immigration Restriction Act of1901.

In London, Chamberlain wholeheartedly supported these measures,hoping that they would have helped the cause of imperial union. Atthe Imperial Conference of 1897, he expressed all his sympathy for‘the determination of the white inhabitants’ of the self-governingcolonies in rejecting any ‘influx of people alien in civilisation’in their lands, and he assured that the British government would nothave offered ‘any opposition to the proposals intended with thatobject.’23 Moreover, he suggested the adoption of restrictive actssimilar to that recently established by the Natal government inSouth Africa, which did not allow entrance to any immigrant devoidof minimal property and unable to write and sign documents in aEuropean language. Technically non-racial, the Natal Act of 1897 wasclearly designed against Indian immigration, and it became soon thetemplate for the exclusion policies of the other settler colonies inthe Pacific.24 Nevertheless, even Chamberlain advised the colonies totone down the racial character of their anti-immigration laws,because it risked to undermine the moral foundation of the imperialsystem, which officially did not discriminate a man because of thecolour of his skin but for his social or individual conduct.25 Onthis point, however, the Colonial Secretary was going to bethoroughly disappointed: the Dominions adopted in fact a hard andconfrontational racial stance on immigration issues, provoking aninternal turmoil in the British Empire and threatening itsinternational position in the Far East. Indeed, while China wasunable to counter the discriminatory measures taken against its

22 In Australia, for example, Queensland was quite fierce in its opposition to Chinese immigration, while Western Australia supported it as a means to inhabit and develop its wild territory. It was only after the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 that these divergences were reconciled in the ‘White Australia’ policy. 23 Quoted in R.A. Huttenback, ‘The British Empire as a “White Man’s Country”– Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement’, Journal of British Studies, 13 (1973), p. 117.24 Ibid., pp. 111-2.25 Quoted in Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, p. 164.

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citizens, due to the extreme weakness of its imperial government,India reacted with popular protests and demonstrations, upholdingthe so much vaunted liberal character of the British Empire. And therise of Japan as a great power in the East challenged the racistcomplacency of Chamberlain, who had once defined non-whiteindependent nations as ‘sleeping dogs’, unable to enforce therespect of international treaties on the British white colonies.26

On the contrary, the Japanese government asked for an equitable andrespectful treatment of its citizens, who could not be excluded fromCanada or Australasia on the same grounds used against Indians andChinese. It contested the supposed fairness of exclusion based onlanguage tests, and it resented the humiliating conditions imposedon its citizens in the Dominions, which did not spare even merchantsand tourists.27 The position of Tokyo was partially reinforced by thesigning of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, which underlined thestrategic and military weakness of Britain in the Far East after theSouth African War.28 Dependent on Japanese support for themaintenance of its position in China, Britain could not in factentirely ignore the requests of its new ally, but any attempt toreach a compromise on the issue met the fierce resistance of theDominions, who rejected any possible infringement of their strictimmigration policies. Moreover, the shocking result of the Russo-Japanese War gave new life to the ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria in Canada,Australia, and New Zealand, which reached a dramatic climax inSeptember 1907, when the city of Vancouver became the theatre of theworst race riots in Canadian history, resulting in brutal mobviolence against Japanese immigrants and in huge damages to theproperties of the local Chinese community.

The event coincided with the Japanese-American diplomatic crisisover California immigration laws, marked by brutal attacks againstJapanese shops in San Francisco, and it revealed the existence of astrong ‘transregional white working-class identity’ explicitlyopposed to Asian immigrants.29 Indeed, the riots had been instigated26 Quoted in Huttenback, ‘British Empire’, p. 119.27 Neville Bennett, ‘White Discrimination against Japan: Britain, the Dominions, and the United States, 1908-1928’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies,3 (2001), pp. 94-5. 28 On the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, see Ian Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894-1907 (London: Athlone, 1966) and Phillips P. O’Brien, ed., The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004).29 Lee, ‘ “Yellow Peril” ‘, pp. 550-3; Kornel Chang, ‘Circulating Race and Empire: Trasnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian

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by members of the AEL coming from the near state of Washington,where they had already attacked Sikh immigrants in Bellingham, andthey involved white labour activists coming from all the Pacificworld, reunited in Vancouver for a vigorous common stand against the‘Yellow Peril.’ As well noted by Kornel Chang, such a violentgathering was almost a ritual of ‘racial and community solidarity’,reuniting new European immigrants and old citizens of the Pacificnations into a shared working-class identity, and it emphasized‘whiteness’ over any other form of national or political allegiance,including the imperial bond in the British settler colonies.30 In ahighly symbolical act during the demonstration preceding streetviolence against Asian immigrants, in fact, the mob in Vancouver didnot only shout offensive remarks against the Canadian government,guilty of not doing enough to prevent the arrival of new undesirable‘yellow’ workers from the East, but they arrived even to burn theeffigy of the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, the officialimperial representative in the region, waving banners and flags indefence of a ‘White Canada.’31 Needless to say, this racial emphasiscontinued well after the riots, showing a marked contrast ofattitudes and interests between Britain and the Pacific Dominions.

In New Zealand, for example, the Vancouver event generated sheerenthusiasm among the members of the Anti-Asiatic League, a localorganization modelled on the AEL, who disseminated the streets ofWellington with several leaflets asking to combat ‘the evils arisingout of the presence of Asiatics in our midst.’32 Meanwhile, inAustralia, the Sydney Morning Herald justified the riots as ‘a mereebullition of feeling’ outgrown from the constant ‘danger’ ofJapanese immigration in British Columbia, and it called‘emphatically’ Canadians, Americans, and Australians to get togetherand put an end to the whole problem of ‘Eastern immigration intocountries dominated by white people.’ And if such a solution cameout from violent ‘troubles’ like those of Vancouver, ‘all the betterfor Australia.’33 Of course, these reactions seriously concerned theBritish government, who feared the disruptive consequences of theVancouver mayhem on its alliance with Japan and its imperialposition in the Far East. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary,

Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880-1910’, The Journal of American History, 96 (2009), p. 678.30 Chang, ‘Circulating Race’, p. 691. 31 ‘Canadian Attack on the Japanese’, The Montreal Gazette, 9 September 1907, p.1.32 ‘ “The Yellow Peril” ‘, The Marlborough Express, 20 September 1907, p. 3.33 ‘East and West’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1907, p. 8.

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lamented that the ‘Pacific slope’ was in ‘a high state of fever’,and he feared that the Dominions might interpret Britain’sconciliatory efforts toward Japan after the riots as a betrayal oftheir special relationship with the mother country, provoking‘untoward political consequences’ both at an imperial andinternational level.34 There was also deep irritation at theunreasonableness and extremism of the self-governing colonies onimmigration issues, seen as a sign of political ‘selfishness’ andcultural ‘immaturity.’ In a long editorial significantly titled‘Race Prejudice’, the Times accused the Dominions of placing ‘theirlocal interests and prejudices’ before the greater good of theBritish Empire, ignoring the important ‘obligations’ that theimperial government had to perform toward other nations and other‘members of the Imperial family.’35 It was absurd to believe that ‘afew thousand Japanese’ were going to turn British Columbia andCalifornia into ‘Mongolian provinces’, or that ‘some ten or twelvethousand Indians’ in the Transvaal represented a ‘serious menace’ towhite South Africans. The self-governing colonies must finally learnto take into consideration ‘the interests of the Empire as a whole’,and to respect the right to ‘fair-play’ of their fellow Indiansubjects across all imperial territories.36 More ironically, theManchester Guardian dubbed the Dominions as ‘recalcitrant colonists’,and it implied the economic superiority of Asian workers over theirwhite rivals, due to their extreme cheapness and industrialefficiency. At the same time discriminatory legislation in thePacific Dominions was substantially useless, because Japan was‘physically bursting’ with a population that it could not feed, andit was also living in ‘a period of national exhilaration’ like theElizabethan age in Britain, two conditions that promised to increaseits ‘natural’ emigration movement toward the scarcely populatedfields of British Columbia and Northern Australia.37 Finally, therewas also a consistent press campaign to underline the ‘un-Britishness’ of the leading rioters, who were generally depicted as‘Americans’, ‘Irish’, or even ‘Scandinavians’, detaching theirwicked cause from the official values of British civilization.38 34 Sir Edward Grey to James Bryce, 30 March 1908, in G.M. Trevelyan, Grey of Fallodon: Being the Life of Sir Edward Grey Afterwards Viscount Grey of Fallodon (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1937), p. 203.35 ‘Race Prejudice’, The Times, 9 September 1907, p. 11.36 Ibid.37 ‘No Title’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 September 1907, p. 4.38 See for example ‘The Anti-Asiatic Riot at Vancouver: Causes of the Outbreak’, The Times, 10 September 1907, p. 3, where the main responsibilityof the riot was attached to a small group of ‘Irish labour leaders’, helped

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The paternalist reproaches of the mother country only nurtured theresentment of the white colonies, who defended the righteousness oftheir anti-Asian crusade in fierce and uncompromising terms. One ofthe most biting replies to British criticism, for example, was thatof the Kalgoorlie Miner, a daily newspaper of Western Australia, whoaccused London of having adopted a ‘strictly English and insular’standpoint on the problem of ‘alien immigration’, ignoring the self-governing rights of the Dominions and the vital threat posed by non-white labour to their national existence.39 If nothing was done,Australia risked of becoming invaded by ‘a superabundance ofAsiatics’, with ‘untenable’ consequences for its white people, andthus Australians were not going to sacrifice themselves ‘in theinterests of other nations, even if they be British subjects also.’The responsibility of all the troubles was completely on theshoulders of the mother country, and the solution was simply to helpAustralia to become ‘a fine country for white people’, leaving asideany other humanitarian or political consideration. Otherwise, therelative ‘emptiness’ of Australasia was going to be ‘an ever-presenttemptation to the crowded peoples of the East’, and a big argumentin support of their emigration movement.40 Such a reasoning found acertain sympathy among imperialist circles in Britain, withintellectual personalities like Richard Jebb and Mackinder defendingthe right of the white colonies to decide their own immigrationpolicies without any interference from the London government.41

However, the British public never bought entirely the alarmistvision of the ‘Yellow Peril’ expressed in the colonies, and thisfact – coupled with the material detachment of the United Kingdomfrom the fluxes of Asian immigration – represented a serious elementof divergence in Anglo-Dominion views on the matter, keeping aliveheated debates between the mother country and the Dominiongovernments. Apart for the popular fiction of Sax Rohmer, in fact,the ‘Yellow Peril’ idea did not enjoy great consideration amongBritish writers and politicians, who often dismissed it as a hollow‘bogey’ in very contemptuous terms.42 Lord Curzon, for example,

by a mysterious ‘Scandinavian’ agitator.39 ‘Intolerance toward Asiatics’, The Kalgoorlie Miner, 14 September 1907, p. 4.40 Ibid. 41 Richard Jebb, ‘The Imperial Problem of Asiatic Immigration’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 56 (1908), pp. 585-610; Mackinder, ‘What London Thinks’, p. 6. 42 On Rohmer’s fiction, see Jenny Clegg, Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril: The Making of a Racist Myth (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1994) and Ulmira Seshagiri, ‘Modernity’s (Yellow Peril): Dr. Fu-Manchu and English Race Paranoia’, Cultural Critique, 62 (2006), pp. 162-94.

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criticized at length the racial fears of Australian authors likeCharles Pearson, stating that ‘the Yellow belt in the Far East’ wasnever going to clutch ‘the keys of empire’ from Britain or tochallenge ‘the racial dominion of the West.’43 And at the height ofthe Russo-Japanese War, when Europe and the Dominions were scaredalike by Japan’s spectacular victories in Manchuria, authors likeE.J. Dillon and Demetrius Boulger ridiculed at length discoursesabout the rise of a new ‘Mongol Empire’ in East Asia, underliningthe numerous divisions between the main peoples of the area andfocusing more their sharp criticism against Russia, the real‘Asiatic’ menace to the freedom of the world.44

In the case of Japan, the contrast of views with the Dominions waseven starker: while Australians like Captain R.A. Crouch feared therise of Tokyo as a ‘domineering’ power in the Far East, dreading itseffect on the maintenance of their restrictive immigration policy,many Britons were instead quite enthusiastic about their alliancewith Japan, viewing the Asian country as a model of military powerand ‘national efficiency’.45 Military officers like Sir Ian Hamiltonwrote powerful eulogies of Japanese warrior values during the eventsof 1904-05, and the Times praised at large the efficient organizationand moral strength of the Japanese educational system, seen as aperfect example to counter the societal decay of Britain after theSouth African War.46 Moreover, the Foreign Office encouraged thedevelopment of an elaborate royal diplomacy between London andTokyo, marked by frequent visits of members of the Japanese imperialfamily to England, where they were generally received with greatpomp and solemn celebrations.47 For the Dominions, especiallyAustralia, all these positive feelings toward Japan were almostnonsense; as proud young ‘white’ countries, they saw mainly Tokyo asanother danger to their efforts of building homogeneous nationalsocieties, free from the nightmare of ‘colour’ intruders. Indeed,when Prince Fushimi visited Vancouver in the summer of 1907, in anattempt to strengthen Japanese-Canadian relations, the only effect43 George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East: Japan, Korea, China (London and New York: Longmans, 1894), pp. 411-2.44 E.J. Dillon, ‘Foreign Affairs’, Contemporary Review, 86 (1904), pp. 286-90;Demetrius C. Boulger, ‘The “Yellow Peril” Bogey’, The Nineteenth Century, 55 (1904), pp. 30-9.45 ‘The Yellow Peril: To Australia’, The Review of Reviews, 30 (1904), p. 164.46 Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes (London: Hurst& Co., 2009), pp. 85-109; ‘Education in Japan’, The Times, 2 November 1905, p. 5. 47 Anthony Best, ‘Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922’, Social Science Japan Journal, 9 (2006), pp. 171-86.

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of his parade through the streets of the city was to raise the fearsof local white residents, who later joined the destructive riots ledby the AEL.48 Royal diplomacy did not seem to work well in the self-governing colonies, who reacted to London critical remarks with adirect appeal to the only foreign power really sympathetic to theircause – the United States. In the early weeks of 1908, theAustralian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, invited the American fleetto visit Sydney and Melbourne during its proposed world cruise,sending a strong message of political and military solidaritybetween the white nations of the Pacific. New Zealand also sentlater a similar invitation, maybe hoping to reconcile the moralimperative of white solidarity with some material publicity for itsnew-born tourism industry.49

The British government was furious for the Australian initiative:Winston Churchill claimed that it was something that should be‘discouraged from every point of view’; the Admiralty, unable to putup a parallel naval demonstration in the area, felt completelymortified; and the Foreign Office was literally outraged by apolitical and military show clearly directed against Japan, a formalally of the British Empire.50 On its part, Canada skipped theoccasion, although it used the anger and embarrassment of the mothercountry to promote its own diplomatic initiatives in the Pacific,leading to a gentlemen’s agreement with Tokyo on immigration issuesand the compensation of the victims of the Vancouver riots.51 In theend, there was not very much that London could do to stop the event,and the Asquith cabinet had to swallow the bitter pill of watchingthe American fleet sumptuously parading in Auckland Bay and SidneyHarbour among cheering crowds waving American flags. On the otherhand, President Theodore Roosevelt was entirely satisfied by his‘smart Yankee trick’, which represented the culmination of hisprevious informal diplomacy toward the Dominions in order to create

48 ‘Vancouver Riots: An Appeal for Moderation’, The Manchester Guardian, 12 September 1907, p. 7.49 Margaret Werry, ‘ “The Greatest Show on Earth”: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific’, Theatre Journal, 57 (2005), pp. 365-6.50 Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-14 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), pp. 164-5.51 On these diplomatic efforts, see Howard H. Sugimoto, Japan, the Vancouver Riots, and Canadian Diplomacy (New York: Arno Press, 1978) and Kirt Niergarth, ‘ “This Continent Must Belong to the White Races”: William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canadian Diplomacy and Immigration Law, 1908’, The International History Review, 32 (2010), pp. 599-617.

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a common front against the ‘Yellow Peril’.52 It was a good occasionto show to the Asians the racial and cultural superiority of theWestern world, compelling them to accept a compromise preventingtheir further emigration into the white Pacific nations. Moreover,the tour of the United States fleet in the South Seas was alsodesigned as a way to include Australasia into the Monroe Doctrine,reinforcing the international image of Washington as a great powerand preparing the American people to their imperial destiny in thetwentieth century. Organized as a theatrical melodrama, the arrivalof American ships in Australia and New Zealand represented thepinnacle of that wide transnational movement, seen already at workduring the Vancouver riots, whose main aim was to transform thePacific basin into a ‘white man’s space’, closed to the migratoryinflux of Asian peoples. And here this movement was fully recognizedand supported by state authorities, who used to it to justify theirmajor strategic and imperial ambitions on the world stage. As wellnoticed by Margaret Werry, both Australians and New Zealandersreceived in fact their guests through costly and spectacularcelebrations, ‘saturated with political and racial significance.’53

There were ceremonial arches, parades, banquets, illuminations, andpublic speeches exalting America’s special relationship with theAustralasian colonies. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Sir JosephWard declared that the United States fleet was not the fleet of ‘aforeign country, but that of a nation who were our cousins, kith andkin of the Anglo-Saxon race.’ And he predicted that such a navalforce would become very useful in the near future, due to theimminent titanic struggle between the ‘white races’ and ‘those ofthe East’ over the control of the Pacific.54 At the same time localnewspapers published long ‘Fleet Week’ supplements full of articlesand cartoons sanctioning the racial and cultural unity of Americansand New Zealanders, including one where an American eagle exchangeda hongi, the classical Maori gesture of welcome, with an elderlykiwi.55 In Australia, over half a million people assistedenthusiastically to the arrival of American battleships in SydneyHarbour, while the poet F.J. Burnell saluted the event as thereunion of the ‘grand old Anglo-Saxon race’, ready to check the

52 Donald C. Gordon, ‘Roosevelt’s “Smart Yankee Trick” ‘, Pacific Historical Review, 30 (1961), pp. 351-8.53 Werry, ‘ “Greatest Show on Earth” ‘, p. 364.54 ‘New Zealand Premier and the “Yellow Peril” ‘, The Manchester Guardian, 22 July 1908, p. 6.55 Werry, ‘ “Greatest Show on Earth” ‘, pp. 365-6.

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‘swarming hungry Orient’ with ‘stern unflinching mace.’56 The Premierof New South Wales, C.G. Wade, emphasized the strengthening of‘existing ties of brotherhood and racial affinity’ with the UnitedStates, and this idea was later expanded by the influentialpolitician George H. Reid, who declared to the New York Herald thebirth of a new “league of friendship” between the Australian and theAmerican federation, with ‘young Australia’ rejoicing in ‘the giantstrength and magnificent destiny’ of its North American cousin.57 Inhis declaration, Reid also reaffirmed the original loyalty ofAustralia to Great Britain, seen as ‘the invincible champion of theliberties of Europe’, but such a clarification did little to dispelthe growing concerns of London, nurtured by the mass celebrations ofAustralian-American special relationship in Sydney Harbour.58

Needless to say, these celebrations were a white man’s affair withno place for other racial groups: Japanese stewards serving in theAmerican fleet, for example, were hastily sacked before the cruise,while black sailors suffered a brutal system of segregation enforcedby their white comrades, leading often to violent altercations inthe streets of Sydney and Auckland.59 From this point of view, anAustralian reporter noticed with a certain sadness the incredible‘disdain’ showed by white Americans toward their ‘negro brethren’,treated almost as lepers or lower creatures aboard the fleet’s mainbattleships.60

Though Roosevelt did not stress too much the political results ofthe Australasian tour, hoping to maintain a positive entente withLondon, the British cabinet decided to look for a compromise withthe Pacific Dominions on the knot of Asian immigration, curing themfrom their dangerous Americanophilia. An informal agreement wasfinally reached at the Imperial Conference of 1911: the Dominionsaccepted without objection the renewal of the Anglo-JapaneseAlliance, receiving a long tirade by Grey on the complex reality ofinternational affairs, and they got in return the completerecognition of their national autonomy over immigration issues,limited only by a bland statement in favour of more legislative

56 F.J. Burnell, ‘Australia to America’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August 1908, p. 9.57 ‘Farewell Messages: From the Premier’ and ‘Two Federations: Mr. Reid, M.P., on the Visit’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1908, p. 7.58 ‘Two Federations’, p. 7.59 Meaney, Search for Security, pp.167-8; ‘American Armada: Black versus White’, The Advertiser, 13 August 1908, p. 7; ‘Sydney Festivities’, The Argus, 26 August1908, pp. 7-8. 60 ‘The Fleet in Melbourne’, Sunday Times, 6 September 1908, p. 11.

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uniformity between the mother country and the overseas colonies.61

The imperial gathering also saw the dismal failure of Sir JosephWard’s proposals for the creation of a common imperial parliament,modelled on the constitutional ideas of Milner’s Round Table, andthis event represented a fatal blow to the cause of imperial union,rejected by all the other Dominion leaders in favour of themaintenance of the old system of voluntary cooperation between thevarious members of the British Empire.62 Although the problem ofAsian immigration cannot be considered the primary cause of such adevelopment, rooted in broader economic and political reasons, itcertainly did not help the pan-national efforts of Britishimperialists, furthering instead motives of distrust and resentmentbetween Britain and the Dominions. And these motives remained verywell alive at the Imperial Conference of 1911, where the IndiaOffice vainly tried to persuade the self-governing colonies aboutthe need of more ‘humane’ exclusion measures toward Indianimmigrants, fellow subjects of the British Crown. Indeed, the Earlof Crewe asked Dominion governments to treat with more respectIndian labourers living in their territories, making some personalsacrifice for the sake of imperial peace, and he warned that until‘fairly pleasant terms’ existed between the white colonies and Indiathe concept of imperial unity remained a hollow one, with Britainconstantly intervening as the advocate of one side against theother, or playing the unenviable role of referee between the dividedmembers of the imperial family.63 What Crewe really feared was thesteady rise of anti-colonial nationalism in India, which was findingnew motives of outrage and agitation in the brutal methods used bythe self-governing colonies against Hindu and Muslim emigrants.

These methods were famously contested by Gandhi’s non-violentcampaigns in South Africa, but they generated a more dramaticresponse in Western Canada, where the Sikh community openlychallenged the immigration restrictions imposed by localauthorities. In 1913, a Japanese steamship, the Panama Maru, carried56 Indian immigrants to British Columbia, and after a long legalbattle they were able to enter the country, despite the fierceopposition of immigration officers led by William Charles Hopkinson,a former policeman from India.64 Inspired by this success, BabaGurdit Singh and other members of the Ghadar Party, a revolutionary61 Imperial Conference, Minutes of Proceedings of the Imperial Conference, 1911 (London: HMSO, 1911), pp. 97-125, 424.62 J.E. Kendle, ‘The Round Table Movement, New Zealand, and the Conference of 1911’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 3 (1965), pp. 104-17.63 Imperial Conference, Minutes, pp. 398-9.

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organization based in California, chartered another Japanese cargo,the Komagata Maru, to transport 165 Indian immigrants from Hong Kongto Vancouver, an early number which quickly increased to 376 aftertemporary stops at Shangai, Manila, and Yokohama.65 The intent of thejourney was to challenge again Canadian immigration laws, hoping tocompel the Ottawa government to keep open its borders to all Britishsubjects, and Singh underlined to the Japan Gazette the fine conditionsof immigrants aboard the ship, who disposed of enough money orprofessional competencies to open new businesses in North America.66

At their arrival in Vancouver, however, the passengers of theKomagata Maru were not even allowed to disembark, remaining trappedon the ship in critical sanitary conditions for almost eight weeks.With scarce food and water, Singh and his companions wrote desperateletters to newspapers, politicians, and legal courts, pleading forthe possibility to enter the country, but to no avail. After a shortlegal battle, all their requests were repealed by the Canadian Courtof Appeal in early July 1914, and the Komagata Maru wasunceremoniously escorted out of national sea waters by the Rainbow,the main battleship of the new Canadian fleet. Blocked in Japan forother four weeks, the ship disembarked its weary passengers atCalcutta in September 1914, where they were met by a massivesecurity apparatus, due to their supposed relationship withrevolutionary terrorism and the recent outbreak of militaryhostilities with Germany. Some passengers were forcibly escorted toPunjab with a special train, while those who refused to do so werelater involved in a brutal confrontation with police forces at BudgeBudge, resulting in twenty-two people killed and more than twohundred sentenced to various prison terms. Singh escaped capture andlived under false identity in India for several years, surrendering

64 John Price and Sonia Manak, ‘Comment: Panama Maru Incident Shook Ottawa and B.C.’, Times Colonist, 17 October 2013 <http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-panama-maru-incident-shook-ottawa-and-b-c-1.661880> [accessed: 10 November 2013] 65 All the information and documents on the Komagata Maru incident presentedhere are from Komagata Maru: Continuing the Journey <http://komagatamarujounery.ca>, an extremely detailed website with original archival materials edited for educational purposes by Simon FraserUniversity Library in cooperation with the Canadian Department of Immigration and Citizenship. On the Ghadar Party, see instead Maia Ramnath,Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 66 ‘Ship Full of Indians for Canada’, The Japan Gazette, 18 April 1914 <http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/9039> [accessed: 13 November 2013]

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to the authorities only in 1921.67 A few weeks later the Ghadar Partyavenged the Budge Budge massacre by killing William Hopkinson, theinflexible Canadian immigration officer, in the streets ofVancouver, starting a long series of terrorist acts against theBritish Empire in North America which lasted until the end of theFirst World War.

The case of the Komagata Maru clearly showed that the Dominions hadno intention of pleasing London even on the delicate question ofIndian immigration, regardless of the political consequences for theIndia Office. On the contrary, many Canadians saw the incident asanother proof of the need to become more independent from London,dealing with their own immigration problems without any embarrassing‘dependence upon the British taxpayer.’68 From this point of view,H.H. Stevens, Conservative MP for Vancouver, proposed even strongerlegislative measures against Asian immigration, excluding fromCanada all peoples coming from nations ‘south of the 50th parallel’,including all the British dependencies in South Asia.69 Although theBritish cabinet tried again to relax Dominion immigration lawsduring the war, acknowledging the huge contribution given by Indiato the war effort, it could not overcome the fierce resistance ofthe various colonial governments, who used their own economic andmilitary contribution to the Allied cause to check London requests.70

By the end of the conflict, Britain finally decided to abandon thetopic, accepting without further objection the discriminatorypolicies of the Dominions. Two factors led to this decision, whichput temporarily London at the head of the ‘white men’s alliance’ atthe Paris Peace Conference opposing the Racial Equality Proposaladvanced by the Japanese delegation: a new sense of community withthe self-governing colonies, matured through the experience of thewar, and the gradual decline of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,undermined by the expansionist policy of Tokyo in East Asia and bythe implicit support given by Japanese officers to the revolutionary

67 Released in 1927, Singh became a prominent member of the Indian National Congress, in close contact with Gandhi and Nehru throughout the struggle for national independence. In 1952 he participated to the inauguration of amonument memorial to the Komagata Maru in Calcutta. He died in Amritsar twoyears later. 68 ‘Clippings from the Canadian Gazette’, 9 July 1914 <http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/207> [accessed: 13 November 2013] 69 Ibid.70 ‘Newsclipping - Desire Removal of Embargo on Hindus’, 7 December 1914 <http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/221> [accessed: 14 November 2013]

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movement in India.71 Moreover, British authors and politicians beganto look with other eyes to the ‘Yellow Peril’ myth, accepting someof its premises and fearing the violent overthrown of their imperialauthority in the East. The India Office, for example, discussedelaborate containment strategies against any future Japaneseexpansion toward the Persian Gulf, while even an old genuineSocialist like H.M. Hyndman wrote an alarmist book about theimminent political ‘awakening’ of Asia, destined to wreak havoc onthe imperialist nations of the West.72 Weakened by the war andtroubled by vast popular uprisings in India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia,the British government opted then to reinforce its traditional tieswith the Dominions, defending their hard anti-Asian legislations andpromoting sometimes a wider entente between the Anglo-Saxon nationsappealing to their racial patriotism. In this sense, it evenaccepted the quick demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1922,satisfying the joint diplomatic pressure of Canada, Australia, andthe United States.73 This represented another important victory forthe ‘White Pacific’ vision, discarding the main obstacle in favourof a new solidarity between the English-speaking peoples in thePacific area.

But if London hoped with these actions to resurrect old ideals ofimperial union, it was badly mistaken. Despite a superficialsolidarity with the mother country, the self-governing coloniesrefused to accept the burden of international or imperialresponsibilities, promoting only their selfish economic interestsand retreating into a proud diplomatic isolationism. Moreover, theold conflict with India over immigration remained well alive duringall the 1920s, marked by serious public confrontations like that atthe Imperial Economic Conference of 1923, where members of theIndian delegation attacked the exclusion policies of the Dominions,asking for equal political rights for their compatriots living inthe white colonies.74 On that occasion, the Baldwin government kept avery low profile, and it tried merely to preserve some vague form of71 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 11; Best, ‘Race’, 182-3.72 John Fisher, ‘ “Backing the Wrong Horse”: Japan in British Middle EasternPolicy 1914-18’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 21 (1998), pp. 60-74; H.M. Hyndman, The Awakening of Asia (London: Cassell, 1919). 73 Phillips P. O’Brien, ‘Britain and the End of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, in O’Brien, ed., The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, pp. 264-84.74 ‘Indian Status: Claim at Imperial Conference’, The Glasgow Herald, 2 November 1923, p. 9; ‘Indians as Citizens: Appeal to Dominions’, The New Zealand Herald, 3 November 1923, p. 11.

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consensus among the members of the imperial gathering, delegatingall the compromising stuff to the bureaucratic machinery of theColonial Office. Needless to say, such a meagre result was far awayfrom the dreams of a strong united British Empire entertained byMackinder and other imperialists in the antebellum era, who resignedthemselves to support the new loose structure of the Commonwealth ofNations in the interwar years.75 Their only consolation was that eventhe rival vision of the ‘White Pacific’ championed by the UnitedStates suffered a consistent decline in the early 1920s, due to thenew internationalism of the time and the partial retreat ofWashington from world affairs. Thus when Representative Britten ofIndiana proposed in 1924 the organization of a conference betweenthe white nations of the Pacific, designed to intimidate Japan inthe Far East, his suggestion did not receive any kind of endorsementby the American government, who deplored instead an inconsiderateinitiative which could have damaged its positive relations withTokyo, leading to a disastrous ‘conflict between the white andyellow races.’76 Even the Australian press rejected the idea,claiming that Australia, ‘while firmly maintaining her immigrationpolicy’, desired ‘nothing more than to live in peace and harmonywith her neighbors’, including the ‘great and friendly’ Japanesenation.77 The bellicose atmosphere and racial paranoia of 1908 seemeda distant memory of the past, and Britten’s project was discarded ina few weeks. Though not dead, the ‘White Pacific’ concept did notreappear in international politics until the Second World War, whenAustralia and America transformed the conflict into a ‘white man’scrusade’ against Japanese imperialism, marked by terrible atrocitieson both sides.78 But it was a brief moment that did not last long,replaced by the recreation of the Pacific basin as a space ofeconomic exchange and peaceful cooperation in the post-1945 era.75 Mackinder, for example, became the chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee, an intra-imperial board concerned about the development of stronger naval communications between Britain, India, and the Dominions. Itwas an experience constantly frustrated by the vetoes of the Canadian government, jealous of its national autonomy on shipping matters. See Simone Pelizza, ‘Geopolitics, Education, and Empire: The Political Life of Sir Halford Mackinder, 1895-1925’ (unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Leeds, 2013), pp. 198-225. 76 ‘White Races in Pacific: Conference Opposed’, The Argus, 20 December 1924,p. 25.77 ‘ “A White Pacific” ‘, The Advertiser, 27 December 1924, p. 8.78 On this point, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) and Gerald Horne, Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

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How can we conclude this short survey of imperial and internationalhistory in the Pacific region during the early twentieth century? Itappears clear that the question of Asian immigration in the PacificDominions represented a serious problem for the British Empire atthe time, undermining the effort of creating a closer imperial unionbetween Britain and the white self-governing colonies. Indeed, theassertive racial patriotism of Dominion societies – nurtured by thespectre of the ‘Yellow Peril’ – pushed them to adopt harshdiscriminatory legislation against Asian immigrants, includingfellow British subjects like the Indians, and to contest vehementlythe strategic Anglo-Japanese entente in the Far East, challengingone of the pillars of British imperial defence in the East. To thisintransigent attitude of the white colonies, London did not know howto respond, torn between its own imperial interests in Asia and itsspecial attachment to the ‘kith and kin’ peoples of the settlernations. Moreover, Britain did not believe entirely about theexistence of an ‘Asiatic’ threat to the Western world, and it wasquite proud of its supposed ‘imperial equality’, guaranteeing thesame rights and opportunities to all members of its great imperialsystem. On the contrary, the Dominions rejected this idea, lookingmainly for a way to create homogeneous national societies, and theywent well beyond the cautious expedients advanced by Chamberlain inthe late 1890s, endorsing a brutal and confrontational racialattitude over immigration issues which provoked big trouble bothwithin and without the British Empire. Deluded by the lukewarmbehaviour of the mother country, they also found a common politicaland cultural ground with the United States, the recognized leader ofa vast transnational movement in favour of a ‘White Pacific’, andthey showed all their hostility to Asian immigrants during theVancouver riots of 1907, supported and organized by the AEL. Thetriumphal cruise of the American fleet in Australasia in 1908sanctioned this deep convergence of views with the AmericanRepublic, giving a huge blow to Britain’s imperial complacency andcompelling the Asquith government to look for a compromise at theImperial Conference of 1911. This, however, proved very difficultand the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 reopened the ‘Asiatic’ problemin a dramatic way, confirming the racial intransigence of theDominions and fostering permanent anti-colonial resentment in India.When Britain finally decided to support the white colonies after theFirst World War, concerned about the rise of nationalist movementsin the tropical empire, it was too late to save old ideals ofimperial union, while the Dominions were substantially disinterestedin sharing the political and military burden of the empire, opting

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for the open flexibility of the Commonwealth of Nations. They hadalso lost interest in the ‘White Pacific’ vision, retreating into aquiet international isolation and endorsing a peaceful rapprochementwith Japan in the 1920s. Their ‘white’ identity was no moretransnational, but strictly national, supporting economicprotectionism and diplomatic disengagement. Rejecting the Orient andweakening the imperial connection, the Dominions had successfullyplayed the race card to become modern nation states, paving the wayto their future emancipation from the British Empire in thedecolonization era.

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