In The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States, David Atkinson provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of mobility across the British Empire and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, he recognizes the traditional push and pull reasons for migration as well as the various efforts to restrict movement on grounds of race and ethnicity that prevailed in this recognized period of mass migration, when countries around the world vied for global domination, both politically and economically.
The material is neatly arranged geographically by continent and country, from Australia and New Zealand to Africa, and from North America to South America, and it includes interesting chapters on the impact that both war and peace have had on the restriction and movement of labor. Atkinson neatly brings the issues up to date in the conclusion, recognizing that although restrictions on grounds of race have receded, attitudes and anxieties very much remain.
In the chapters exploring attitudes in wartime and peace Atkinson examines uneasy alliances between nations, detailing, for instance, how the White Australia policy deteriorated the relationship between “allies” of Australia and Japan during the First World War. In the following chapter he emphasizes accurately the hope that peace at the end of the Great War would bring positive change on social, economic, and political levels, as new nations emerged on the global stage. Ultimately, however, peacetime failed to end the restriction of Asian immigration and if anything made things worse, culminating in the decay of the American and Japanese relationship in the 1930s, in the buildup to the Second World War.
Atkinson usefully illustrates his arguments with pertinent examples in each chapter, ranging from attitudes toward Chinese laborers in South African gold mines to Japanese mobility in the America West. There are some gaps, though. Colonial populations were by no means static. For example, after the defeat of Britain in the American War of Independence in 1783, loyalists left for Canada, Nova Scotia, the Bahamas, and England. Also, after the abolition of slavery, emigrants from the Indian subcontinent were encouraged to migrate to the West Indies to help with local labor problems, as indentured labor. The latter phenomenon could have been explored more fully, perhaps warranting a separate chapter for the Caribbean. That said, Atkinson forms useful parallels and comparisons with attitudes to races other than Asians, most notably Afro-Caribbean in the United States.
The book is well researched, and Atkinson provides a very extensive bibliography of both published and unpublished sources from a host of archives across the globe, including the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
