The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia 1836-1888

Abstract

Before the 1840s only a trickle of C antonese 'coolies a n d labourers' h a d com e tp the Pacific region.But in the g re at goldrushes of 1848 to 1854 in California, Eastern A ustralia, New Zealand, a n d British C olum bia the trickle b ecam e a flood.W hen gold b e g a n to p eter out, the C hinese rem ained, enjoying a brief period of h u m an itarian liberalism .But in the 1870s ren ew ed im m igration aro u sed fear of slave lab o u r a n d racist an tip ath y tow ards 'inferior' races.O ne b y one the four a re a s erected barriers a g a in st the C hinese, b y severe restriction on im m igration a n d h arsh discrim inatory control of the settlers.In describing their evolution a n d grow th Dr Price distinguishes com m on sources for w hat seem purely local grievances, a n d show s how w ide sp re ad e v e ry d a y p ressures g a v e rise to policies ap p a ren tly b a se le ss a n d u n n eces sary.These policies w ere the g re at white w alls', an alo g o u s with C hina's G reat W all built to keep out the b arb arian s.This h u m an e study looks at coloured m igration from the point of its victims a s w ell a s from that of the dom inant w hite society.It show s that the notorious 'W hite A u stralia Policy' is not unique but h a d its counterparts in the other regions of the Pacific.It a d d s a n ew dim ension to under standing the political, social, economic, a n d m oral forces that c a u se d sa v a g e a n d w id esp read restrictions on coloured im m igration.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.