Empire, Immobility, and Antagonism: The Australian Case

This paper contributes a broader discursive and historiographical argument to our panel. Much of the recent literature on migration, empire, and international relations history has adopted a transnational frame that stresses global mobility, openness, and connection in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Examples of circuits, conduits, and conjunctures proliferate throughout the literature, supported by similarly abundant evidence of flows, transfers, integration, and exchange. This paper nevertheless examines a potent countervailing tendency. Rather than focusing on the ways in which empires, states, corporations, and migrants carved new circuits of mobility—as much of the recent literature on empire, migration, and international history does—this study instead focuses on the efforts of white settler societies to staunch and restrict those networks.

Using the example of the “White Australia” policy, this paper shows how Australian restrictions on Asian migrants antagonized British imperial and foreign policy throughout the early twentieth century. In contrast to the imperial preference for maintaining global flows and apertures, this paper illustrates the predisposition of settler colonial societies—in this case Australia—toward occlusion and sclerosis, particularly with regard to the movement and migration of certain groups of people. Instead of illuminating the ways in which global “nodes” and “hubs” facilitated transnational mobility, this paper examines how white settlers established nodes of immobility to impede the movement of certain migrants across newly-regulated borders. By placing immobility and enclosure at the interpretive and historiographical center of the discussion, my paper recasts Asian immigration restriction as one of the most significant and divisive corollaries to global mobility and interconnectedness in the early twentieth century.