A multilayered world history that adds materially to the sadly evergreen topic of immigration exploitation and exclusion.
A Columbia University professor of Asian American studies tracks Chinese immigration to California, Australia, and South Africa from 1848 to 1899 and the subsequent racist backlash.
In an ambitious, diligent work of archival research that spans three continents (Northern California and the Yukon, the Victoria midlands, and South Africa) Ngai tracks the influx of Chinese immigrants in response to the discovery of gold—and the ugly dynamics surrounding what became known as the “Chinese Question”: “Were Chinese a racial threat to white, Anglo-American countries, and should Chinese be barred from them?” The rushes to the gold fields attracted not just Chinese, but many other immigrant groups. However, it “occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans” and provoked new challenges in an already racially divided society. The Chinese immigrated in order to chase fresh opportunities, many as indentured servants or volunteer free labor. As the numbers increased and they vied for work with poor White laborers, the Whites viewed them as threats, incapable of being assimilated. “Americans and British alike opposed the ‘slavery’ of the Chinese—but did not support their freedom,” writes Ngai. In Australia, the large numbers of Chinese immigrants led to racist hysteria, perpetuated by White colonial settlers, of being overrun by “devouring locusts.” In South Africa, the experiment to lure Chinese through contract labor to work the mines when not enough African laborers would do it proved costly and politically disastrous. Ultimately, exclusion laws were erected, prompting debate over free trade and hurting the once-thriving import-export businesses between China and the rest of the world. The author also examines the makeup of the Chinese communities that immigrated—with illuminating archival photos—the businesses they created, and the sustained racist backlash against them. This is intricate history that may lose some general readers, but students of the subject will be well rewarded.
A multilayered world history that adds materially to the sadly evergreen topic of immigration exploitation and exclusion.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-63416-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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