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David C Atkinson, Chris Suh. The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1315–1316, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae273
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Chris Suh’s The Allure of Empire is an important contribution to our understanding of international relations, race, and empire in the early 20th-century Pacific. This is already a crowded field: countless volumes exist on the myriad subjects addressed in this study, from the intricacies of Japanese-American relations to the imperial projects of the region’s primary actors and the responses of those they subjugated. We also know much about the geopolitical, transnational, and local implications of Asian migration in the transpacific, a subject Suh intertwines throughout his narrative.
So, what is at stake in this book? Anybody who has analyzed the course of Japanese imperialism—and the responses of British and US diplomats, colonial officials, and journalists—has been confronted by the multitude of paradoxes and contradictions that suffused those interactions. Inconsistencies provoke us at every turn. Why did US, and indeed British, observers often tolerate, and even welcome, Japanese expansionism in East Asia during the years surrounding the Russo-Japanese War? Why did contemporary constructions of Japanese racial character often countenance the possibility of their higher status, at least those who remained in the homes islands? What explains the coyness of Western diplomats toward explicit racial restriction against Japanese migrants, when other Asian sojourners often faced categorical exclusion? Scholars do not need to solve these contradictions, for they are insoluble. But we do need a better explanation for them.
