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The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion

Online ISBN:
9780197631652
Print ISBN:
9780197631614
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion

Chris Suh
Chris Suh
Assistant Professor of History, Emory University
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
3 May 2023
Online ISBN:
9780197631652
Print ISBN:
9780197631614
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Empires were never the agents of progress as their apologists claimed. Yet during the Progressive Era, various people across the Pacific turned to empires as a source of empowerment. While the United States and Japan strove to emerge as the world’s great powers, numerous Asians and African Americans embraced Japan to challenge long-standing assumptions of human inequality based on color. Japan’s allure, however, was hardly limited to nonwhite peoples. American policymakers perceived Japan as a “progressive” empire akin to their own, and the two powers cultivated an amicable relationship across the color line, even as they competed for influence in Asia and conflicted over Japanese immigration to the American West. The Allure of Empire traces how American ideas about Asians were made and remade on the imperial stage, and how these ideas shaped US foreign and immigration policies. Based on research conducted in South Korea and the United States, it uncovers how Americans justified Japan’s colonial rule in Korea by comparing it to the US rule in Cuba and the Philippines. It reveals that the United States refused to exclude Japanese immigrants the same way as it had excluded Chinese and Indian immigrants until American perceptions of Japan took a negative turn, in light of Japan’s violent treatment of Koreans and the Chinese. But even after Japanese exclusion in 1924, the mutual respect for “progressive” empires sustained the inter-imperial relationship until World War II, when both sides erased the history of their collaborations to cast each other as incompatible enemies.

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