In the gold-rush era, initial ceremonial greetings soon gave way to bigotry and violence as Chinese immigrants were tarred as a “coolie race” and cast as a threat to free white labor. The two books under review tell the story of how and why.
The Chinese Question and Chinese exclusion policies circumnavigated the Anglo-American world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and supported the consolidation of British and American power over global emigration and trade.
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