‘The Inalienable Right of the White Man’

Victory over Russia established Japan as the leading power in East Asia, and inaugurated a period during which its economic and political influence in the region sharply expanded. This chapter explores these shifts in the regional order from the perspective of both British policymakers in London, and from that of the British communities in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the other ‘treaty ports’ scattered along the China coast. For many, Japan, came to represent a challenge to British hegemony in China that manifested itself on a racial as well as on the commercial or political fronts. The chapter goes on to analyse the efforts of the ‘Shanghailanders’ to mobilize British policy to constrain Japanese power in the region through public campaigns and political manoeuvring. In the process, it demonstrates how treaty port residents articulated their own vision on Britain’s imperial future in Asia.

Conclusion

The conclusion reflects on how questions of race and empire came to occupy a central place in Anglo-Japanese relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Reviewing some of the study’s main arguments, it dwells on what the inter-imperial debates on Anglo-Japanese relations reveal about contemporary thinking on race and empire, and the often-conflicting demands and perspectives of policymakers in London and the settler colonies. Immigration and naval defence were particular areas where disagreements were liable to arise, with the dominions seeking imperial support for their vision of a ‘white empire’, while the British strove to insulate the ‘imperial’ business of diplomacy from colonial interference.

A War for Civilization

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) marked a watershed in global history. Victory over Russia secured Japan’s position as the first Asian ‘great power’. But it also raised an acute debate over the meaning and implications of its sudden rise. Some praised the Japanese victory as the triumph of ‘civilization’ over Russian barbarism; others pointed ominously to the effect that the destruction of a ‘white power’ would have on the collective European colonial project in Asia. Policymakers, both in London and its self-governing colonies, were forced to reckon with the implications of Japan’s bid for equality. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Britain, Canada, and Australia all took symbolic steps to demonstrate their willingness to recognize Japan as a co-equal member of the international system.

Empire and Exclusion

Japanese expansion after the Russo-Japanese War was dynamic and multi-directional, and manifested itself in the growth of trade and emigration across the Pacific as well as territorial acquisition in Asia. The fourth chapter explores the Japanese ‘immigration crisis’ of 1906–8, when an increase in the number of Japanese immigrants sparked a panic on the Pacific coast of North America. Its central focus is on the Vancouver riots of September 1907, the largest incidence of anti-Asian violence during this period. Mass rioting against Japanese immigrants placed the Canadian government in in a difficult position, as it attempted to reconcile the clamour for a ‘white Canada’ with its position in the empire. This chapter analyses British and Canadian efforts to manage the migration crisis. It also dwells on the crisis’s transnational dimension, which expressed itself through declarations of racial solidarity between Canada and the United States.

‘The Englands of East and West’

In September 1894, Japan won a series of dramatic victories over its much larger neighbour, Qing China. This demonstration of Japanese military power forced British observers to reassess their relationship with a country that, prior to the 1890s, many had dismissed as an ‘oriental’ curiosity. The late 1890s also saw the intensification of Anglo-Japanese interaction in the Pacific, as Japanese trade and migration came into closer contact with the British settler colonies there. Yet whereas London became increasingly concerned with Japan’s potential role in the East Asian balance of power, its willingness to cooperate with Tokyo (culminating the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902) conflicted with the racialized visions of Japanese expansion articulated by actors and commentators across the imperial system. Nowhere was this contradiction more evident than in the establishment of the ‘white Australia’ policy at the same time that Britain was negotiating its treaty with Japan.

Introduction

The formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in February 1902 marked an important moment in modern diplomatic history: for the first time in decades, a European power concluded a nominally equal defensive partnership with an Asian state. But the alliance’s crossing of the ‘global colour line’ was politically fraught from the outset, and would become more so as Japan came to pose an ever more explicit challenge to the racial orders on which the British imperial system rested. While Japan came to play a pivotal role in the geostrategic security of the British Empire in Asia, it was simultaneously denounced as a ‘yellow peril’ to British (or ‘Anglo-Saxon’) ascendancy in the Pacific. By examining the Anglo-Japanese relationship along the twinned arcs of empire and race, this book does two things. First, it offers new insight in how Japan’s integration in the international order was complicated by race. Second, it shows how the Japanese ‘question’ came to shape the evolution of the Edwardian British Empire.

Alliance and Empire

The final chapter brings the book’s strands together in a re-examination of the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1911 and its political aftermath. Friction over China, immigration, and naval security, had by this point, cast significant doubts over the viability of Britain’s partnership with Japan, and revealed the difficulties of maintaining a unified foreign policy within an increasingly decentralized imperial system. In turn, this forced London to develop new forms of managing its relations with the white dominions, seeking their endorsement for the renewal of the Japanese alliance at the 1911 imperial conference. Yet London’s hopes that it might settle the ‘Japanese question’ as an imperial issue quickly proved misplaced. In the years that followed, Canada was further tightened its restrictions on Japanese immigration, while Australia and New Zealand became embroiled with London over the Pacific naval policies of the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Once again, British ties to Japan became a point of divergence between metropolitan and colonial perspectives on empire, race, and the future of global politics.

The Pacific Problem

This chapter examines how the emergence of Japan as a leading naval power influenced thinking on security and defence throughout the ‘British world’. It concentrates on Australia and New Zealand, where a mixture of strategic anxiety and racial panic fed powerful calls to shore up national defence. In the years after the Russo-Japanese War, as anti-Japanese rhetoric hung heavy in the air, both dominions introduced compulsory military training, sought to establish autonomous naval forces, and demanded a greater degree of imperial protection. As the chapter shows, fear of Japan became a powerful factor in shaping Australasian ideas of nationhood and empire, increasingly recast in militarist, racialized terms. It explores a number of episodes in which these efforts collided, at both an ideological and political level, with Britain’s own strategic priorities: the visit of the American ‘Great White Fleet’ to New Zealand and Australia; the ‘dreadnought scare’ of 1909; and the subsequent imperial defence conference.