The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : Yellow and gold -- Two gold mountains -- Two gold mountains -- On the diggings -- Talking to white people -- Bigler's gambit -- The limits of protection -- Making white men's countries -- The roar of the sandlot -- The yellow agony -- The Asiatic danger in the colonies -- The richest spot on earth -- Coolies on the Rand -- The price of gold -- The Asiatic danger in the colonies -- Yellow, gold, and white -- Exclusion and the open door -- Becoming Chinese, becoming China -- Epilogue : The spectre of the yellow peril, redux.

"How Chinese migration to the world's goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race. In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration? This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world, from Europe's subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that linger to this day. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it"-- Provided by publisher.