David Atkinson

Ph.D. Boston University

Specialization

American foreign relations and migration; international history; American and British imperial history

Originally from Leeds in the UK, I received my Ph.D. in history from Boston University in 2010. My most recent book is entitled The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Labor Migration in the British Empire and the United States. From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asian migration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their position of global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringent legislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration. Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaboration between these movements, but I instead highlight the differences in these campaigns and argue that the main factor unifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions they caused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, I trace how these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic, and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncratically in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that the so-called white man’s burden was often white supremacy itself, I demonstrate how the tenets of absolute exclusion--meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy--only inflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the British Empire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of international cooperation that followed the First World War.

I am working on a new project that explores how Americans interacted with imports from around the world in the long 19th century, and I am also the author of a book entitled In Theory and in Practice: Harvard's Center for International Affairs, 1958-1983. In addition to these book projects, I have also published articles on Asian migration in the Pacific Northwest, on the international resonances of American immigration restriction in the 1920s, and on the imperial and international implications of Australian immigration policy.

List of Publications