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Introduction
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 On a clear, late August afternoon in 1896, a large crowd gathered around the Seattle waterfront against the backdrop of a brilliant firework display, which illuminated the Pacific skies above them, giving the aura of a truly grand occasion. The throng came from all parts of the city, which included its leading citizens—the mayor, the president of the chamber of commerce, and members of the city council—who took their place at the head of the festivities nearest to the water’s edge. A local reporter covering the pageantry noted: “The yells of thousands of people on the docks and the blowing of every steamship whistle for five miles along the waterfront, and the flaunting of innumerable flags to the breeze [that] celebrated the glad event and welcomed the Oriental visitor of the East to the Occident.”1 The “Oriental visitor” he was referring to was the Mike Maru, a transpacific steamship liner belonging to the Nippon Yusen Kaisha Company (NYK), which was making its inaugural voyage. Railroad mogul James J. Hill had recently entered an agreement with the Japanese steamship company establishing regular steamship service from Seattle to Hawai’i, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. For years Seattle leaders and boosters had pinned their hopes on becoming a bridge to Asia and the fabled China market. The landmark agreement between Hill’s Great Northern Railway and the NYK, they thought, would finally make this dream a reality. With a twenty-one gun salute blaring in the background, the welcoming committee proclaimed Seattle the gateway to the Orient, the transpacific city where the Orient and the Occident, the East and the West, met and were to be united. On a day when admiration for “the Orient” was running at a fever pitch, it was hard to believe that this very same port, only a decade earlier, Introduction 9780520271685_Intro.indd 1 19/03/12 11:31 AM 2 • Introduction 2 • Introduction was the site of a violent campaign to expel Chinese residents from the city. A few steps from where the cheering crowd stood to welcome the Mike Maru was where an angry white mob, almost exactly ten years earlier, forcibly held Chinese residents, while awaiting the ship that would deport them back to Asia. This campaign of forcible removal, called “abatement” by contemporaries, was inspired by the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which enshrined into law the idea that the Chinese did not belong, which in turn legitimized the cries that “the Chinese must go.” Indeed, white rioters, in justifying their actions, claimed that the Chinese posed a grave threat to the body politic. “All who have ever come into close contact with them are satisfied that they are not only a most undesirable but a positively dangerous class to any country having free popular institutions.”2 The expulsions, then, were seen as an act of selfprotection , an effort to secure the racial and political integrity of the nation-state. Exploring the contradictory impulses represented by these two moments and understanding how they came to mutually shape and define a region underpins this study of the U.S.-Canadian borderlands in the Pacific Northwest. Beginning in earnest with the nineteenth century, the imperatives of capitalist development and imperial expansion integrated this periphery into the world economy. As the region’s vast natural resources came into range, foreign capital and labor rushed in to develop them. The rise and mix of extractive industries drew a diverse collection of people and cultures into contact through new systems of mobility and exchange. This polyglot assemblage, including Chinese merchant contractors , Japanese and European migrant workers, Anglo labor activists, and South Asian and white radicals, propelled the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries. This process—often captured loosely under the rubric of globalization—expanded the region’s connections with the Pacific world, embedding it firmly within an imperial circuitry of migration, trade and communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book therefore re-imagines these ostensibly “Western” spaces as a critical intersection of colonialism and the Pacific world, where the American West, the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire, and Asia intersected and overlapped. Whereas Western historians have confined borderland studies to bi-national frameworks—as discrete and bounded spaces at the edge of two nations—my study offers a more expansive approach 9780520271685_Intro.indd 2 19/03/12 11:31 AM [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:08 GMT...