The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion

As both constructed imaginings and materialized geopolitical entities, empires took on various sizes, forms, and colors. In particular, the color “white” played a crucial role in rationalizing subjugation and colonialism through the sanctified “burden” of civilizing “non-whites.” But what happens when a non-white empire emerges to level, challenge, and eventually threaten the domination of Western empires? The color line stretches and shifts to accommodate new collaborations and, more notably, the ambitions of both whites and non-whites, yet it never completely caves in.Focusing on this very picture, Chris Suh's first book demonstrates the complex and multilayered relationship between two rising empires in the decades preceding the devastating Second World War—America and Japan—and their respective manipulations of “race” in cementing interimperial collaboration in a precarious era. This interimperial relationship was complicated by domestic unfoldings, which Suh elaborates through the changing immigration policies of the United States toward the Japanese. It was multilayered in the sense that empire building not only transpired through the plans of the American and Japanese empire builders, but also in the thoughts and advocacies of Koreans, African Americans, and other colonized groups “who adapted to, and sometimes even adopted, ‘progressive’ imperialism for their own goals” (19). Using English- and Korean-language primary sources that encompassed official documents, letters, newspapers, journals, printed propaganda, and the writings of Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois and Korean politician and progressive activist Yun Ch'i-ho, The Allure of Empire is a welcome addition to a persisting strand of scholarly studies that have sought to understand the sprouting of the American empire as a catalyst to transpacific interimperial dynamics that destabilized preexisting conceptions of empire and color lines as, chiefly, Western and official projects.The book is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and epilogue. Across all five chapters, the voices of intellectuals and activists seep through the cracks and Suh manages to weave these into the fabrics of the unfurling imperial order. In chapter 1, Suh traces the contours of collaboration between the United States and Japan at the dawn of the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt envisioned the Yellow Sea as Japan's Caribbean and received the Japanese imperialists into its “circle of civilized mankind” so as to “secure its interests across the Pacific without expanding its territorial empire and rise as a key player in the emerging multipolar imperial order” (23). While partnership blossomed among the imperialists, the seeds of anti-Japanese movements in California were sown by American political activists. These seeds would germinate in chapter 2, which explores negotiations between progress and backwardness, and of inclusion and exclusion for different parties, each with their own agenda. Despite the US administration's efforts in distinguishing Japan from China through the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, Californians succeeded in restricting the rights of Japanese immigrants with the California Alien Land Law. To prove their “worth,” the Japanese responded by staging a campaign to “uplift” working-class Japanese Americans. As Suh put it, “The idea was that, if they could remake the Japanese immigrants to satisfy the expectations of white progressiveness, white Americans would distinguish them from the Chinese and see them as a ‘race’ worthy of respect” (81).Chapter 3 touches on the solidification of the new color line that bolstered Japan's seat within the circle of advanced nations capable of leading the subjugated to progress. To justify the annexation of Korea in 1910, the American and Japanese imperialists articulated Japan's racial advancement through comparative exercises that clustered the Filipinos and Koreans together to “cast themselves as members of ‘progressive’ races who ruled their colonies by social ‘reform’ and racial ‘tutelage’” (122). Suh argues that the infatuation of American missionary leaders with ideas about “race development,” echoed by Korean missionaries, also assisted in the colonization of Korea. In the face of the Japanese colonists’ demeaning treatment of Koreans, the missionaries vouched for “reforms,” thwarting the possibilities of Korean self-government. Such support for progressive imperialism is also tackled in chapter 5, wherein a handful of white and non-white members of the Institute of Public Relations, an international nongovernmental organization that worked to address Pacific issues, were enthused by technocratic rule and social engineering projects that facilitated the relocation of exploited Korean migrant workers to aid Japan's increasing influence over Manchuria.Chapters 4 and 6 trail the gradual dismantling of the US government's romanticization of Japan as an almost equal partner. In chapter 4, Suh discusses the revival of anti-Japanese sentiments through Korean grievances, not to sympathize with the latter but to “stoke white Americans’ fear of Japanese immigrants” during a Californian politician's reelection campaign to the Senate (131). The result was, for the Japanese, a humiliating bill that excluded all aliens from eligibility for American citizenship. Chapter 6 addresses the collapse of the interimperial framework across the Pacific that was established at the start of the century. The Sino-Japanese War of 1937 crushed existing imaginaries of Japan as a harbinger of progress, and the United States, distracted by domestic issues spiraling out of the Great Depression, gradually withdrew from the shared imperial bubble it had constructed with Japan.Demonstrating Chris Suh's thorough knowledge of the developments on both sides of the Pacific and in between, The Allure of Empire prompts a rethinking of “empire” as an overlapping exploration and experience for whites and non-whites, and the “color line” as a tool simultaneously negotiated and manipulated by white and non-white politicians, missionaries, activists, and intellectuals to project their standards of an ideal world. Scholars, researchers, students, and readers with an interest in the constructions of race, interimperial histories, and transpacific relations will be enlightened by Suh's convincing argument that in the first few decades of the twentieth century, US-Japan relations reflected the intimate intertwining of the worlds of whites and non-whites—and their use of one another—in creating an imperial world order against the aspirations of emerging radicals struggling for a decolonized world.