Passports, immigration bureaucracies, and immigration law are so deeply embedded in modern life that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. But how did they get institutionalized into national and international policy? In the past decade, a number of scholars have begun to explore the origins of modern immigration regulation and identification. Adam M. McKeown's Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders is the most recent and among the most ambitious of these studies. According to McKeown, the principles guiding modern border control around the world have their roots in the policies and technologies that white settler nations established to exclude Asian immigrants beginning in the late nineteenth century.
By delving into government archives in Australia, Canada, China, Great Britain, and the United States, McKeown shows how migration control, including passports, visas, medical examinations, interrogations, record keeping, and technologies of surveillance, arrest, and deportation became symbols of national sovereignty within the international world order. He argues that the United States and its Asian exclusion laws were particularly important in articulating and crafting policies and practices of migration control within the international system.
The book is divided into four parts. The first offers a broad examination of the rise of mass migration and migration regulation up to the 1870s, including premodern regulation, patterns of global migration, the surveillance of Asian indenture, and the centralization of regulation. Part II provides analyses of how the “problem” of Asian migration in places as diverse as South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada produced Asian restriction policies that set the foundation for modern migration control. These included the first policies and diplomatic agreements that explicitly justified border control as a defining characteristic of sovereignty. Part III takes up the issue of the practical enforcement of these laws, especially the U.S. Chinese exclusion laws, at the turn of the twentieth century. The last part examines how the principles and practices of Asian immigration regulation were diffused globally.
In addition to extensive primary research in archives around the world, McKeown also relies on a great deal of existing scholarship on Asian migration and exclusion to and in specific countries. As he concedes, many parts of this story have already been told in national and colonial histories. There exists an especially large body of work on the case of Chinese exclusion in the United States, and these sections of the volume are less original to experts in this field. However, McKeown's intent is to trace how these national processes became international—to write the history of international identity documentation and migration control as global history. The end result allows us to better understand the larger global patterns at work and to view national histories in a new comparative framework. The comparisons of the different solutions enacted by empires and nation-states around Asian exclusion are especially instructive. As an independent nation-state, the United States was able to deal directly with Asian nations or formulate its own laws in relation to its own domestic needs, while immigration legislation in British dominions such as Canada, Natal, and Australia had to satisfy colonial populations without contradicting the British Empire's stated policy of nondiscrimination of imperial subjects.
McKeown's attention to global comparisons is eye-opening. The last chapter shows that by the twentieth century, the adoption of migration laws had become a global process that was inextricably tied to nation building. Countries demonstrated their inclusion in the family of nations by defining their social and political borders through migration control. Social protest movements, including the anti-American boycott in China and Gandhi's satyagraha movement in Africa criticized aspects of migration control but also reinforced the general principles already at work.
In its focus on connecting nation-specific patterns to global processes, however, the book pays less attention to transnational connections. The last part of the book might have been strengthened had the author paid equal attention to the transnational conversations, negotiations, and cooperation around Asian exclusion that also resulted in policy diffusion across colonies, nations, and empires.
McKeown's muted attention to race also raises questions. He explains that he favors a focus on “civilization” and “technical discussions of law and administration” over race in order to “emphasize the extent to which seemingly neutral vocabulary can redeploy principles of hierarchy and discrimination even as it claims to overcome them” (p. 14). This is a thoughtful and instructive approach to the study of Asian exclusion around the world. But the lack of race as a category of analysis in explaining the deep-rooted and passionate motives for such transformative laws in so many different places paints an incomplete picture of this topic. Stylistically, Melancholy Order is wordy and sometimes disorganized. But its overall contribution to global history and Asian history is undisputed. It will be required reading for any scholar who is interested in the history of migration control.
