It is no easy task to write a coherent history that crosses the usual area studies boundaries. Chinese among Others is the first book to attempt a synthetic history of Chinese migration around the world from the sixteenth century to the present. It is a lively and accessible book, appropriate for undergraduate courses while retaining complexity and diverse insights for the specialist. Extended primary citations appear in boxes throughout the text, successfully illuminating important themes and providing color to the narrative. It is a timely achievement that both summarizes the state of the field and offers distinct interpretations, helping readers take stock and move forward in new directions.
A successful synthesis cuts through the clutter of existing research at its most contentious and confused points by building convincing narratives that both illuminate and bring order to the issues at stake. Philip A. Kuhn achieves this goal with exemplary success on three themes. The first is the organization and financing of migration, for which Kuhn gives dense analytic descriptions showing how family and credit practices adapted to a variety of migration contexts. The second is that of anti-Chinese attitudes: Kuhn offers concise and insightful accounts of nineteenth-century white settler nations and post–World War II Southeast Asian nations that synthesize the many turbulent forces into a set of concerns about status, capital, and race in ways that highlight both the similarities and differences across space and time. The third is a discussion of Chinese nationalism that highlights the diverse ideas and responses that filtered throughout China and abroad. Here Kuhn diverges from the emphasis on Sun Yat-sen that dominates much of the secondary literature in his portrayal of a much more nuanced and varied nationalist landscape.
In addition to the hard work of synthesis, Kuhn makes other original contributions. Most significantly, he provides a much-needed counternarrative to the long-outdated idea that China prohibited emigration. With rich citations from official discussions, he shows that policy swings in the first half of the Qing dynasty finally cumulated in an imperial decree of 1754 that allowed free departure and return for all Chinese traders. The decree did not mention labor migration, but it was implicitly tolerated until the formal repeal of all restrictions on emigration in 1893. Throughout the book, Kuhn also insists that overseas migration must be understood in the context of domestic migration, both in terms of overlapping patterns and sometimes divergent official attitudes. The book concludes with the idea that overseas migration will not produce a deterritorialized greater China, but that migrant successes are dependent on the various opportunities, protections, and challenges offered by state borders. “National sovereignties, national boundaries, and national differences matter to migrants” (p. 368).
A successful synthesis encourages readers to ask, where to go from here in subsequent research? To this reviewer, Kuhn's work suggests three directions, all of which build on recently emergent research trends. The first one is straightforward: a need for more attention to the region that now includes Vietnam and Cambodia. Kuhn only mentions this region in passing, reflecting what was, until very recently, a general dearth of scholarship. The second is to begin more systematic comparative work with other migrations around the world. Kuhn wisely avoids entering the debates about the unique “Chineseness” of his subject, but occasionally suggests points of similarity with European migrations. More work to establish these general similarities would help not only to situate Chinese migration as an integral part of the history of world migrations, but also to create a framework from which to better specify and explain what, if anything, was different about the Chinese.
The third is to develop an understanding of Chinese migration that is not so deeply obscured by the shadow of European expansion. Despite attempts to situate Chinese migration within an “energy … generated within China” (p. 107), Kuhn's study is still very much in the vein of older research, in which Europeans have the central role. European imperialism and indenture frame most of the narrative before the 1950s, and are given an often unsupported causality. In contrast, some researchers have begun to call the period from 1750 to 1850 the “Chinese century” in Southeast Asia, when Chinese shippers, labor, and politics shaped the region. Furthermore, less than 3 percent of Chinese emigrants were ever indentured to Europeans from 1847 to 1939. Colonial administrators and planters frequently complained of their failure to obtain and regulate Chinese labor, and remarked on their dependence on Chinese merchants. To be sure, indenture produced an amount of documentation that was in inverse proportion to the actual prevalence of indenture, and for that reason alone was significant. But what would a narrative look like if it gave proportional representation to the other 97 percent of Chinese migrants?
