The White Australia Policy, the British Empire, and the World

his article recovers the essential imperial and international context of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, and argues that the foundational deliberations that produced the White Australia Policy cannot be fully understood without attention to that global perspective. Indeed, the real and potential imperial and international implications of Asian restriction dominated the parliamentary debates and influenced the policy\u27s character and application from the outset. The debate was not about whether to implement a restrictive immigration regime, it was about how to implement that regime, a calculus suffused with a range of imperial and international considerations. This paper therefore argues that the White Australia Policy was a consciously and deliberately imperial and international act that imparted a distinctly global inflection to the Australian nation building project at its inception