During the first decade of the twentieth century, as the new British colony of the Transvaal sought to recover economically from the South African War (1899-1902) that had led to its incorporation into the empire, a coalition of mining interests and government officials hatched a plan to overcome a perceived labour shortage in the gold mines by importing workers from China. Between 1904 and 1907 63,695 indentured Chinese workers were brought to the Transvaal. But by 1907 white public opinion had turned against the program both in Great Britain—where a new government had been voted into power in 1906 partly on the strength of its opposition to Chinese indentured labour—and in the Transvaal, where the first act of a newly empowered legislature in 1907 was to cancel the scheme. In January 1910 the last of the Chinese workers were returned to China.

In Chinese Labour in South Africa, Bright explores the process through which the Chinese labour migration scheme moved from unlikely beginning to rapid decline. Despite its title, the book is not for the most part a history of Chinese workers in South Africa—its focus is the idea of Chinese labour in South Africa and, most significantly, the impact of that idea on the evolution of the British Empire during the early twentieth century. Bright makes a strong claim for its importance in this context, arguing that it played a unique role in defining the relationships between Britain and its “white” colonies and among the settler societies by pushing them to articulate beliefs about “matters of self-governance, imperial citizenship, and national and imperial federation” (4). The sub-title “Race, Violence and Global Spectacle” describes the lenses through which Bright has approached this episode. She uses it to investigate the intersection of several global networks: not only the links between South African mining interests and the colonial and imperial government, or, more broadly, between colony and metropole, but those between settler colonialism and labour migration, and among Anglophone settler societies including the United States. Bright connects these strands to one another and to the Chinese labour scheme through attention to the ideologies of race, labour and democracy with which they shaped and constrained it, demonstrating that the scheme unfolded against an already powerful racial discourse.

The analysis is grounded in the evolution of attitudes in the Anglophone settler diaspora about race in general and Chinese people in particular during the second half of the nineteenth century. Bright begins (chapter 1) by tracing how the stereotypes applied to the Chinese took shape and how they in turn informed the development of whiteness itself as an identity. By 1900 participants in settler networks had demonized Chinese migrants not only for the vices that were commonly ascribed to them (sex, drugs and general immorality) but also the virtues (frugality and industry) that painted them as potential competition for Anglophone settlers and made Chinese migration a fraught political issue. She emphasizes that racial ideology was a constraint from the beginning, precluding the “obvious economic solution” (29) of a desegregated South African workforce that some scholars have imagined as a road not taken. Chapter 2 sets the South African stage by unpacking the racialized assumptions about the so-called “labour problem” which informed mine owners, politicians and the white public in the aftermath of the war.

The remainder of the book traces the history of the plan in its imperial and local contexts. Chapters 3, 4 and 7 focus on the imperial debates and discussions which led first to its implementation and then to its end. Here Bright investigates how the Chinese labour scheme illuminated the ideological conflict between a non-racial ideal of imperial citizenship and the settler ideal of whites only democracy based in racial stereotypes and assumptions about interracial competition. The use of imported labour reflected British efforts to integrate the Transvaal securely into the empire as a “white” colony and Bright raises questions about what that meant. She concludes that, in the end, opposition from the white communities of the Transvaal and Britain itself created “a two-tier British Empire” (185) in which settler colonies were allowed to dictate their own racial policies and the ideal of imperial citizenship became meaningless as these societies primarily identified with a white network that included the United States rather than with the multi-racial British empire.

Chapters 5 and 6 are locally focused on the Transvaal itself. This section is constrained by the book’s lack of Chinese voices and Bright notes that a lack of Chinese-language sources is possibly the “major failing” (7) in this study, which not only draws upon parliamentary papers, government documents and archival material in Britain and South Africa but also a wide range of newspapers and journals from throughout the empire. African and, to a lesser extent, Afrikaner perspectives are similarly neglected by this approach. She does include a brief discussion of the involvement of the Qing government, which tried and failed to use the scheme as an opportunity to bolster its status with its own diaspora by negotiating improved labour conditions for the workers sent to South Africa. The experiences of those workers, however, remain opaque, separated from readers by the language barriers and cultural ignorance which informed her sources. Instead, this section focuses primarily upon the reaction of white, primarily Anglophone, colonists to the Chinese presence. Chapter 5 describes a moral panic which, she argues, arose as a result of a combination of white anxiety about the Chinese presence in their unstable society and rumours about specific criminal acts committed by individual Chinese men, manifested as the intersection of “yellow peril” imagery from elsewhere in the settler network with the “black peril” idea already common in southern African settler colonies. Chapter 6 turns to the question of administration under those circumstances, noting that none of the major actors—the administration, the Chinese labourers, or the mines—was completely in control of the situation but that increased government oversight, with the consent of the settler establishment, was among its results. Although she argues for the importance of the scheme in South African as well as imperial history, her conclusion that this administrative shift helped to create “a legislative mind-set which fostered segregation and state control, two of the most important building blocks of apartheid” (159), presents an echo of her argument for the imperial significance of the indentured labour scheme, one which must take its place among the many factors contributing to apartheid’s development.

Bright begins by arguing that the study of “identity politics and networks of people and information” must be extended into the arena of imperial politics (4) and by doing so she makes an important contribution to the political history of the British Empire and of South Africa. The study is strongest in its positioning of the Chinese indentured labour scheme within the cultural politics of what James Belich has termed the “Anglo-world” of the early twentieth century. Here her world-historical perspective adds nuance to our understanding of the “messy affair” (2) that is the global history of empire, race and nation.