ABSTRACT
In the late 1800s, South African leaders were active participants in “an imagined community of white men” that spanned the British Empire and the United States. 2 They and their counterparts in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and California shared the assumption that democracy required the exclusion of non-white people. As part of expanding self-rule, the Dominions gained the right to regulate immigration, an issue viewed as critical for retaining white superiority. 3 The resulting exclusion of Asians, politically and physically, inscribed a racial hierarchy between whites and non-whites. Ironically, a racist Anglo-American collective ide was thus constructed by advocates of “democracy.”
