In his new book,
Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018),
Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia, offers a comparative look at the tensions that arose in settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as white settlers protested Asian migration but had only limited sovereignty vis-à-vis the Colonial Office in London. These competing interests led to a legislative compromise featuring a series of indirect immigration restriction laws that did not explicitly mention race but were still aimed at non-white migrants.