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Special thanks are due to Mrinalini Sinha for her extensive and insightful commentary and to Katherine Franke for a halcyon summer in the Butler Library of Columbia University. Tim Alborn, Peter Mandler, Guy Ortolano, Susan Pedersen, George Robb, and the other members of the British History Seminar at Columbia University kindly shared their expertise. The research and writing of this article were made possible by generous support from the University of Northern British Columbia, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the conveners of the 2010 Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop hosted by Columbia Law School.
For two years before I married Quong Tart, I kept many of the newspaper cuttings referring to him, and after marriage continued to do so. Sometime in the year 1900 I showed him a bundle of clippings. He said: "Very good; keep them safely; some day I shall have them put into book form to hand down to the children and let them see, although their father was a Chinese, he could be creditably compared with thousands of European fathers."
------Margaret Tart, The Life of Quong Tart, or, how a Foreigner Succeeded in a British Community (1911)
With his now famous statement, "Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced," Stuart Hall neatly articulated one of the most vexing problems confronting historical analysis of these two categories: how can one distinguish the effects of each when they seem so deeply intertwined?1As is true with the relationship between class and gender, most historians working in the British context have been frustrated in their attempts to cut the Gordian knot and have settled for concluding that the two were mutually constituted.2Imperialism, which shaped this relationship in myriad ways, has added a further layer of complexity.3Immigration and emigration in Britain and the empire, and the resulting conundrums of social tension, assimilation, and economic mobility have made the relationship between race and class a central issue of politics and policy as well.4
What little study has been done of Chinese immigration's significance in Britain and the British Empire has been on the social history...