Past Event

Please join us on January 13, 2016 for a lecture by Professor Jeremy Martens, Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Western Australia. Jointly sponsored with the Institute of African Studies, the lecture is entitled:  “‘For his failure to assent to the Natal Act’: South Africa, settler sovereignty and the Vancouver riot of 1907”.

Abstract:

The Vancouver riot and its consequences have been comprehensively studied by Canadian scholars, who have placed them within the historical context of Canada’s increasingly restrictive twentieth-century racial immigration policies; mobilization of anti-Asian sentiment within the labour movements of the Pacific north-west; and Canada’s international, imperial and diplomatic relationships. These studies demonstrate that the events of September 1907 were the culmination of a decade of increasing white hostility and racism directed towards Asians immigrating to British Columbia, the strength of which had been underestimated by authorities in Ottawa. Thus the extent of the violence surprised federal officials and spurred on the adoption of a new, restrictive immigration regime in 1908. However, while historians have long recognized the international and British imperial dimensions of British Columbia’s anti-Asian movement, the connections between immigration restriction policies in South Africa and Canada remain under-researched. This paper places events in western Canada within a wider global and settler colonial context by exploring how the ‘Natal Act’ – legislation passed in the southern African colony of Natal in 1897 – served both as a model and rallying cry for British Columbia’s anti-Asian movement.