The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism
Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961

Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

Sidney Xu Lu (Author)

9781108712316, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 June 2020

329 pages, 30 b/w illus. 4 tables
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

'As Lu's erudite book reveals, the shift in colonial imaginations expressed in the characters offers a distinctively Japanese inflection to theoretical understandings of colonial migration-one that is best understood in its transpacific manifestations.' Martin Dusinberre, Project Muse

This innovative study demonstrates how Japanese empire-builders invented and appropriated the discourse of overpopulation to justify Japanese settler colonialism across the Pacific. Lu defines this overpopulation discourse as 'Malthusian expansionism'. This was a set of ideas that demanded additional land abroad to accommodate the supposed surplus people in domestic society on the one hand and emphasized the necessity of national population growth on the other. Lu delineates ideological ties, human connections and institutional continuities between Japanese colonial migration in Asia and Japanese migration to Hawaii and North and South America from 1868 to 1961. He further places Malthusian expansionism at the center of the logic of modern settler colonialism, challenging the conceptual division between migration and settler colonialism in global history. This title is also available as Open Access.

Introduction: Malthusian expansion and settler colonialism
Part I. Emergence, 1868–1894: 1. From Hokkaido to California: the birth of Malthusian expansionism in modern Japan
2. Population and racial struggle: the South Seas, Hawai?i, and Latin America
Part II. Transformation, 1894–1924: 3. Commoners of empire: labor migration to the United States
4. Farming rice in Texas: the paradigm shift
5. 'Carrying the white man's burden': the rise of farmer migration to Brazil
Part III. Culmination, 1924–1945: 6. Making the migration state: Malthusian expansionism and agrarianism
7. The illusion of coexistence and coprosperity: settler colonialism in Brazil and Manchuria
Part IV. Resurgence, 1945–1961: 8. The birth of a 'small' Japan: postwar migration to South America
Conclusion: rethinking migration and settler colonialism in the modern world.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB]