The Imperial Self: A perspective on Anglo-America from South Africa, India, and Ireland

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 nonwhite 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 identity was thus constructed by advocates of “democracy.”.