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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
50/100Scholars
96/100Author:
Mae M. Ngai
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
August 24, 2021
How Chinese migration to the world's goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race.
What The Reviewers Say
This is a work of towering ambition, which led Ms. Ngai to scour archives on five continents and to familiarize herself with several national histories to complement her primary expertise in U.S. history. There is good reason that many professional and popular historians opt for more narrowly drawn accounts of discrete events or individuals. But the payoffs of Ms. Ngai’s comparison are notable, among them the challenge to American exceptionalism as well as the illumination of key differences between her case studies.
... meticulously researched.
Though Ngai’s account is global in scope, she also provides fascinating details about quotidian life in these far-flung diasporic communities. She notes inter-racial and same-sex relationships among the Chinese migrants. She provides names and physical descriptions of individual miners, advocates who resisted discriminatory policies, and mine bosses who cheated and flogged Chinese miners if they didn’t meet the ever increasing labor demands.
Ngai adeptly narrates both seismic shifts in the world economy and the nuanced dynamics of small communities, paying particular attention to the choices made by individual immigrants as they navigated harsh and unfair foreign environments. Every aspect of Ngai’s inquiry is sharply relevant today on many fronts..
