A Racist International?: Emigration Policies, Settler Colonialism, and 'Global Color Lines,' 1870-1900

• In Event: Migration and Indigeneity in the Russian Empire and the Post-Soviet Sphere: Geopolitical Migration Policies and Racialized Indigenous Populations

Abstract

In the 1880s, German diaspora speakers from Volhynia/Ukraine began to emigrate because of religious and ethnic discrimination in the Russian Empire’s western border regions. On the grounds of a perceived military threat, these Imperial policies targeted ethnic German, Jewish, and Polish populations. Leaving Volhynia, German speakers moved to many places, such as the Russian Far East and Siberia, the Empire’s Baltic provinces, Germany’s Poznań Province, Brazil, and Canada.
While the Russian Empire aimed to reduce non-East Slavic populations in its Western governorates, Canada actively recruited settlers for its Prairie provinces. These immigrants settled along newly established railroad lines built by exploited laborers from the Chinese Empire. In its selective immigration policies, Canada discriminated against potential Southern European colonists. It also hindered further Asian immigration – rejecting “the mixture of the Mongolian and the Arian” races, as Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald put it in 1883. Also, the government gradually marginalized, resettled, and dispossessed the indigenous First Nation peoples.
On the example of the Russian Empire and Canada, this paper will connect ethnonationalist exclusionary policies, racialized borders, discriminating immigration policies, and settler colonialism. The paper develops W.E.B. du Bois’ concepts of the global “colour line” and a “new religion of whiteness” further and applies it to the case of Volhynia’s German speakers' global migrations. Based on family genealogies, private correspondence, and public discussions on settlement and migration, I will demonstrate how Volhynia’s German speakers were both – victims of the Russian Empire’s exclusionary population policies and beneficiaries of Canada’s racist settlement policies.

Author

• Jan Musekamp, German Historical Institute Warsaw (Poland)