Part One: “Exclusion/Belonging,” traces the construction of the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant laborer as the original Asiatic/Mongolian, a figure who was not-white but above all not-Black, a wage worker who was degraded but nonetheless categorically superior to the slave. If we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the white worker, Chinese foreignness was a site of dispossession, persecution, and exclusion. But if we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the slave, we discover that Chinese foreignness was also, paradoxically, a site of plenitude, standing, and belonging. The exclusion movement expelled the Chinese immigrant from the nation, but not from the Family of Man. The U.S. state developed its pattern of weaponizing the Asiatic against the Black struggle during this period, as explained here in a new interpretation of Yick Wo v. Hopkins and Plessy v. Ferguson. For their part, Chinese immigrants grasped the value of their not-Blackness and developed strategies to take advantage of it, from displacing freed people on plantations during Reconstruction to refusing to allow their children to attend “colored” schools in the Mississippi Delta in the interwar years.

Early modern South East Asia can be characterized as a region of low population density, abundant natural resources, and high labour productivity in agriculture, where coastal areas were deeply involved in international trade, in particular with China and India. Available information on urban real wages indicates that in most parts of the region, living standards were well above Chinese and Indian levels until at least the mid-nineteenth century. The population growth observed throughout the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests also a strong resilience to climate shocks and wars. The main independent indigenous polities in the mainland and a few smaller ones in the archipelago reinforced their authority, legitimacy, and capacity. An increase or stability in the long run of per capita terms comprehensive wealth, which is the total value of natural, human, and physical (i.e. produced) capital stocks divided by total population, would imply a sustainable economic transformation. The general trends that can be observed suggest that this was the case in early modern South East Asia.