History of Global Arms Transfer, 10 (2020), pp. 27-44

Migration, Naturalisation, and the‘British’ World, c.1900-1920
RACHEL BRIGHT*

SummaryThis article explores the distinctly legal vagueness that underpinned citizenshipand subjecthood in the British empire in the early twentieth century, drawing on
examples from South Africa and Australia. Situating the administration of
citizenship laws within a global context, this offers a revision of the current
scholarship on the global ‘color line’. The white ‘color line’ which developed
within the British empire was less a shared legal system and more of a constantnegotiation between different actors. Unlike other recent studies of citizenshipand subjecthood, this is not an intellectual history. This, instead, is a close
scrutiny of bureaucratic decision-making precisely because the system whichflourished under British rule was designed to accommodate colonial
discrimination by encouraging legal vagueness and executive privilege, allowing
considerable space for official and unofficial influence. By focusing on liminalgroups (Jews in South Africa and women in Australia), it illuminates how a‘British’ world was constructed, who was included and who excluded from thisprocess, and how this process unfolded, especially concerning issues of race andgender.

I Introduction
The flow of people, ideas and goods has been of central import in the scholarship of the
British world. The question of what exactly was ‘British’ about a British world has
remained elusive, however, as discussed by Andrew Dilley and myself elsewhere.1 Today, I
want to explore the legal, social and racial issues surrounding citizenship in the empire, andhow these worked in practice in order to better answer this question.
This article examines this issue within two colonies: Australia and South Africa,
exploring the degree to which the growing numbers of laws and bureaucracy meant tocontrol migration and naturalisation shaped both the construction of a system of migration
control, and how wider ideas of Britishness were constructed and imagined. This can help
us better understand the power dynamics within empire, politically and socially, and theways people imagined who belonged and who did not.
I situate this research within recent scholarship portraying the global history of migration
control, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth century ‘Age of Migration’.2 Thanks* Author’s Affiliation: Keele University.
1 Bright and Dilley, ‘After the British World’, pp. 547-568.
2 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport; Doulman and Lee, Every Assistance & Protection; Singha, ‘The GreatWar and a “Proper” Passport for the Colony; Stepan, ‘The Hour of Eugenics’; Kraut, Silent Travellers; Donnan

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RACHEL BRIGHT
to this recent scholarship, it seems impossible to dispute now that the development of ourmodern system of migration control, and the international laws which frame it, was a
global process, and the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia were key to its
development.
As settler societies dependent on migration, they were at the forefront of wanting toregulate that migration, to be able to distinguish between good and bad migrants. The
creation of this system has been famously called by Lake and Reynolds the ‘global colorline’, set up by European settlers who wanted to exclude Asian migrants from ‘white’colonies. The ‘color line’ was the legislative framework created by white settler societies
who wished to protect their privilege through excluding other ‘colors’ of people (acommonplace colloquialism at the time for other ‘races’) from a range of rights, including
migration, citizenship, and suffrage.3
In showing us what these systems had in common, (namely a focus on white identity), thesignificant differences in practice have become obscured.4 Laws can be interpreted in manydifferent ways, however carefully worded. Part of my argument today is that such a focus
on a white settler colonial world of exclusion ignores this, and ignores the distinctive
British legal system which had developed. Settler colonies were not sovereign like the US,
and had a significantly different legal tradition. Adam McKeown has described a migration
system in the US where specialists created ‘an orderly and impersonal procedure based on
clearly stated law and scientific inquiry’ which was ‘applied equally to all migrants’, even
if those laws were fundamentally racist, sexist and classist.5
In contrast, within the British system, ‘“much is left to tacit understanding.”’6 Most laws
have evolved over hundreds of years and involve a variety of quite contradictory
precedents.7 This vagueness has been particularly evident when it comes to any discussionof nationality: before 1948, there was no such thing as British citizenship. This meant thatmany of the ways it was decided who was British legally depended on common law, court
decisions, and the individual interpretations of officials at any given time. Each part of theempire had their own legal precedent and their own naturalisation laws. Usually anyoneborn on British soil (including the colonies) was legally a subject of the Crown. The
monarch would protect the subject in exchange for loyalty and possible military service.
The only rights clearly defined for British subjects in Britain were the right to own land,
inherit property, or sit in Parliament, but this male only affected the tiny number of subjects
with property, and this did not automatically apply abroad or in the colonies, where
different laws evolved. Citizenship did not exist, although the term was used frequently bycontemporaries. The British state was hardly recognised in this relationship.
and Wilson, Border Identities; Caplan and Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity; Fairchild, Science at
the Borders; McKeown, Melancholy Order; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Castles andMiller, The Age of Migration; Robertson, Passport in America; Breckenridge and Szreter, eds., Recognition andRegistration; Bashford, ed., Medicine at the Border; Taylor, ‘Immigration, Statecraft and Public Health’.
3 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. They borrowed this term from W. E. B. Du Bois, The
Souls of Black Folk (1903).
4 Bright, ‘A “Great Deal of Discrimination Is Necessary”’; Bashford and Gilchrist, ‘The Colonial History of
the 1905 Aliens Act’.
5 McKeown, ‘Ritualization and Regulation’, p. 399; McKeown, Melancholy Order, pp. 268–291.
6 Henry Sidgwick, Elements of Politics (1891), p. 548, quoted in Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, p. 103.
7 The best overview of the laws and precedents affecting naturalisation can be found in Karatani, Defining
British Citizenship. See also Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, pp. 3-4, 59; Dummett,‘The Acquisition of British Citizenship’, p. 75; Clarke, ‘Citizenship and Naturalization’, p. 320; Muller, ‘Bondsof Belonging’, p. 32; Anderson, ‘Britons Abroad, Aliens at Home’; Baldwin, “Subject to Empire’, pp. 522–556;
Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens; Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship; Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law;
Sen, “Imperial Subjects on Trial’.

28Migration, Naturalisation, and the ‘British’ World, c.1900-1920
Adding to this mix was the fact that all colonial governments had the centuries-old rightto naturalise aliens within the colony. Subjecthood anywhere in the British empire wasalways about declaring allegiance to the Crown - so people were either born under the
Crown, and so had a ‘natural’ duty of allegiance to the Crown, or they could choose
allegiance through the process of naturalisation. An alien migrant could be naturalised in
Britain or in any colony, provided they met whatever local requirements existed, and local
requirements varied considerably. For instance, in New Zealand, no residency was required
before applying for naturalisation, while in Britain, an alien had to wait five years before
applying.
Such legal vagueness and inconsistency caused little controversy until the early twentiethcentury. As universal suffrage and the welfare state spread, so the rights people associated(or wanted to link) with subjecthood became significant areas for debate. This particularly
focused on what the relationship should be between being a subject and having rights, suchas the right to vote or move freely within the empire. As migration and communication
increased, the disparate ways these issues were addressed in different places also became
more evident.8 Canada’s naturalisation act was unusual in specifically stating what rights
were associated with local naturalisation (as in Britain, this largely related to property
ownership and inheritance), but most other colonies had not directly addressed the matterat all, simply acting as if Britain’s legal system applied in their colony (even when this was
not clear).9 For instance, Australia’s Naturalization Act (1903) and Nationality Act (1920)
did not specify how ‘natural born British subject’ was defined, nor did they make clear
what the rights or duties were for any subjects, naturalised or ‘natural born’. Suchambiguities could lead to considerable differences in practice.10
The general public most commonly assumed that subjecthood granted the right to travel
anywhere unrestricted throughout the empire.11 In practice, while British subjects wererarely prevented from entering Britain itself, British subjects were regularly prevented fromtravelling between different parts of the empire.12 Indeed, while scholars have frequently
depicted the rise of migration controls in the twentieth century as marking the death oflaissez faire movements, recent revisionist scholars have recognised that such migratory
openness was perhaps always more of an idea than a practice.13 To take an example frommy own research in South Africa, it was common for people naturalised in Britain to be
excluded. In 1911, a ‘Mr and Mrs Otto were refused admission because Mr Otto wasindisposed’, despite the fact that both had been ‘naturalized in England.’14 In another case,a man naturalized in the neighbouring Transvaal found that his eleven year old son was
denied the right to pass through the Cape because he had ‘a cut lip’.15 This was despite
8 British Parliamentary Papers, Cd 3524, Papers laid before the Conference, Enclosure 4 in No. 1, M. D.
Chalmers, Law of Aliens and Naturalization Bill, Memorandum, November 1902, pp. 142, 146.
9 Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, p. 76.
10 See Rubenstein with Field, Australian Citizenship Law in Context; Davidson, From Subject to Citizen;
Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights; Chesterman, ‘Natural-Born Subjects?’, pp. 30-39.
11 British Parliamentary Papers, Cd 3524, Papers laid before the Conference. Enclosure 4 in No. 1, M. D.
Chalmers, Law of Aliens and Naturalization Bill, Memorandum, November 1902, p. 143; see also Haycract,‘Alien Legislation and the Prerogative of the Crown’, Law Quarterly Review (1897), pp. 165-186; Cd.1742,
Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, Report, pp. 35-36.
12 There were exceptions to this rule, however. See the restrictions placed on West African men married to
British women in the twentieth century in Ray, Crossing the Color Line.
13 Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens, p. 3; Maclean, ‘Examinations, Access, and Inequity within the Empire’, p.
115; Gammerl, ‘Subjects, Citizens and Others’, pp. 523-549.
14 UCT, BC 160, Morris Alexander Papers, ‘Immigration’, 5 August 1911, passenger from “Bon Louis”.
15 UCT, BC 160, Morris Alexander Papers, 3.D63/499, 10d: ‘the Trintapel[?] Castle 20 Aug. 1911’; pencilled
above ‘cut’ is ‘split’.

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RACHEL BRIGHT
Union in 1910, as a common law uniting the naturalisation policies of the separate South
African parts was not agreed until 1913. Such cases reflect the lack of reciprocal
recognition of naturalisation across the empire, as well as the anti-Semitism of the bordersystem in the Cape at the time (I shall discuss this more later).
One significant problem with the naturalisation law which developed, and which thesecases highlight, was the lack of clarity about whether an alien naturalised in one part of theempire was naturalised outside of that territory as well. A 1669 court case ruled thatcolonial law only applied within the colony, but various laws and rulings at different times
reached different conclusions about whether British naturalisation law applied in thecolonies.16 Such vagueness meant that being ‘British’, even in a legal sense, meant very
different things in different parts of the empire, and that decisions on specific cases often
reflected broader social constructions of citizenship.17
I use Linda Bosniak’s formulation here, that citizenship needs to be thought of as several
different things: a legal status, a system of rights and duties, and a form of group identity.18
It is also essential to understand this within the context of the growing historiography about
the creation of ideas of Britishness in the eighteenth century onwards, most notably Linda
Colley’s Britons.19 In it, she explained that, from the legal creation of Britain in 1707, thepublic used and identified with the label of being British in many different ways, and only
gradually came to adopt it.
My research will show, when dealing with applicants for naturalisation, there was noclear definition of Britishness provided, but that the question implicitly pervaded decisionmaking. Looking at the naturalisation of aliens within Britain’s settler colonies puts a
spotlight on people whose position within a ‘British’ world was always marginal - if they
were British, they would not have to be naturalised. Often their claims to whiteness, or tobeing desirable migrants, were also marginal - they were Germans, French and other
Europeans on the whole, but there are also Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian,Turkish, and Pacific Islanders within their ranks. It lays bare the liminal spaces of identityand belonging within settler societies and challenges the dominance of the British migrantexperience (e.g. migrants from Britain) within existing British world scholarship.
In the empire, the myriad identities of migrants and indigenous groups have complicatedthe political identification of residents even further, a situation exacerbated by a lack ofclear constitution outlining who was and who was not British, nor how the label could beacquired or removed. Naturalisation law and bureaucracy was meant to assign legal status,
but it was also tied to different rights and duties (real and imaginary) and to broader ideasof race, class and other aspects of group identity. This tension did not lead to Britain or its
colonies developing a legalistic bureaucratic machine, as has been described as developingin the US. Instead, because settler colonies wanted to exclude Asians but Britain did notwant to sanction overt racism against Indians (who were British subjects) or against
Japanese (who were allies), Britain encouraged a deliberate vagueness in legislation,
16 Craw v Ramey (1669), Vaugh. 274, 124, E. R. 1072, quoted in Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens
and Others, p. 76; The British National Archives (TNA), HO 45/10489/112229: Aliens, Bills and Acts,
Naturalisation: Under Sec of State, Foreign Office, to Under Sect of State, Colonial Office, 2 October 1903. See
also Markwald v. Attorney-General, Chancery Division, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 348 and 370, quoted in John
Chesterman, ‘Natural-Born Subjects?’, p. 33; Clarke, ‘Citizenship and Naturalization’, p. 321.
17 Muller, ‘Bonds of Belonging’, p. 53.
18 Bosniak, ‘Citizenship Denationalized’. Psychologists have differentiated further by pointing out that group
identity and individual identity may overlap, or even contradict, and are not necessarily the same thing. See
Condor, ‘Towards a Social Psychology of Citizenship?’; Rubenstein with Field, Australian Citizenship Law.
19 Colley, Britons.

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perpetuating wider constitutional vagueness about citizenship, rather than clarifying it.
To take one example of how different conceptions of citizenship could affect what
happened, consider the debates surrounding the writing of the Australian constitution.
There one attendee perfectly illustrates the ways that contemporaries used ‘subject’ and‘citizen’ to mean many different things:‘it would simply be monstrous that those who were born in England should in any way
be subjected to the slightest disabilities. It is impossible to contemplate the exclusion ofnatural born subjects of this character; but on the other hand, we must not forget that
there are other native-born British subjects whom we are far from desiring to see comehere in any considerable numbers’20
Here, distinctions were made between ‘natural-born’ subjects, described interestingly as‘English’ and not ‘British’, and ‘native-born’ subjects who were technically British subjects
but should not be allowed to migrate into the country. The example of Hong Kong
‘Chinamen’ and Indians were the most common in such debates; people who were
technically British but somehow were not really British. It was exactly the difficulty indefining how to draw the line between the two that led Australian politicians to deliberately
not define colonial citizenship in the final version of the Constitution, nor did the eventual
1903 Naturalisation Act (or subsequent acts) entirely clarify the matter. Instead, who wasentitled to citizenship, as well as the rights and duties associated with citizenship, was left
to inference by individual bureaucrats, government ministers, and occasional judicial
review.21
The most famous and arguably the most influential law to do this was Natal’s 1897
Immigration Restriction Act, more commonly known as the Natal Language Test. It
allowed border officials to implement a literacy test in any European language to anyone
arriving at a port. In other words, they could decide whether someone looked desirable andimpose a literacy test if they wanted to keep the potential migrant out of the colony. At the1897 Colonial Conference, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph
Chamberlain, pushed this language test as an acceptable model of migration control.
Although neither he nor the Natal governor (who devised it) denied that it was formulated
to keep out Asians, they could still deny accusations that it racially targeted them. While
this legislation was not universally popular, all of the settler colonies adopted versions of
it.22
Less analysed by scholars was a concession made by Chamberlain at the same meeting,concerning executive privilege. The New South Wales Prime Minister, George Reid, had
asked whether ‘power should be given to the Governor in Council at any time to exclude
any person or class of person… an executive power, which would be exercised withdiscretion’, and was specifically described as a kind of ‘common law.’23 While Chamberlain
showed reluctance at the time, subsequent colonial laws were allowed to contain clauses
about executive privilege. This meant that the executive could always decide to grant or
20 Australian Record of the Debates of the Convention (Melbourne, 1898), vol V, p. 1760, quoted in Rubensteinwith Field, Australian Citizenship Law, p. 52.
21 For a full breakdown of these early debates, see Rubenstein with Field, Australian Citizenship Law, esp. pp.
50-54. She has argued that this lack of definition remains today in Australia, meaning the rights and duties
associated with it are equally unclear in the most recent Australian Citizenship Act (2007).
22 See Bright, ‘Asian Migration and the British World, 1850-1914’, pp. 128-149; Huttenback, ‘The British
Empire as a “White Man’s Country”’, p. 111; Lake, ‘Translating Needs into Rights’, p. 203.
23 UK Parliamentary Papers, Cd8596, 1897 Colonial Conference, London Proceedings, p. 139.

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RACHEL BRIGHT
withhold naturalisation for anyone on any grounds, and did not have to provide a reason.24
Naturalisation applicants in settler colonies found it almost impossible to appeal any
decisions as power rested with the executive, and no reason had to be given for refusal.25
These types of laws, which put so much power in the hands of executive privilege andbureaucratic decision-making, shaped a distinctive migration system. Subsequent
legislation embraced this method, and discriminated increasingly on the basis of ‘morality’,‘health’, wealth, and other very flexible categories, often left to border officials tointerpret.26 Vague legislation like this meant that Greater Britain could simultaneously
promote their unity on migration matters, what Ratiki Karatani has called the ‘common
code’ 27, while excluding whomever they pleased. 28 This code, of course, operated
differently in each colony, precisely because the ‘code’ that developed was developed to bevague. While important to recognise the overlapping push for a ‘global color line’, inpractice, it is crucial to recognise how different such systems could actually work, and theways this fed into wider debates about citizenship.
Even when governments attempted to be specific, the restrictions on explicit racism led
to further confusion and inconsistency. For instance, in Australia, the CommonwealthFranchise Act of 1902 excluded any ‘aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa, or the
Island of the Pacific except New Zealand’ from ever voting, or applying for naturalisation.29
They were not allowed to specify race, only geography, but this in turn led to endlessdebates about the boundaries of continents. Most famously, Turkey was divided by the
Bosporus River, with residents to the West deemed acceptable European migrants and thoseto the East banned. Those in ‘Syria’, a generic name for the territory south of Turkey until
somewhere around Jerusalem (the exact boundaries were inconsistently imagined bydifferent people), were occasionally allowed in and even naturalised, but on other occasions
they were labelled Asians or Africans and banned from migration and naturalisationaccordingly.30
We need to understand then the white ‘color line’ which developed within the British
empire as less a shared legal system and more of a constant negotiation between different
actors. Robin Cohen’s phrase, ‘frontier guards’, works well at helping conceptualise these
actors as any person or even a movement that seeks ‘to influence the ideological and legal
parameters of nationality, citizenship and belonging’, to decide who to include and who to
24 UK Parliamentary Papers, Cd8596, 1897 Colonial Conference, London Proceedings, p. 140.
25 For example, the Australian Naturalisation Act (1903), Section 7: ‘The Governor-General in Council, if

satisfied with the evidence adduced, shall consider the application, and may, with or without assigning any
reason, in his discretion grant or withhold a certificate of naturalization, as he thinks most conducive to the public
good.’ Conversely, executive privilege was used frequently during the First World War in Australia to grantGerman women naturalisation, despite ’enemy aliens’ being banned from applying. See Bright, ‘Women’s
Naturalisation in Australia during World War I’, forthcoming.
26 Huttenback, Racism and Empire; Martens, Empire and Asian Migration; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing a
Global Colour Line, pp. 125–132; McKeown, Melancholy Order, pp. 185–214. Britain referenced this legislation
when passing their own first migration control legislation in 1905; see Bashford and Gilchrist, ‘The Colonial
History of the 1905 Aliens Act’, pp. 409-437; TNA, HO 45/10489/112229/18: Aliens, Bills and Acts,
Naturalisation, Elgin Circular to self-governing colonies, 14 December 1906.
27 Karatani, Defining British Citizenship, pp. 70-83.
28 Bright, ‘A “Great Deal of Discrimination Is Necessary”’.
29 TNA CO 885/19/7: Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas, ‘Native races in the British empire. Memorandum.’ Thisdeals with the position and rights of the indigenous populations of Crown colonies, self-governing colonies andprotectorates, 31 December 1907, p. 2. See also Chesterman, ‘Natural-Born Subjects?’ p. 32.
30 See, for instance, National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1, 1904/9135, M. Betro (1904); A1, 1912/18004,
Salma Betros (1905); ST1233/1/0, N6777, Rachel Nasser (1916-28); ST1233/1, N2930, Mrs Freda Abraham(1916-25); A1, 1906/6969, Revocation of certain Naturalization Certificates, Confidential letter, Atlee Hunt to P.
J. McDermott, Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Office, Brisbane, 22 May 1905, pp.35-36.

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exclude.31 Examining how such frontier guards imagined citizenship and administered thesystems of naturalisation helps illuminate much about how contemporaries understood theirworld and their place in it, and will make up the bulk of the rest of this article.
Unlike other recent studies of citizenship and subjecthood, this is not an intellectual
history32. The popular political and intellectual theories underpinning the global colour line
do share many features, as several recent histories have emphasised.33 This, instead, is a
close scrutiny of bureaucratic decision-making precisely because the British legislativevagueness was so important.
I have chosen South Africa and Australia as case studies for several reasons. They were
important in shaping the ‘global color line’.34 Senior bureaucrats left private papers, which
can be combined with very thorough official migration and naturalisation files to gain amuch clearer sense of the negotiations which shaped migration in practice.
A similar process would probably be evident in Britain itself and would be of greatinterest but Britain has historically done a poor job of preserving records for migrant entry
and naturalisation.35 And while this issue of naturalisation and law also fed into questionsof legal sovereignty, and did affect the eventual development of separate citizenships (firstin Canada in 1946) this is not my primary focus today.36 Precisely because of the vaguenessof the laws, it is clear that broader social ideas of citizenship bled into how laws were
implemented, thus giving administrators and policy-makers as well as external agents theopportunity to influence who the state recognised as legal subjects, and who were granted
rights.
You may notice some slippage between naturalisation and migration throughout thisarticle; this is because any focus on naturalisation laws must also take into accountmigration laws. In both Australia and South Africa (and throughout most of the world at thetime), the same departments governed both initial migration and later naturalisation. Thesebureaucracies were primarily designed to enforce any exclusion at the port of entry (and inSouth Africa, there were virtually no border checks on their land borders with other Africancolonies until the 1920s).37 Neither put much effort into recording or policing migrants
once they had arrived within the country until after WWI. Passports were also quite rare
until after WWI. For instance, the total number of passports issued to Australian women
before 1914 appears to be less than 20.38 Fundamentally, while there was a recognition thatnaturalisation was quite important, and the laws often attracted considerable attention, theadministration of those laws was almost always of secondary concern, and bothadministrations seem to have depended on external bodies (individuals, charities, evenshipping companies), to help police the system, rather than doing much active policing
themselves. This meant that the number of people who could shape the system wasconsiderable.

31 Cohen, Frontiers of Identity, p. 2.
32 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain; Behm, Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion; Gorman,

Imperial Citizenship.
33 See footnote 3.
34 Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration; Caplan and Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity; Lakeand Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.
35 Gammerl, ‘Subjects, Citizens and Others’, pp. 532, 542; Farhrmeir, Citizens and Aliens, p. 93.
36 Karatani, Defining British Citizenship, p. 40.
37 See Hyslop, ‘Oceanic Mobility and Settler-Colonial Power’, pp. 248-267; MacDonald, ‘Colonial Trespassers
in the Making of South Africa’s International Borders’.
38 According to a search in the NAA database for passport applications from females, July 2019.

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RACHEL BRIGHTII South Africa
In South Africa, I want to start with the colourful Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1872-1954),
who ran the Cape migration office from 1905 until 1915, as Chief Immigration Officer,
before being appointed the Union’s head of migration until 1922. In addition to official
records, he left extensive letters and diaries, and even a memoir.
Cousins’ chief responsibility was to create a paperwork system for processing all
migrants and to train and supervise his staff. This included the implementation of thelanguage test, and a range of other laws and regulations. The Cape 1906 Migration Act, forinstance, banned anyone suffering from one of a range of medical or pseudo-medical
conditions, including ‘idiots’.39 Similarly, when South Africa passed its first national
Immigration Exclusion Act in 1913, it banned the ‘diseased’ and ‘disabled’, and could also
exclude anyone on ‘economic grounds’ and ‘habits of life’. These terms were kept
deliberately vague by the government to ensure (successfully) that Britain did not interfere,
and anyone could be excluded in practice.40
Politicians in South Africa perfected such vague legislation, and Cousins clearly
embraced the power this gave him personally. Cousins wrote extensively about his work ina private diary and long letters to family, making it clear that his personal identity was
linked to his migration work, (although it is worth noting that this rarely accompanied any
statements about Britishness or South Africanness). He frequently framed his work, and his
own identity, as being a ‘custodian of the gate’ for white colonials. In this respect, it isworth noting that he was himself an immigrant: born in Madagascar in 1872 to a
missionary father (employed by the London Missionary Society) and educated in Oxford
before attending the university, where he studied modern history. His career hopes were
dashed, however, when due to family finances, he had to find work before completing his
degree. Like many before him, the colonies offered a solution, and he arrived in Cape Town
in 1896, where he worked in a variety of government departments before running the
Migration Office.41
Cousins’s writings reveal two overriding concerns: keeping out ‘Orientals’ (a groupwhich included Chinese, Indians, and Jews, but apparently not Japanese), and helping
young ‘English’ women. When a woman arrived to join a husband who had deserted her
and landed in jail, he considered excluding them as undesirable migrants, but decided that,as they were English, he would ‘giv[e] them every chance’.42 On another occasion during
the war, a young English girl, ‘clearly a nice girl, well-educated, and a lady’ arrived inCape Town, sent by her mother to marry a local man, but Cousins suspected somethingcloser to white slavery (although that term was not used by him). The man who came tocollect her produced a letter from the mother, giving permission for her daughter marrying‘“any of your old pals” as long as he had plenty of money and would be kind to the girl.’
This put Cousins in a dilemma. The letter from the mother seemed to make everythinglegal, but it also seemed to indicate human trafficking, a child sold by her own mother andsent alone to South Africa for, at best, marriage, and, at worst, prostitution. He eventually
persuaded her to travel back to her mother in England. Although he was concerned about
her fate with her ‘horrid mother’, it was the best he could do, and he used considerable
39 See the Annual Reports of the Immigration Restriction Department in the Cape (1902–9); DhupeliaMesthrie, ‘The Form, the Permit and the Photograph’, p. 7 for detailed residency requirements, and how it wasused to exclude Indians.
40 Peberdy, Selecting immigrants, pp. 39, 47, 51; Saron, ‘Jewish immigration’, pp.101–102.
41 University of Cape Town Archives (UCT), BC1154, C. W. Cousins Papers, E4.
42 UCT, BC 1154, Cousins Papers, A4.1.3, Diary, 29 April 1913.

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Migration, Naturalisation, and the ‘British’ World, c.1900-1920
time and effort, and some of his own money, helping the girl ‘escape’ her fate in South
Africa.43 She was not an unusual case, with his letters and diaries full of cases of young‘English’ women in distress and his own efforts to save them.44 The growing administrative
body, overseen by Cousins spent considerably energy protecting such women and excluding‘undesirables’.
One of the notable features of Cousins’ oversight was his faith, not in documentation, but
in the ability to ‘see’ whether migrants were desirable. Cousins was frequently explicit inexplaining how personal encounters were more important than the actual paperwork:‘There are of course other things to look for than signatures to declarations or answers
to stated questions. The experienced officer has for example to possess an instinct of allsorts of possible disqualifications which the passenger’s papers will not reveal.’45
He noted with approval when an Immigration Officer detained ‘a young London Jew’
because he ‘did not like the look of him’.46 The law and Cousins both encouraged migration
decisions based on the ‘look’ of arrivals. If they saw someone they thought ‘looked’ wrong,they were encouraged to use the laws creatively, as described earlier concerning naturalised
British Jews. Conversely, if he liked the look of English girls, he helped them.
It is worth emphasising here, however, the constant negotiation between different actors.
While the law gave Cousins the power to enforce his anti-Semitic exclusionary desires,47
the vague laws and executive power built into those laws meant others could also influence
decision-making. One such person was Morris Alexander (1877–1946), a Jewish lawyer
and member of Parliament. He frequently was the lawyer for Jews and Indians who wished
to appeal migration decisions in court, and was an outspoken champion of racial equality inSouth Africa. In 1904, he co-founded a charity which sought to regulate and protect Jewish
migrants, the Cape Jewish Board of Deputies, which became nationally amalgamated in
1912. He left meticulous records of everything he did.48
Now I want to draw attention to notes Alexander made during seven visits between Juneand October 1911, when he watched border officials at work on behalf of the Board. In
Alexander’s notebook, he documented 26 cases of suspicious rejections of Jews, almost all
on medical grounds. In one case, ‘a Mr Kaplan and his three children, already resident in[a] Johannesburg suburb, were refused entry because ‘one eye of one child was defective.’On the same ship, ‘Mrs Omdur & four children were stopped, because the one childappeared to be a little pale.’ 49 Others were turned away on different days for being‘unclean’, ‘a dwarf’, or being ‘pale’ or ‘sickly’.50 Many of these refusals on health grounds
appear specious, or at least vague. Such were the concerns, the South African Jewish Boardof Deputies subsequently employed a medical man to greet each ship and monitor
43 UCT, BC 1154, Cousins Papers, B1.3, Monthly Family Letter from Cousins to England, 20 December 1914;
see also 198-9, 1 November 1914; 278-9, 14 December 1914; A4.1.2, Diary, 5 August 1912; A4.1.3, Diary, 19
March 1913 and 21 October 1913 (2).
44 See Bright, ‘A “Great Deal of Discrimination Is Necessary”’.
45 UCT, BC 1154, Cousins Papers, SC 16 – 1908, Report of the Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances(1908), p. 111, quoted in Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘False Fathers’, p. 108.
46 UCT, BC 1154, Cousins Papers, A4.1.3, Diary, 21 October 1913.
47 Peberdy, Selecting immigrants, pp. 4, 28. For more on ‘contagion’ and migration, See works by Alison
Bashford.
48 Saron, Morris Alexander; Alexander, Morris Alexander; Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa.
49 UCT, BC 160, Morris Alexander Papers, D63/499, 10d – ‘Immigration’ booklet, 5 August 1911, passenger
from “Bon Louis”.
50 UCT, BC 160, Morris Alexander Papers, 3.D63/499, 10d – ‘Immigration’ booklet. See especially 20 August
1911, passenger from ‘Trintapel[?] Castle’; Per Garth Castle, 11 September 1911. See also UCT BC 1154,
Cousins Papers, A4.1.3, Diary, 19 March 1913.

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RACHEL BRIGHT
refusals.51
The observational role of Alexander and his charity, however, does not just confirm
discrimination by Cousins and the border officials under him. It was worth employing a
medical man because they had personal networks which could be utilised to go over thehead of Cousins and his staff. While it is difficult to identify specific cases where official
decisions were reversed because of external pressure, Cousins complained regularly in hisdiary that Jews contacted his minister to exert such pressure.52 The South African Board ofJewish Refugees claimed to engineer such changes of mind on multiple occasions.53 By thetime of Union, the Board worked closely together with authorities to protect and police theJewish community. 54 This cooperation reflected the fact that both Indian and Jewish
populations accepted that it was ‘undesirable’ to have unregulated migration and took onelements of self-policing as a way to protect existing residents from racism.55 The Board
did this in a far more semi-official capacity than Indians did, possibly reflecting theirgreater integration within the wider white settler society (however much people like
Cousins wished to exclude them from the category of white). According to Alexander’smemoir, this close relationship went back to 1904, (before Cousins was even hired), at thebehest of the Colonial Secretary, Colonel Crewe. It is worth noting that when the Board
was launched in the same year, their guest speaker was Alfred Milner, the Governor.56
Those connections meant they could go over Cousin’s head concerning admission at theports, and once they had entered the colony, the Board had a virtual monopoly on deciding
which Jews to support through the naturalisation process.57
So, here we have a legal system deliberately designed to be vague, allowing frontier
guards (official and semi-official) to discriminate with regards to naturalisation andmigration policy. Cousins hated Jews and sought to exclude them, but the Board proved
largely effective in circumnavigating his power by forming semi-official partnerships withmore senior government figures. It is also worth noting that Alexander, when fighting forthe rights of Indians, Chinese, and Africans, proved far less effective, earning his label as
51 See Rabinowitz, ‘From the Morris Alexander “Immigration” Notebook, 1911’. The office ran from 1914-15,
closed due to the war, and reopened again in 1923 through the 1930s as a growing number of Eastern European
Jews arrived.
52 See, for instance, UCT, BC 1154, Cousins Papers, A4.1.3, Diary, 19 March 1913.
53 Saron, Morris Alexander, p. 21. Some oral history suggests other prominent Cape Town Jews engaged insimilar activities. See Schrire, From Eastern Europe to South Africa, pp. 33–34; Saron, ‘Jewish Immigration’, p.
101. This is part of ongoing research into the Board’s archival records and those of official migration andnaturalisation records.
54 Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, p. 65; Cape Town Archives Repository (KAB): GH, 23/79,
127, application for admission to the Cape Colony from Mr. Von Sever, A Russian Jew; Transvaal National
Archives Repository (TAB), PSY, 52, J7/00, 1900, political secretary to military governor: undesirables Jews not
to be counted as class undesirables; TAB, GOV, 636, PS 6/04, Jewish Board of Deputies (1904); TAB, GOV, 803,
PS 7/19/05, Jewish Board of Deputies (1905); Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (NAB), CSO, 1727,
1903/2494, R. Levisohn, Honourary Secretary, Durban Hebrew Congregation, Durgan, Relative to the Landing of
Person of the Jewish Persuasion at Durban; NAB, IRD, 19 IRD, 688/1903, Colonial Secretary: Deputation fromJewish Community; NAB, IRD, LEER, 91 IRD, 708/1911, Private Secretary, Minister of the Interior, Pretoria,
correspondence with Sigried Raphaely, President of Jewish Board of Deputies; South African National Archives
Repository (SAB), GG, 1306, 36/26, Exclusion of Certain Russo-Jewish Immigrants from the Union of South
Africa; SAB, PM, 1/1/237, PM110/2/1913, Immigration: Jewish Board of Deputies; SAB, GG, 170, 3/3360,
Defines SA Jewish Board of Deputies, Stating Objects, Forwards Report from 14 April – 31 March 1919; SAB,
GG, 960 19/417, Governor-General: Resolution of Loyalty Passed by South African Hewish Board of Deputies(1920).
55 See Indian Opinion throughout the early 1900s; Saron, ‘Jewish Immigration’, p. 104; Mendelsohn andShain, The Jews in South Africa, p. 44.
56 Alexander, Morris Alexander, p. 31.
57 Alexander, Morris Alexander, p. 32; The South African Jewish Board of Deputies Report, 1912-14, quoted inSaron, ‘Jewish Immigration’, p. 104; Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, p. 60.

36

Migration, Naturalisation, and the ‘British’ World, c.1900-1920
the champion of lost causes. The Board was able to wield such political power primarily
because, as middle class men, they shared many of the same social and economic links, and‘shared interests and values, including empire loyalism and racial prejudice’ with otherpowerful members of settler society, a social position which excluded other groups
championed by Alexander.58
While explicit references to Britishness were rare, the question of belonging andnationhood were implicit throughout Cousins’ and Alexander’s work. Indians, Chinese, andJews, from Cousins’ perspective, were eternally sojourners and eternally dishonest, while
English women needed rescuing by an English man. On the other hand, Alexander clearly
believed strongly in ‘British ideals’, constantly referring to them in his various fights forthe rights of British subjects in South Africa. Despite being a lawyer, he constantly
appealed to inclusive, largely mythic, cultural ideas of the rights and duties of British
citizenship. His memoir, completed and published by his wife after his death, explainedthat he saw naturalisation as a particularly important part of this process. He‘held the conviction… that it was the duty of everyone eligible for naturalization to
become naturalized and to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. He believed thatnaturalization was a vital step towards identification with the immigrant’s new country,
and that it brought with it a new dignity and status, as well as a feeling of security.’59
Such imaginings of naturalisation had little to do with the specific laws in place, nothing
to do with subjecthood to a Crown, or loyalty to Britain or South Africa. Yet thesedemonstrate competing ideas of group identity, civic responsibility, and race, all bound by
the imagined rights and duties of citizenship. And vague legislation ensured that imagined
rights and belongings could prove significant in shaping what actually happened inpractice, who was included and who excluded.

III Australia
I do not plan to now offer a direct comparison with Australia. Rather, I want to show how
similar laws were implemented in Australia. Specifically I want to show how a very
different personality running Australia’s system sought to develop a more legalistic andconsistent approach (perhaps more like in the US), but ultimately he oversaw a systemriddled with inconsistencies because of the legal and constitutional situation within theempire. In short, in South Africa the vagueness was embraced, while Australian bureaucrats
tried to pretend the laws were clear, fair, and consistent (even when privately
acknowledging that they were not).
The head of migration control from Federation in 1901 until 1916 was Atlee Hunt, an
Australian-born and educated lawyer. While policing the border was Cousin’s whole life,
for Hunt, overseeing migration and naturalisation matters was a small part of his job. As
head of the Department of External Affairs (DEA), his job included all broadly imperial orforeign policy matters for the federal government. 60 He took a less personal interest(perhaps he was simply more secure in his place within Australian society) and seems tohave adopted a much more conservative attitude towards using his powers. When
58 Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, p. 65.
59 Alexander, Morris Alexander, p. 32.
60 National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1, 1903/2284, Nature of work carried on by External Affairs

Department, report by Secretary, Atlee Hunt, 23 April 1903.

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RACHEL BRIGHT
confronted with a specific question about when to administer the language test to whitepassengers, for instance, he encouraged far less personal discrimination than Cousins had
done: the test, he said, should only be applied if there was ‘some specific reason… known
to [the] officer why that course should be adopted’ and made little effort to single out Jews
or other groups (although he did tell border officials to always be suspicious of Chinese
people’s paperwork).61 On another occasion, he expressed a liking for Japanese officials inAustralia, but still refused to interfere in granting their wives visas, as he could have done.
He explained:‘I do not intend to discuss whether or not we ought to wish to have these people here ornot. My own view is that the law is a necessity of our very existence, but whether or not
I concur in it is beside the question. The fact remains that the object of the law is to
exclude certain classes of people from Australia, and eventually, by refusing to admit
any more, to entirely free Australia from them.’62
Elsewhere, when discussing the thorny matter of German naturalisation during the FirstWorld War, he described his oversight of naturalisation to include ‘a general obligation to
see that the terms of the law are faithfully carried out’, so did not think it would be fair todeprive already-naturalised Germans of that status.63 In other words, he supported Asian
exclusion and was suspicious of German-born migrants (regardless of whether they had
been naturalised) but, unlike Cousins, did not think his personal views on the matter shouldinterfere with the administration of the law.
This does not mean that discrimination did not occur, but that it was less systematic,lacking direction from a senior bureaucrat. Discrimination was especially evident whenlaws were vague (such as where the boundaries between Europe and Asia were). Women inAustralia became a particular source of inconsistency, because naturalisation laws and theforms used for applicants assumed applicants were male. This meant that the forms opened
up a variety of problems for both women filling in the forms and bureaucrats processingthem.
If we look at the plight of married women, the problems become especially pronounced.
In most countries around the world between roughly 1850 and 1945, a woman’s nationality
depended entirely on her husband’s nationality. Married women were almost universally nolonger citizens in their own country if they married an alien, and usually automaticallyadopted the nationality of their husband. 64 For instance, a British woman marrying a
Japanese man would find herself no longer British, but Japanese.65 (Censuses often adopted
a similar recording mechanism, so that, when ‘race’ was recorded, wives were recorded as
belonging to the same race as their husband.) Married women could not apply fornaturalisation at all under British law. Both the 1870 and 1914 British Nationality Acts
stated that people suffering from a ‘disability’ could not be naturalised; ‘disability’ included
61 NAA: J3116, 14, Alien Immigration – correspondence relating to arrival of SS Duke of Argyll, 25 January
1902 and an inquiry from a Customs Officer as to whether the Education Test is to apply to Europeans [White
Aliens]. See also Atlee Hunt Papers, National Library of Australia, Series 14, MS 52/822, Hunt to Collins, 1 May
1912; MS 52/840, Collins to Hunt, 22 August 1912; MS 52/14/846.
62 Atlee Hunt Papers, MS 52/1313, Hunt to F. W. Foxall Esq., Japanese Consulate General, Sydney, 8
December 1908.
63 Atlee Hunt Papers, MS52/1517, Hunt to Mahon, 19 January 1916.
64 Irving, Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State.
65 A Japanese woman marrying an alien would only lose her nationality if she acquired her husband’snationality, according to the Japanese Law of 1899. See Irving, Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern
Constitutional State, p. 109.

38

Migration, Naturalisation, and the ‘British’ World, c.1900-1920‘married women, infants, lunatics, and idiots’.66 Historians have generally assumed that thismeant no married women could have applied successfully in Australia or anywhere else in
the empire.67 However, my current research shows that approximately 45% of all applicantsin Australia were married women, and only a small handful had their applications
rejected.68
The reasons for this are complicated. Until 1911, there was no dedicated space on theform to list a spouse or children, so sometimes administrators made women fill out forms
for themselves at the same time as their husbands applied, while on other occasions women
were told they did not need to do this.69 In some cases, administrators knew that thehusband had previously been rejected in his own right, but the wife was still successful.70
In a few cases, administrators were clearly sympathetic to cases of desertion.71 Most
frequently, officials did not even ask why a married woman was applying, or the status ofher husband.
The success of these women was not merely a matter of bureaucratic incompetence or
indifference. In one 1910 case, the applicant, Alice Shong Kew Wong Sing, was born in
Gympie, Queensland, to a Chinese father and ‘English’ mother, and had subsequently
married a Chinese man who was ineligible to apply. She was applying because a local bankhad insisted that she had to be naturalised before taking out a mortgage. 72 Despite her
appearing to be exactly the sort of person not desired in Australia, (in fact someone
pencilled ‘Chinese’ at the top of her application, showing how they identified her), she was
successful. The files do not make it entirely clear why, but in her case, and several
subsequent cases, especially involving women married to ‘enemy aliens’ during the War,
being born in Australia (regardless of parentage), and being the mother of children born inAustralia, seems to have been powerful factors in shaping their inclusion into the bodypolitic. It is worth remembering that, theoretically, this certificate of naturalisation gave heraccess to the vote, to maternity cover and old age pension, and, of course, to securing amortgage and an inheritance which she would otherwise be denied (at least in Australia;
remember that naturalisation guaranteed no rights outside of Australia).73 Perhaps, while
her husband was forever Chinese, her life in Australia, and her role as a woman and amother, and her own ‘English’ mother, meant that state agents thought of her as both lessthreatening and as more easily absorbed, or even conquered, by the dominant British
culture of Australia.74 Many German women granted naturalisation during World War One
66 Section 17 (1870): ‘“Disability” shall mean the status of being an infant, lunatic, idiot, or married woman’;Section 27 (1914): ‘The expression “disability” means the status of being a married woman, or a minor, lunatic,or idiot’. See Irving, Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State; Baldwin, ‘Subject to Empire’,
pp. 522-556.
67 From Dutton, ‘Women - Citizenship in Australia’. The Naturalization Act of 1903, section 9: ‘A woman
who, not being a British subject, marries a British subject, shall in the Commonwealth be deemed to be thereby
naturalized, and have the same rights powers and privileges, and be subject to the same obligations, as a person
who has obtained a certificate of naturalization.’
68 Based on all digitised NAA applications from females between 1901 and 1909, as of 13 November 2019.
The database, once completed, will be freely available online at https://naturalisation.online/database/.
69 See, for instance, NAA: A1, 1912/6502, Margaretha Klose (1908); NAA: A1, 1905/83, Carolina Rurade(1905); NAA: A1, 1904/321, Gertie Wolper (1904). This was still a problem concerning women and children in
1939: NAA: A406, E1947/10, J. E. Stewart, Commonwealth Electoral Officer, Queensland, Memorandum, 13
December 1939.
70 NAA: A1, 1904/9341, Mary Joseph (1904).
71 NAA: A1, 1904/5299, Rose Lestrem (1904).
72 NAA: A63, A1910/4814, Alice Shong Kew Wong Sing (1910); See a similar example at NAA: A1,
1908/6179, Sarah Jane Karl, nee Wilson (1908).
73 NAA: A63, A1910/4814, Alice Shong Kew Wong Sing (1910).
74 See other examples from World War one, such as the files for Mrs. Fauvette Erdos, born to Portuguese

39

RACHEL BRIGHT
through executive power were able to do so by emphasising their position as mothers ofAustralian children, who in turn were contributing to the war effort, an appeal authorities
did not accept from fathers. 75 It certainly appears that, probably due to genderconsiderations, female applicants were simply not scrutinised as closely as male applicants,
what Michelle Langfield has referred to as the ‘differential treatment of men and women’embedded within Australia’s migration system. 76 This ‘differential treatment’ was notalways reflected in specific legislation, but because laws were written by men for men; theapplication to women led to further confusion. The vagueness of legislation also meant thatthe system encouraged what we would now call unconscious bias in making decisions.
Women were seen as less threatening and less important, and so received less scrutiny.
Both ministers overseeing the DEA and Attorney Generals changed rapidly during thisperiod, with it rare for one to be in place for even two years. Their interpretations of thelaws varied considerably and their rulings were not always widely disseminated. To takeone example, in 1904, R. R. Janan gave the opinion that: ‘Not being either natural-born or
naturalized under the Act, she [a married woman] is not a “British Subject”, and is eligible
under section 5’ to apply for naturalisation, a ruling confirmed in 1910 by a different
Attorney General.77 In 1906, however, Isaac A. Isaacs, the then Attorney General, gave acompletely different ruling, that marriage itself could not take away a woman’s ‘British
nationality’, seeming to draw on older ideas of the inalienable status of subjecthood. Under
his interpretation, British female subjects who married aliens did not need to apply fornaturalisation at all, and ‘should be given the benefit of the doubt, and be enrolled as anelector.’78 He drew not just on British traditions of subjecthood but also on the intention ofAustralian constitution writers who had not included a clause about women andnationality.79
These legal Opinions were never publicly advertised by the government and seem to havebeen adopted haphazardly by various electoral officials and migration and nationality
officials. Married women were never told they could apply for naturalisation. Indeed, other
scholars have written about how women’s groups championed the renaturalisation of
British women who married aliens during this period.80 Both contemporaries and thissubsequent scholarship have been seemingly unaware of how easy being re-naturalised
was. Still, in practice, if a woman applied in Australia, whether married or not, she wasusually successful until 1916.
This changed after a revealing exchange between Hunt, a law professor friend of his, theAustralian Prime Minister, the Australian Attorney General, and the Colonial Office inLondon. Starting in 1913, and again in 1914, 1915, and 1916, the Colonial Office wrote toparents in Tasmania, and married to an Austro-Hungarian, described by her lawyers ‘as British as anyone incharacter, sympathy and feeling’. NAA: A11803, 1914/89/84, correspondence concerning Mrs Fauvette Erdos;
NAA: A1, 1916/12834, Fauvette Erdos; NAA: A401, Erdos. Further discussion of women’s applications during
World War 1 can be found in Bright, ‘Women’s Naturalisation in Australia during World War I’, forthcoming.
75 See NAA: A1, 1917/14627, Schedule Showing Names of Germans Applying for Naturalization (Approvedby Minister), pp. 7-14.
76 Langfield, ‘Gender Blind?’, p. 143.
77 NAA: A1, 1904/7646, Naturalization of Married Women in NSW, Opinion from the Attorney General, 29
August 1904, pp. 2-3. Confirmed in A63, A1910/7244, Naturalization British Women married to aliens, C.
Hughes, Attorney-General, Opinion: Eligibility of a British Born Woman Who Has Married an Alien to Apply fora Certificate of Naturalization, to DEA, 7 November 1910.
78 NAA: A63, A1910/7244, Isaac A. Isaacs, Attorney General, Opinion: Franchise - British Woman Married toan Alien: Naturalization Act 1905, 29 March 1906.
79 He referenced Australia Parliamentary Debates (1903) Vol.14, p. 2200.
80 See Irving, Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State; Baldwin, ‘Subject to Empire’, pp.
522-556.

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Migration, Naturalisation, and the ‘British’ World, c.1900-1920
Hunt to complain that married women should not be naturalised, as they were prohibited by
British law. Never mind that the Home Office and Foreign Office kept telling the Colonial
Office that it was not clear that British naturalisation law applied in the colonies, or what
the relationship between its law and colonial law was. Despite this, the Colonial Office also
complained that Australia’s failure to charge a fee was another case of serious inconsistency
within the empire, at a time when various imperial conferences were promising to try tomove towards common naturalisation laws. This then led to a rather heated debate oversovereignty that was only quietly resolved in 1916 when Australia agreed to stop
naturalising married women, in an apparent nod to the ‘common code’ they were supposed
to strive to achieve.81 These inconsistencies in Australia reflect some of the unintended
consequences of legal vagueness, a vagueness which allowed positive discrimination on
behalf of women until executive privilege led the minister to remove this right frommarried women in 1916. Pointedly, this was done without accepting the Colonial Officeclaim that British naturalisation law trumped Australian law and involved no actual change
in naturalisation law.
It also reveals how social construction of citizenship meant women born in Australia,
regardless of her parentage, received favourable treatment, and that a form of positive
discrimination operated for women. This was never an intention of Hunt or others working
with him. That women seem to have been allowed a far more racially inclusive version ofsubjecthood than men is all the more surprising in this context, given wider popularconcerns about eugenics and miscegenation. Perhaps in a society which so often lacked
female migrants, any married woman bearing children in Australia was a good migrant.82

IV Conclusion
These case studies show how the issue of naturalisation in the early twentieth century
reflects the complex ways in which citizenship and subjecthood were constructed,
problematised, and reconfigured. Because of the specific British legal and constitutional
context, how these things were imagined really mattered. It is perhaps unsurprising that thepeople most susceptible to discriminatory practices under the naturalisation laws which
existed in the empire were people whose claim to whiteness or Europeanness weredebatable (such as Russian Jews or Syrians), or women, since the system was designed
largely to accommodate men. The vague laws were fostered, not just to accommodate
colonial racism, but were part of a much longer legal and constitutional tradition within
Britain and its empire.
As settler colonies introduced new rights and duties, connected at least tenuously to local
citizenship, citizenship became highly contentious (and, while I have not had space todiscuss it here, more desirable for migrants themselves 83). Who was entitled to legal
citizenship, as well as the rights and duties associated with citizenship, were left toindividual bureaucrats, government ministers, the odd external agents like the Jewish Boardof Deputies, and occasional judicial review. A ‘common code’ was never possible, but
81 NAA: A1, 1914/20769, Atlee Hunt to Prime Minister’s Secretary, 5 August 1914, pp. 27-28; Colonial Officeto Hunt, 18 July 1913; NAA: A435, 1944/4/4347, Attorney-General’s Opinion, Eligibility of the Wives of Aliensfor Naturalization, 31 May 1916; Hunt Papers, MS 52/1536, Hunt to Harrison Moore, 17 March 1916; NAA:
A2863, 1917/25, Naturalization Act - No. 25, 1917, p. 8, handwritten note by S. Mahon, 18 April 1916.
82 This remains the subject of ongoing research, and will appear in a forthcoming book, The Good Migrant:
Naturalisation, Race and Gender in South Africa and Australia in the Early Twentieth Century.
83 Fortier, ‘What’s the big deal?’, pp. 697-711.

41

RACHEL BRIGHTGreater Britain was united in having systems that relied on the personal judgements andprejudices (conscious and unconscious), from a variety of official and unofficial borderagents.
This was a distinctly British system, one which has to be distinguished from other legal
systems at the time, such as that which developed in the United States. While the languageof whiteness and focus on Asian exclusion were common issues in all of these settler
societies, the legal and unwritten constitutional boundaries of the British empire ultimately
did matter when it came to citizenship. That citizenship did not actually exist, that this was
an exercise of contemporary imagination as legal interpretation, does not diminish theimport of considering these local examples and how they fit within the imperial and global
dimensions of citizenship and migration control in the early twentieth century.
Examining South Africa and Australia together can also help scholars better understandthe global system of migration control which developed, and which still exists. While themore overtly racist and sexist discriminatory laws of the past have disappeared, thediscretionary powers given to border officials are still largely in place. Once we realise thatthe ‘color line’ which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wasless a system of laws and more of a constant negotiation between different actors, we canbegin to recognise that such a system still exists and is still open to manipulation anddiscrimination. And while we may never have a definitive answer to the question of how
British the British world was, the vague legal underpinnings of nationhood, citizenship andnaturalisation were decidedly British. In many former colonies and in Britain itself, thosevague legal underpinnings remain.
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