Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

The story of how East Asians became "yellow" in the Western imagination—and what it reveals about the problematic history of racial thinking

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was res...