This article examines the essential imperial and international context of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, and argues that the foundational deliberations that produced the White Australia Policy cannot be fully understood without attention to that global perspective. Indeed, the real and potential implications of Asian restriction beyond the Australian continent dominated the parliamentary debates and influenced the character and application of the policy from the outset. The debate was not about whether to implement a restrictive immigration regime, it was about how to implement that regime, a calculus suffused with a range of imperial and international considerations. It hinged upon Labor Party leader John C. Watson’s popular amendment, which scorned the Natal formula’s discretion and instead expressly excluded ‘any person who is an aboriginal native of Asia, Africa, or of the islands thereof’. The question of whether to risk embarrassing the British, Japanese, and Chinese governments by enacting open and explicit restriction—as advocated by proponents of the Watson amendment—or whether to disguise the legislation’s intent and spare Britain’s sensibilities along with the prestige of its friends, colonies, and partners—as preferred by Edmund Barton’s Protectionist Ministry and the Colonial and Foreign Offices in London—therefore guided the discussion. Ultimately, the Barton government’s indulgence of the Natal formula was vigorously contested and the central device at the core of the White Australia Policy—the notorious literacy test—was never a foregone conclusion. This illustrates that while the White Australia Policy was a racialized act of ‘self-conscious nation building’, as John Fitzgerald argues, it was also a consciously and deliberately imperial and international act that imparted a distinctly global inflection to the Australian nation building project at its inception.4