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‘Wan and Wistful Little waifs’: Settler Child Welfare Work in Shanghai, c. 1890–1939
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Over the course of the last two decades imperial history has undergone a revival. Inspired by the “cultural turn” and the rise of global history, imperial historians have moved away from accounts that focus on a metropolitan center and a colonial periphery. Instead, they have advocated a decentered approach to the study of empire, which emphasizes the importance of paying close attention to the multiple networks of capital, goods, information, and people that existed within and between empires. While these networked treatments of empire have added much to our understanding of imperialism, the articles in this special issue argue that historians must remain sensitive to the specifics of the imperial experience, the limits of imperialism’s global reach, and the way in which imperialism could lead to new forms of exclusion and inequality.
What was life like for the British men, women, and children who lived in late imperial India while serving the Raj? Empire Families treats the Raj as a family affair and examines how, and why, many remained linked with India over several generations. Due to the fact that India was never meant for permanent European settlement, many families developed deep-rooted ties with India while never formally emigrating. Their lives were dominated by long periods of residence abroad punctuated by repeated travels between Britain and India: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. As a result, many Britons neither felt themselves to be rooted in India, nor felt completely at home when back in Britain. Their permanent impermanence led to the creation of distinct social realities and cultural identities. Empire Families sets out to recreate this society by looking at a series of families, their lives in India, and their travels back to Britain. Focusing for the first time on the experiences of parents and children alike, and including the Beveridge, Butler, Orwell, and Kipling families, Elizabeth Buettner uncovers the meanings of growing up in the Raj and an itinerant imperial lifestyle.
The book confronts the history of childhood and youth for the light it can shed upon the history of empire more generally. It moves beyond conventional national or imperial frameworks and uses a comparative, trans-colonial approach focusing upon situated entanglements and networked interactions linking Asian centres under colonial rule with global processes. This volume examines children and childhood as both became a key focus of policy making, literary interactions and cultural representations in the commercial and administrative centres that burgeoned in Asia under British and French rule in the age of global empires. The book shows how, as settlers, expatriates, governments, international agencies and indigenous agents mobilised childhood to critique colonialism, children emerged at the heart of debates over the future of Europe's empires. It also provides insights into the lives of children who negotiated expectations that they live up to, or inhabit, certain visions of colonial childhood.
This book explores the untold history of the removal of métis [mixed-race] children from their Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao mothers as part of a colonial plan to reproduce the French race in Vietnam. Throughout the colonial period and, on a lesser scale, the postcolonial period, French child welfare organizations conducted extensive searches of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao countryside for métis children who had been abandoned by their French fathers. Because these children had been raised without French cultural influence, authorities deemed them legally “abandoned” and separated them from their mothers—sometimes by force. The children were then placed in state-run institutions called “protection” societies, whose curriculum of re-acculturation would transform them, in the words of one French administrator, into “little Frenchmen.” The colonial state, in short, usurped the role of the family.
Diaspora transformed the urban terrain of colonial societies, creating polyglot worlds out of neighborhoods, workplaces, recreational clubs and public spheres. It was within these spaces that communities reimagined and reshaped their public identities vis-à-vis emerging government policies and perceptions from other communities. Through a century of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, this book explores how mixed-race diasporic communities survived within unequal, racialized and biased systems beyond the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. Originating from Portuguese Macau yet living outside the control of the empire, the Macanese freely associated with more than one identity and pledged allegiance to multiple communal, political and civic affiliations. They drew on colorful imaginations of the Portuguese and British empires in responding to a spectrum of changes encompassing Macau’s woes, Hong Kong’s injustice, Portugal’s political transitions, global developments in print culture and the rise of new nationalisms during the inter-war period.
By the 1920s, the schools of the Shanghai Municipal Council aimed to teach “China-born” children, whose upbringing in the International Settlement’s littoral milieu meant they were in danger of becoming deracinated and déclassé, how to be both productive Shanghailanders and imperial Britons. Whereas the history of colonial education is often considered in national, imperial, or exclusionary terms, Shanghai’s schools for foreign children instead shaped and responded to understandings of education that were multinational, local, and reluctantly inclusionary. Through an exploration of the council’s education policies, the ideologies of childhood that governed admissions decisions, and the ways in which graduates of these schools employed their education professionally and politically, this article contends that the political and demographic features of the colonial periphery shaped alternative visions of imperial Britishness that went beyond nation and empire. As this case study makes clear, discussion of these British spaces overseas should be anchored in specific social, spatial, and political conditions rather than analysis of “sentiment” alone. Colonial ideologies of childhood and the ways in which it was produced by the educational experience were central to these articulations of a cosmopolitan Britishness that could be sustained beyond the boundaries of British territory by social and cultural institutions such as schools. In Shanghai, young settlers, and especially mixed-race “Eurasian” children, who together embodied both elite fears about racial and cultural degeneration and also their hopes of cultivating a firmly rooted settler society, were at the center of debates about community identity, status, and cohesion.
This book explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.
Shaping Modern Shanghai provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854-1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history.
In 1911, Frances Storey of Paddington wrote to the Prime Minister to plead for his assistance in bringing her son Charles back to Australia. Charles had been living in China for the previous two years with relatives of his father, and now her letters to him were being returned unopened. In 1913, Beatrice Denham of Carlton met with the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs to see whether he could provide help in securing the return of her two children, Alice and Eric. They were living with her late husband's first wife in a village inland from Hong Kong, but she wanted them to come back ‘home’ to Melbourne. Both Beatrice and Frances, suffering the pain of separation from their children, turned to government authorities for help. Using records from the National Archives of Australia, this paper will follow their attempts to be reunited with their children, as they struggled with the difficulties of their cross-cultural lives. Their stories, and others like them, demonstrate that Chinese-Australian intermarriage demanded a complex negotiation between two very different ideas of family.
The history of child welfare in Australia has been constructed within the context of empire, but the writing of British child-welfare history has paid little attention to Australia, noting only its role as a (complicit) destination for the last generation of child migrants, and, within studies of settler colonialism, its program of Indigenous child removal. This article brings these historiographies into a closer relationship, arguing that developments in the way in which child-welfare history has been written in the wake of Australian inquiries into historical abuse can inform similar inquiries now being undertaken in Britain.
This article has been peer reviewed.
Book synopsis: The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it.
For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection.
Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.
The Po Leung Kuk (PLK) was a rescue institution in Hong Kong, founded by local Chinese middle and upper class men, devoted to providing shelter for destitute women and children. By producing categories of disempowered and dangerous women, the PLK actually functioned as an institutional tool for the colonial state in dealing with the contradictions between emancipation and morality. The first part of this article examines how the PLK incorporated both Chinese and western forms of charity, each of which sought to confine and reform women who deviated from social norms. The second part of this article reconsiders the nature of charity by examining the operations of the PLK. The expansion of the PLK’s functions from protection of the destitute to classifying women in society reflects an early twentieth-century shift in the discourse of sexuality from a taboo topic contained within marriage to a social problem tied to public hygiene and public order.
The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the 'domiciled community', which was made up of mixed-descent 'Eurasians' and racially unmixed 'Domiciled Europeans', both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures-predominantly philanthropic and educational by character-that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem-or as what was then called the 'Eurasian Question'-and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.
Between 1869 and 1967, government-funded British charities sent nearly 100,000 British children to start new lives in the settler empire. This pioneering study tells the story of the rise and fall of child emigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Rhodesia. In the mid-Victorian period, the book reveals, the concept of a global British race had a profound impact on the practice of charity work, the evolution of child welfare, and the experiences of poor children. During the twentieth century, however, rising nationalism in the dominions, alongside the emergence of new, psychological theories of child welfare, eroded faith in the ‘British world’ and brought child emigration into question. Combining archival sources with original oral histories, Empire's Children not only explores the powerful influence of empire on child-centered social policy, it also uncovers how the lives of ordinary children and families were forever transformed by imperial forces and settler nationalism.
This book reopens the question of consular jurisdiction and extraterritoriality in China and Japan. The book combines recent findings in Qing history on the nature of ethnicity and law with the history of the treaty ports in both China and Japan, especially Shanghai, Yokohama, and Nagasaki. Extraterritoriality was not implanted into East Asia as a ready-made product but developed in a dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions, which are best understood within the complex triangular relationship between China, Japan and the West. A close reading of treaty texts and other relevant documents suggests that a Qing institution for the adjudication for Manchu-Chinese disputes served as the model for both the International Mixed Court in Shanghai and the extraterritorial arrangements in Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in 1871. The adaptability of Qing legal procedure provided for a relatively seamless transition into the treaty port era, which would have momentous consequences for China's national sovereignty in the twentieth century. There was no parallel to this development in the Japanese case. Instead, Japanese authorities chose not to integrate consular courts and mixed courts into the indigenous legal order, and as a consequence, consular jurisdiction remained an alien body in the Japanese state, and Japanese policymakers were determined to keep it that way.
Traditionally, histories of philanthropy have adopted a nationalist focus. Influenced by new imperial history, this article seeks to move beyond national borders by placing metropolitan and colonial philanthropic practices in a single frame of analysis. This approach facilitates not only a comparison of philanthropic activities in two specific sites, Birmingham and Sydney, but a broader analysis of how philanthropic practices in both sites were shaped by ideas in constant flow between Britain, its colonies and the wider world. Evidence from various charities in Birmingham and Sydney reveal the existence of ‘layered networks’ spanning the local, national, imperial and global. As such, this article aims to extend the work of transnational/cross-border histories and geographical networks, by retaining a sense of the local.
“You will sign up again this year for the work of the Holy Childhood, won't you?”
“I can't—my parents don't want to pay.”
“But you must have some small sum. You can pay with your own money.”
“I don't have any money … I have a rabbit and I could sell it, but … ” Tears rose in the little boy's eyes.
“Come, come, I will put your name down.”
“He is so pretty! And I like him so much!” Then, after a moment of reflection, “All the same, I could certainly sell him for
the sake of the little Chinese.”1
Contract breaking off relations: Chen Zhiwan of Diantou village in the Western Mountains has a son, Yinwa, age 12, but his
family is too poor to raise the child, so he requests to send him to the Geliaogou boys' orphanage to be brought up, and to
study and learn prayers. Henceforth whether this boy lives or dies will be of no concern to Chen Zhiwan. He will not regret
and go back on his word, and he signs this contract breaking off relations as proof.
25th day of the 1st month of the 28th year of the Guangxu emperor [1902]
Signed: Chen Zhiwan
Middlemen: Eldest son-in-law Liu Rong; Scribe Wang Yongzhen2
Ruth Rogaski is assistant professor of history at Princeton University. Her areas of specialization include urban history, the history of medicine, and the history of gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. She recently completed her dissertation, "From Protecting the Body to Defending the Nation: The Emergence of Public Health in Tianjin, 1859-1953" (Yale, 1996), and is currently working on a project about martial arts, race, and the formation of masculine identity in twentieth-century China.
I would like to thank Beatrice Barlett, Peter Carroll, Sarah Coles-McElroy, Ryan Dunch, Gerald Figal, Emily Honig, and Jonathan Spence for their comments on earlier versions of this article. This work was supported by a research grant from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, and the Yale Prize Fellowship in East Asian Studies.
1. The Hall for Spreading Benevolence is also a fascinating case study because this late Qing institution still exists today, albeit in a different guise. After the Communist victory in 1949, the Hall was taken over by the Civil Affairs Bureau of the Tianjin People's government, stripped of its Confucian name, and transformed into a home for abandoned and handicapped children. Today the Tianjin Children's Welfare Institute is home to more than 150 abandoned children of both sexes, most of whom suffer some sort of mental or physical handicap. Elizabeth Sinn has studied a similar late Qing welfare institution, the Society for the Protection of Women and Children [baoliang ju, literally The Office for the Protection of Goodness], which was founded by Chinese elites in Hong Kong in 1879 and continues to operate as a private charity to the present day. Elizabeth Sinn, "Chinese Patriarchy and the Protection of Women in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong," Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (Hong Kong: Zed Books, 1994), 141-170. On the Hall for Spreading Benevolence in the development of Tianjin's public welfare infrastructure, see Ruth Rogaski, "From Protecting the Body to Defending the Nation: The Emergence of Public Health in Tianjin, 1859-1953," (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996), 77-114.
2. The complete records of the Hall for Spreading Benevolence from 1878 to 1949 are preserved in the Tianjin Municipal Archives, Tianjin, China, record group 130.
3. See, for example, Joanna Handlin Smith, "Benevolent Societies: The Reshaping of Charity During the Late Ming and Early Ch'ing," Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (1987): 309-334; Fuma Susumu, "Zenkai zento no shuppatsu" [The emergence of benevolent societies and benevolent halls], Min Shin jidai no keisei to shakai, ed. Ono Kazuko (Kyoto: Jinbun kagaku kenkyujo, 1983); and Angela Ki Che Leung, "Mingmo Qingchu minjian huodong de xingqi" [The rise of non-governmental philanthropic activities during the late Ming and early Qing], Shihuo Monthly 15, no. 7/8 (1986): 313-314.
4. The major representative of this approach is William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984) and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). See also Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986).
5. Angela Ki Che Leung, "To Chasten Society: The Development of Widow Homes in the Qing, 1773-1911," Late Imperial China 14, no. 2 (December 1993): 1-32.
6. Much of the literature on women in the Qing focuses on the rhetoric and reality surrounding the issue of widows. While remarriage after the death of a husband was the only means to survival for most widows in late Imperial China, those who refused remarriage in the face of pressures, dangers, and economic hardship could receive praise from family, community, and even official recognition from the emperor. Closer scrutiny has shown that some wealthier widows remained faithful to deceased husbands because of economic advantage, yet it is also true that many others persevered in chastity because of dogged adherence to moral standards. Some of the substantial literature on widows includes Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York: Penguin Books, 1978); T'ien...
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