This is the first study of its kind to provide such a broadly comparative and in-depth analysis of children and empire. Youth and Empire brings to light new research and new interpretations on two relatively neglected fields of study: the history of imperialism in East and South East Asia and, more pointedly, the influence of childhood—and children's voices—on modern empires.
By utilizing a diverse range of unpublished source materials drawn from three different continents, David M. Pomfret examines the emergence of children and childhood as a central historical force in the global history of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is unusual in its scope, extending across the two empires of Britain and France and to points of intense impact in "tropical" places where indigenous, immigrant, and foreign cultures mixed: Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. It thereby shows how childhood was crucial to definitions of race, and thus European authority, in these parts of the world. By examining the various contradictory and overlapping meanings of childhood in colonial Asia, Pomfret is able to provide new and often surprising readings of a set of problems that continue to trouble our contemporary world.
This is the first study of its kind to provide such a broadly comparative and in-depth analysis of children and empire. Youth and Empire brings to light new research and new interpretations on two relatively neglected fields of study: the history of imperialism in East and South East Asia and, more pointedly, the influence of childhood—and children's voices—on modern empires.
By utilizing a diverse range of unpublished source materials drawn from three different continents, David M. Pomfret examines the emergence of children and childhood as a central historical force in the global history of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is unusual in its scope, extending across the two empires of Britain and France and to points of intense impact in "tropical" places where indigenous, immigrant, and foreign cultures mixed: Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. It thereby shows how childhood was crucial to definitions of race, and thus European authority, in these parts of the world. By examining the various contradictory and overlapping meanings of childhood in colonial Asia, Pomfret is able to provide new and often surprising readings of a set of problems that continue to trouble our contemporary world.
Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia
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This is the first study of its kind to provide such a broadly comparative and in-depth analysis of children and empire. Youth and Empire brings to light new research and new interpretations on two relatively neglected fields of study: the history of imperialism in East and South East Asia and, more pointedly, the influence of childhood—and children's voices—on modern empires.
By utilizing a diverse range of unpublished source materials drawn from three different continents, David M. Pomfret examines the emergence of children and childhood as a central historical force in the global history of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is unusual in its scope, extending across the two empires of Britain and France and to points of intense impact in "tropical" places where indigenous, immigrant, and foreign cultures mixed: Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. It thereby shows how childhood was crucial to definitions of race, and thus European authority, in these parts of the world. By examining the various contradictory and overlapping meanings of childhood in colonial Asia, Pomfret is able to provide new and often surprising readings of a set of problems that continue to trouble our contemporary world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804796866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
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Youth and Empire
Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia
By David M. Pomfret
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9686-6
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Childhood and the Reordering of Empire
In 1905 Helena May, the wife of a British colonial administrator, reflected upon the long journey back to England from Hong Kong with the words, "We had quite a nice voyage home, in spite of the 24 children!" As May's comment suggests, empire set not only adults on the move but children too. Scholars interested in the movement of children and their families in empire have often discussed this in relation to zones of white settlement and metropolitan emigration schemes. Compared with those travelling to white settler colonies, the number of European children moving out to Hong Kong and other possessions in East and Southeast Asia remained few. Adults defined their presence in such places as, ideally, fleeting. This has led scholars to neglect such children in imperial and colonial history. But this study argues that the activities, mobilities and identities of children in parts of the world where white settlement was considered neither possible nor desirable were central to the fashioning of empire and global modernity. Youth, defined here as both a cultural category and a social group, constituted a principal point around which the relationship of empire was reconstructed in modern times.
Empires were sustained by a fundamental mobility of people, commodities, capital and information and by novel technologies of global communication. And as these technologies reduced travel times in the late nineteenth century, greater numbers of European women and children moved between metropoles and colonies. With this, the management of the domestic environment became entwined with new forms of social ordering. The presence of young people reshaped cultures of colonialism. Children's mobility transformed the bases of colonial domination. Youth and Empire examines how childhood and youth were produced and lived in empire for what this can tell us about the reordering of colonial space, aesthetics of colonial modernity, practices of racial reproduction and fantasies of control in the imperial imagination. It does so by focusing upon the East and Southeast Asian centres of Europe's two largest imperial powers, Britain and France, and the networks that connected them.
The scope of this book extends to colonial centres in Asia defined as 'Tropical' in order to show how childhood was crucial to definitions of race and thus European authority. Notions of age-related vulnerability drew childhood to the centre of a long-running battle over the viability and longevity of the European presence in these parts of the world. The period discussed is bracketed by important events: from the 1880s, when children and families moved out to East and Southeast Asian centres in larger numbers, to the onset of the Second World War, when Japanese military expansion curtailed European imperial power. During this period childhood emerged at the heart of claims for a new, morally informed governance built around the home. While the coercive technologies of gunboat and garrison were never entirely superseded, they were complemented by assertions of superiority in the field of culture focusing upon children, the family and new domestic norms.
Women and children had begun to move from metropolitan Britain to Asia in greater numbers after the East India Company lost the power to restrict immigration in 1833. Their presence grew much more rapidly after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, reducing travel times and increasing levels of safety and comfort on board oceangoing vessels. As passenger lists lengthened, European children formed an increasingly noticeable part of the societies developing in important East and Southeast Asian colonial centres. While children made up only a small proportion of the total populations of these centres (and the accuracy of these figures must remain in doubt), census data suggests they made up a substantial proportion of 'European' colonial communities. In Hong Kong, the number of children rose fivefold from 1893 to 1908. In Singapore some 499 of the 2,302 Europeans and Americans enumerated as 'residents' were under age fifteen by 1891. In 1883 the 230 children recorded as living in Saigon constituted 25 percent of the European population, while a census taken in February 1905 in Hanoi revealed that 470, or approximately 20 percent of the 2,665 French civilians were children. The young remained well represented as a proportion of the foreign societies in these centres up to the Second World War. In 1929, a census snapshot revealed 2,833 European children under age fifteen living in Saigon (with slightly more boys than girls), or 21 percent of the European population, compared with 1,744 in Hanoi (where girls predominated), or 38 percent. There were 2,160 women and 1,183 children in Singapore in 1931, and 2,557 women and 1,814 children in Hong Kong in the same year. Often children outnumbered civilian women in British and French Empire centres in Asia.
Indeed, 'European' children often constituted a larger proportion of their ethnic-racial grouping than did those defined as indigenous to Asia. This was especially noticeable in societies with 'frontier' characteristics, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where for much of the period male migrant labour predominated and women were relatively few. In Singapore, for example, children formed a larger proportion of the European population (at 22%) in 1891 than they did among the Chinese (10%) and 'Tamils and other Indians' (13%), and they were only slightly smaller as a proportion of 'Malays and other natives of the archipelago' (26%). In Hong Kong approximately 23 percent of the 'British Resident Civil Population' of 3,761 were under age fifteen in 1911, but only around 15 percent of the Chinese population were in the same range. In British colonies children remained well represented as a proportion of the European population well into the interwar era. While native children often made up much larger proportions of those living in Vietnamese-dominated centres under French rule, such as Saigon and Hanoi, young people also constituted around 30 percent of the total European population of the colony Cochinchina (present-day southern Vietnam) and the protectorate of Tonkin (now northern Vietnam) from 1922 to 1937.
The significance of young people in empire extended far beyond the mere sociological fact of their presence. The arrival of greater numbers of children in Asia triggered a reordering of empire that made childhood a focal point of projections of imperial authority. Across empires foreign communities debated not only whether children should be accommodated in the tropics, but how they might help to define the boundaries of elite identity. At points of intense interethnic contact dominated by fast-paced commercial activity, childhood and youth served claims for a moral shift, and for 'progress,' as this was contested and redefined. The arrival of children in larger numbers sparked engagements with middle-class norms of childrearing and the need for their wider dissemination. And these in turn sustained essentialist ideals of childhood and race in places where racial-national identity was constantly threatened with effacement.
Across empires ideals of childhood held out the tantalising promise of tying together societies composed of 'settlers' and 'expatriates' proclaiming diverse ethnic affiliations. Recent histories have begun to revise older views of French and British 'communities' in East and Southeast Asia as mere accomplices of imperial expansion, revealing these groupings of settlers, businessmen, officials and religious workers instead as fractured and fissiparous. Robert Bickers, Christian Henriot, Eric Jennings, J. P. Daughton and others have revealed that they were rarely committed to any overarching programme or imperial aim. In the face of such diversity, those determined to assert the nation on the 'frontier' rallied behind more aloof genres of colonialism. As they built claims for racial difference upon evidence of the impossibility of white settlement, childhood became a key resource through which racial difference could be defined. Consequently, the question of how to raise children in nonsettlement colonies linked the 'low pragmatism' of colonialism, as Bickers and Henriot have termed it, with high politics.
This helps to explain why contemporaries were so fascinated by children on the move, as the quote above suggests. Helena May adopted a mock-exasperated tone to document the presence of children at sea, but she and women like her emerged as celebrants-in-chief of children in nonsettlement colonies as they embodied new elite norms. In places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which lacked the grandeur of the imperial cities of the British Raj, childhood and youth became especially important — in different guises — as referents of cultural authority and markers of 'civilisation.' And as Japanese military expansion became a menacing norm during the interwar years, debates over rival 'civilisations' pushed children, and the ability to protect them under the British and French flags, powerfully to the fore.
In colonial contexts childhood functioned as a central interpretive device, a measure of the highest societal and national values. And it could serve by extension as an index not only of 'civility' but also of 'incivility.' For the British, the example of the massacre of women and in particular children during the Siege of Cawnpore (modern Kanpur) in 1857 served to monumentalise Indian barbarity and immaturity and to summon a sense of white racial solidarity, and maturity. For the French, too, children and childhood would prove to be central to the iconography of empire, to imperial rhetoric and to the cultural disparagement that supported claims to rule. To be sure, British and French engagements with the question of youth and empire diverged along the fault lines of quite different intellectual traditions, views of nature and imperial ideals, but across empires childhood and youth became surrogates for culture, and central themes in the justificatory rhetoric of the so-called civilising mission.
As childrearing became more closely tied up with European claims for cultural and political authority, the bodies of children, circulating between metropoles and colonies, defined colonial rhythms of social mobility and made abstractions such as imperialism and empire real. The significance of childhood and youth extended from domestic interiors to the highest levels of the colonial state where they sustained European efforts to segregate space, make populations legible, symbolise empires and define practices such as hygiene. Childhood and youth served as 'screens' onto which cultural authority, prestige and ideas about the future of imperialisms could be projected into the wider realms of colonial culture, well beyond the 'intimate' domain of the home.
HISTORIES OF CHILDREN AS HISTORIES OF EMPIRE
Whilst travelling in Asia in the early 1920s the press baron Lord Northcliffe remarked upon the sight of "little English children, wearing great pith helmets, in the care of Chinese amahs (nurses), playing under the trees." For all that groups of adults sought to segregate their own children, the empire centres studied here were places where indigenous, immigrant and foreign cultures mixed. European children's tendency to forge contacts across lines of ethnicity and to engage in hybrid relations, not only with domestic servants but also with indigenous children, was a consequence of growing up in places where national culture and its institutions were often weak. While for some, children remained emblems of disassociation and dichotomy — the key to ensuring interaction did not check inequality — for others, precisely because children's social agency (their will to act in the world) was considered distinct from that of adults it could embody possibilities for new and 'hybrid' interactions between diasporic communities. Colonial cultures of childhood were often profoundly mixed and disruptive of claims for racial homogeneity. Turning our attention to categories of age and how they were produced and lived in empire allows us to disrupt the conventional picture of 'stable' groups in colonial societies, and to highlight dynamism and mobility instead. Far from signalling a 'closing up' of European society — as scholars have often suggested — this book argues that the growing presence of children opened European communities up to new and unsettling influences.
Since the 1960s a copious literature has exposed the shifting constructedness of 'childhood' and 'youth.' An important starting point for such discussions was Philippe Ariès's seminal work, Centuries of Childhood, and much subsequent scholarship picked up on his general argument that youth was culturally constructed and performed. Studies traced shifting interpretations of childhood from the Enlightenment period in Europe. As older, Augustinian assumptions of childhood as constituting a site of 'original sin' began to be hemmed back, so too were Calvinist injunctions for the use of corporal punishment to discipline children. The Swiss-born naturalised French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work was fashionable in elite circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, promoted childhood as a site of 'innocence.' During the nineteenth century European elites reimagined childhood as predegenerate and degenerate, malleable and essential, while challenging children's economic value. Family size declined across the century as Europe industrialised. The extension of public secular education and the reduction of child labour gradually made children a charge upon, rather than benefit to, household economies. The protection of vulnerable children, through labour reform, education reform and the abolition of slavery, emerged as a cause upon which key liberal victories were won. Consequently, the category of 'the child' came to define modernness and, as Ann Pellegrini has observed, it underwrote many of European modernity's pivotal moral claims.
This study follows such work in that it does not rely upon an a priori, sociological definition of 'youth' or 'childhood' or a legalistic/biological one affixing a determined age. Instead what counts as childhood or youth here is what contemporary actors understood these categories to mean. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distinctions between childhood, adolescence and youth as discrete phases became clearer. However, slippage also often occurred. Commentators often drew children within a larger category of 'youth,' or referred to those who were almost adults as 'children.' The youth of the title is therefore drawn in quite deliberately broad terms to include younger and older children (the latter sometimes referred to as 'adolescents').
As recent scholarship has emphasised, age categories were always enmeshed with other variables — gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and race — in the reproduction of hierarchies of power. However, while acknowledging that age always acts in concert with other variables in structuring power relations and that age categories are unstable, scholars have argued that youthful subjectivities do share certain cross-cultural continuities. As anthropologists have pointed out, notwithstanding considerable cultural variance the differences understood to mark children and childhood out from adults and adulthood in Europe can also be found in other cultures. Such differences include, for example, a close association of childhood with societal reproduction, links to time, becoming and ephemerality. Children's experiences of childhood in empire were qualitatively different from those of adults on account of their age. A critical question addressed here is how categories of age could sometimes become so important that they might at times obscure other social differences — such as those of race, class, and gender — while never existing entirely independently of them. As this book shows, age categories could function as a focal point of trans-ethnic connections as well as dislocations. They delimited difference but could also sometimes function to disavow it.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1Childhood and the Reordering of Empire chapter abstractT This introductory chapter discusses the main arguments of the book and sets out the advantages of an approach focusing upon youth and age relations to the history of empire. It describes the presence of children in non-settlement colonies and why this constitutes an important focus for research. It elaborates the current state of imperial and colonial history, the history of childhood and youth and other related fields of research and sets out how this study will apply a comparative and transnational/trans-colonial perspective in a multi-sited approach to the subject matter. It sets out the rationale for the selection of the specific interconnected sites in East and South-East Asia that form the focus of this book, explaining the comparability of these key centres of British and French colonial rule in Asia, notably Hong Kong, Hanoi, Singapore and Saigon and the nature of their inter-connectedness.
2Tropical Childhoods: Health, Hygiene and Nature chapter abstract'Tropical Childhoods' argues that in the late imperial era European claims for cultural primacy came to rest firmly upon domestic norms. It shows how elite residents linked the household and the happy, healthy child within it more closely to demonstrations of social order and racial authority. At the same time this perspective clashed with interpretations of the 'tropics' as inevitably degenerative of white bodies, especially those of children. In British and French Asia children embodied the classic twentieth century problem of empire. While they could not remain, it was essential that they be there. This chapter examines variations in trans-colonial debates and different national-cultural interpretations of children and Tropical nature. It shows how experts set down different hygienic edits to manage the presence of European children in non-settlement colonies. And it shows how and why these processes were productive of profoundly gendered and qualitatively different 'colonial childhoods.'
3Cultural Contagions: Children in the Colonial Home chapter abstract'Cultural Contagions' looks at the 'intimate' space of the home and parents' and servants' attempts to micromanage children within it. This chapter argues that children in the colonial home were never merely passive recipients of notions of place and race. Instead, parents and children produced colonial childhood through dialogic interactions. Taking a set of encounters with disease and ill health, with non-European children and with domestic servants in four different contexts this chapter reveals how children 'spoke back' to the presumptions of vulnerability discussed in chapter 2. Drawing upon memoirs, autobiographies and letters it argues that children were active participants in cultures of mobility and inter-ethnic engagement. These shared practices exceeded the boundaries of meaning adults drew around them, and often confounded hopes that childhood would underpin racial-national hierarchies in empire.
4Magic Islands: Children on Display in Colonialisms' Cultures chapter abstract'Magic Islands' shows how elites forged new public rituals in which children embodied and symbolised domestic norms central to imperial authority. Children offered a focus around which desires for unity, continuity, and rootedness in places where these were perpetually threatened. This case compares the case of Christmas in the Tropics and the fashioning of colonies into 'fairylands' in British empire centres with squabbles over schoolgirls in the Saigon Opera and rival visions of French and Vietnamese children in the Hanoi exposition. It does so in order to reveal how exemplary childhoods went mobile and were compared trans-colonially. And it shows how before the First World War the ambitions of elites to showcase didactic visions of national culture in empire through childhood were profoundly nuanced by local contingencies and considerations.
5Trouble in Fairyland: Cultures of Childhood in Interwar Asia chapter abstractThe Great War compromised British and French power in Asian empire centres and exposed the dangers of structuring justifications of liberal governmentalities around the unstable child subject. 'Trouble in Fairyland' shows how. It takes the case of a child monarch to illustrate the problems the French encountered as they sought real Vietnamese children to perform ideals of the docile 'associate' that were so integral to Republican political symbolism. In the years that followed, amid a rising tide of anti-colonial nationalism elites completely transformed public displays of children and childhood in British and French colonial centres. The chapter explains how new didactic presentations and representations of ideal colonial children and childhoods emerged in response to this problem in an ultimately futile effort to absorb the tensions and contradictions of empire and to broker inter-ethnic collaboration.
6Intimate Heights: Children, Nature and Colonial Urban Planning chapter abstractGlobally, the management of space constituted a core tension of empire. Chapter 6 'Intimate Heights' shows how ideologies of childhood directly informed British and French colonial urban planning. To illustrate this it takes the case of campaigns to engineer hygienic spaces of 'nature' in the form of 'Hill' or 'Altitude' Stations in the early twentieth century. As Asian elites made more assertive demands upon space, Europeans' desires to self-segregate became interwoven with moral imperatives to safeguard children. In Hong Kong this dynamic produced the segregation of an entire neighbourhood in law. In French Indochina it transformed Dalat in the highlands of Annam into a 'paradise for children.' But in British Malaya, the result was a bitter conflict that stymied development in the heights. In each case, the chapter shows how children proved essential to the battles over space that defined empire in the twentieth century.
7Sick Traffic: 'Child Slavery' and Imperial Networks chapter abstractChapter 7 shows how evidence of unfree migrant child labourers flared repeatedly from centres under British and French colonial rule, horrifying those convinced of the need to make empire 'respectable.' Reformers raised the alarm over official inaction or European complicity in the trafficking of children into statuses not easily distinguishable from slavery. They exposed Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon and Hanoi as linked nodes in networks through which children were trafficked into unpaid migrant labour outside the family. This chapter examines the linked, trans-colonial movement of unfree children that so powerfully posed the question of European responsibility for the raising of youthful colonial subjects. It also explains why British and French engagements with this problem evolved in strikingly different directions.
8Class Reactions: Education and Colonial 'Comings of Age' chapter abstract'Class Reactions' brings to light the coruscating debates over social mobility sparked by the trajectories of children who went to school. Education had become a defining feature of childhood in Europe, and in Asia by the late nineteenth century colonial schooling also set new ideas and youthful bodies on the move. Young scholars' mobility triggered new social and political trajectories. Some linked this to anti-colonial ferment. Hence, while some Europeans urged the fulfilment of the colonial state's educative role others demanded clear limits to its incorporative policies. As these debates raged, youthful involvement in a rising tide of anti-colonialism triggered a series of shifts in education policy. Ultimately, increasingly desperate efforts to attenuate unrest not only divided societies but inadvertently drew together young people into new unities of age.
9Raising Eurasia: Childhood, Youth and the Mixed Race Question chapter abstractChapter 9 'Raising Eurasia' shows that as Europeans used didactic visions of childhood to draw boundaries more firmly around themselves this only served to make the 'problem' of the Eurasian child more visible. The ambiguous, crisis-ridden figure of the Eurasian child formed a counterpoint to ideals of the child as a symbolically coherent, discontinuous presence. Eurasian children compromised efforts to yoke dichotomous, racialised models of childhood and youth to hierarchies of power. They raised powerful questions of imperial responsibility. Age proved critical to the quite different responses to these questions elaborated in British and French-governed centres to the end of the period.
10Conclusion chapter abstractThis chapter concludes by examining the nature of the contribution made to the field. It recaps over the insights gleaned by applying the lens of age to the history of empire, and to the multi-sited approach. It provides a brief summary of the main arguments of each chapter and it elaborates a new research agenda based upon the findings of this book.