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Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2009

David M. Pomfret
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong

Extract

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2009

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41 The home government feared that the amendment would infringe the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation signed with the Japanese government on 3 April 1911, which permitted Japanese to “own or occupy houses in the same manner as native subjects.” CO129/447, minute, G. Grindle, 26 Apr. 1918.

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43 On prestige, see “The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige and Domination in the ‘Colonial Situation,’ ” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, 2 (Summer 2002), 99–100.

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51 Grevosty remarked in 1897, “We are, among all the people of the world, the nation reputed for its high moral mindedness … we must colonise by … moral influence … by moral influence I mean acts of an irreproachable rectitude.” CAOM, GG S.62 7701, report, Grevosty, 24 Sept. 1898.

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58 CO129/478, letter, Reginald E. Stubbs, 16 Sept. 1922. Stubbs worried about this group's “excessive” influence. CO129/460, letter, R. E. Stubbs, 19 Mar. 1920; CO129/462, letter, R. E. Stubbs, 29 July 1920.

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62 In 1920 Governor Sir Reginald Stubbs voiced concern that respectable Chinese, “habitually refer to this class of person as ‘the bastards.’” CO129/462, letter, R. E. Stubbs, 29 July 1920.

63 CO129/489 Robert Kotewall, Report, 24 Oct. 1925, 455–56.

64 Kotewall recruited Pun Wai-chau, “the oldest and ablest” of Chinese editors, to write propaganda articles. CO129/489, report, Robert Kotewall, 24 Oct. 1925, 432, 446, 458.

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68 The Indian-born Armenian businessman Sir Catchick Paul Chater (1846–1926) was the first to have been referred to in this way. Cheng, Irene, Clara Ho Tung: A Hong Kong Lady, Her Family and Her Times (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1976), 1Google Scholar; Carroll, John M., “Colonial Hong Kong as a Cultural-Historical Place,” Modern Asian Studies 40, 2 (2006), 534CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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73 Hong Kong Hansard, 25 July 1940, 100. Members of elite Eurasian families, notably Jean Gittins, Sir Robert Ho Tung's daughter, spent the war detained in the Japanese internment camp at Stanley. Gittins, Jean, Eastern Windows—Western Skies (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1969), 137–56Google Scholar.

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81 CAOM, GG S.63 16.771, note, Chef du Service Administratif, 24 July 1912.

82 Naturalisation was expensive to pursue and awarded only exceptionally. Guillaume, Pierre, “Les Métis en Indochine,” Annales de démographie historique (1995), 189Google Scholar; Mazet, Jacques, La Condition juridique des métis dans les possessions françaises (Paris: Editions Domat-Montchresien, 1932), 68Google Scholar.

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84 Sambuc, Albert, “Les métis franco-annamites,” Revue du Pacifique, 4–5 (1931), 270Google Scholar; Jacques Mazet suggested, “mixing with metropolitan children less faithful to prejudices of race than the colonials.” Eurasian children “would be removed from cruel ridicule.” Mazet, La Condition juridique des métis, 14; Bonifacy, Les Métis Franco-Tonkinois, 4.

85 CAOM, GG S.63 16.776, letter, Révérony, 7 Dec. 1923; CAOM, GG S.63 16.773, letter, Révérony, 8 Jan. 1923. Protection Societies sent pupils to France before the age of fourteen, “because beyond this age, the character is fixed.” Sambuc, “Les métis,” 270.

86 VNNA, RST S.72 48.373, letter, Révérony, 13 Nov. 1923; VNNA, GG T.34 S.63 5328, letter, Tissot, 17 July 1925.

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92 Ibid., 86;

93 Société de Protection des Métis d'Annam, Société de protection des métis d'Annam (Hué: Imprimerie Mirador, 1941), 68; Fondation Brévié, Jules, Fondation Brévié: Son origine, ses buts et ses moyens d'action (Saigon: Imprimerie de l'Union, 1942), 208Google Scholar.

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103 Guillaume, “Les Métis en Indochine,” 187.

104 Salaun, L'Indochine, 385; see also, Bonifacy, Les Métis Franco-Tonkinois, 9.

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109 As Lieutenant Colonel Belloc of the Foreign Legion put it, “We must care for these children from their birth and remove them as early as possible from the vulgar annamite milieu in which they generally live. From age two it is absolutely essential that they are taken from the mother; after this age it is too late.” VNNA, S.73 89, letter, Belloc, 12 Nov. 1942.

110 The census indicated there were 1,548 known Eurasians in Tonkin. VNNA, GGI S.73 88, letter, Decoux, 16 Apr. 1943.

111 VNNA, GGI S6 R2 00065, telegram, 11 May 1943.

112 VNNA, GGI S.6 471, letter, Chauvet, 5 Jan. 1945.

113 In Indochina institutions for the protection of métis became conduits for the integration of young males into the military. Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 232–34.

114 Fondation Jules Brévié, Fondation Brévié, 199. VNNA, GGI S73 00095, letter, Decoux, Dec. 1944.