David M Pomfret

Youth and Empire

Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

David M. Pomfret is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong and the author of Young People and the European City.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 416
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Dezember 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 33mm
• Gewicht: 680g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795173
• ISBN-10: 0804795177
• Artikelnr.: 42794389

Autorenporträt

David M. Pomfret is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong and the author of Young People and the European City.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Childhood and the Reordering of Empire
chapter abstract
T 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 abstract
The 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 abstract
Globally, 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 abstract
Chapter 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 abstract
Chapter 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 abstract
This 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.