Suchergebnisse

'Masters and Servants' explores the politics of colonial mastery and domestic servitude in the neighbouring British colonies of Singapore and Darwin. Through an exploration of master-servant relationships within British, white Australian and Chinese homes, this text illustrates the centrality of the domestic realm to the colonial project. It is a comparative history of domestic service and British colonialism in the tropics, and highlights the important role which 'houseboys' played in colonial households in the tropics and the common preference for Chinese 'houseboys' throughout Southeast Asia

AbstractChinese men working as servants in colonial Singapore were a largely unregulated group of workers and, as a result, few traces of their lives have been preserved in the colonial archive. Rare cases in which Chinese domestic workers were accused of murder compelled the colonial state to directly intervene in their lives. This article explores the experiences of Chinese migrant men who worked as domestic servants in Singapore by analysing three murders that occurred between the 1910s and the 1930s. Details of the crimes and the arrests, along with the processes of conviction and sentencing, were reported in detail in the local newspapers. In addition, testimonies of the accused and of witnesses were preserved in Coroner's Court records. This rich criminal archive is used to shed light upon aspects of domestic servants' lives that would otherwise remain obscure.

AbstractThe archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian 'houseboys'. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of 'houseboys' worked as a 'visual culture' of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.

Abstract
This article explores the emergence of cocktail culture in interwar Singapore. Mixed alcoholic drinks were consumed by British men in Singapore from at least the 1910s, including the famous "Singapore Sling." However, it was not until the 1920s that cocktails became the drink of choice for elite men and women from Singapore's Chinese, British, and Eurasian communities. The consumption of American popular culture and exchange with American colonists in the Philippines helped the cocktail to become a symbol of tropical modernity. At the same time, the possibilities of home entertaining were transformed by the increasing availability of American-made domestic refrigerators in Singapore from the mid-1920s. Multiethnic elites, accustomed to frequenting bars and cafés to enjoy cocktails, began to host their own cocktail parties with the help of their Chinese servants. The interwar cocktail party offered the wealthy a means to display conspicuous consumption and cosmopolitan modernity. They did so in a way that unsettled but did not overturn colonial hierarchies based on gender, race, and class.

Abstract
Imperial and global histories of commodity and food trades predominantly emphasize a South-to-North orientation. This emphasis has tended to obscure lateral networks between colonies and smaller-scale geographies of exchange, particularly across the tropics. The five articles in this special issue address different ways in which food production, trade, and consumption evolved under colonial influence across Asia, Australia, and the Pacific, and variously through transcolonial and trans-imperial connections. This introduction briefly surveys the historiography, summarizes the articles' connecting themes, and outlines the new angles of vision they offer into histories of commodities and colonial modernity.