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'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.

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the 'houseboy' as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as 'houseboys' in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called 'half‐caste' women who, in acknowledgment of their 'white blood', received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a 'breadwinning' wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.

This groundbreaking book brings together two key themes that have not been addressed together previously in any sustained way: domestic service and colonization. Colonization offers a rich and exciting new paradigm for analyzing the phenomenon of domestic labor by non-family workers, paid and otherwise. Colonization is used here in its broadest sense, to refer to the expropriation and exploitation of land and resources by one group over another, and encompassing imperial/extraction and settler modes of colonization, internal colonization, and present-day neo-colonialism. Contributors from diverse fields and disciplines share new and stimulating insights on the various connections between domestic employment and the processes of colonization, both past and present, in a range of original essays dealing with Indonesian, Canadian Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, African, Jamaican, Indian, Chinese, Anglo-Indian, Sri Lankan, and "white" domestic servants.