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Abstract
In recent years scholars have argued that "rejuvenation" took distinctively modern forms as a specific set of surgical procedures intended to realize sexual potency and libidinal enhancement, as well as anti-aging medicine and cosmetic body projects. However, this article underlines the earlier, imperial dimensions of rejuvenation as a set of modern, state-sponsored practices taking shape outside Europe. An important turning point in the modern history of rejuvenation was a shift around 1830 in thinking about "the tropics," as scientists who identified heat as accelerating the process of aging rejected the possibility of acclimatization in hot zones. Because racial vitality supposedly diminished more quickly in the tropics, the older ideal of the grizzled, mature colonial soldier fell into decline, and rethinking the globe in racial-climatological terms made youth an essential corequisite of empire. Military commanders confronted the need to rejuvenate armies by recruiting soldiers at younger ages. Together with medical experts, they responded to fears of racial-climatological impotence by developing a range of strategies—from troop rotation to the development of hill stations—which scaled up rejuvenation to the level of entire population groups. Focusing on strategies elaborated in Asia to address this problem, this article shows how ideas about youth, time, geography, and modernity gave rise to spaces and networks designed to slow or reverse the aging process, or in other words to achieve "imperial rejuvenation" well before rejuvenation became a buzzword in late nineteenth-century Europe.

Those working within the sub-field of the modern history of childhood have rarely taken the dead child as their starting point. However, in a secularising, post-Enlightenment world, elites pursuing "progress" contemporaneously, and very publicly, reinterpreted death in relation to redefinitions of childhood as evidence of the divine. Dead children featured prominently within public modern mourning practices until, late in the nineteenth century scientific explorations of child death drove societies to occlude the presence of dead children. As infant mortality rates fell, perceptions of children as a dangerous, unstable presence, and a threat to the nation grew. New spaces emerged to receive and conceal dead children. New literary and visual cultures recast living children's relationship with death. And in the early twentieth century accidental deaths in commercial space, in reformatories, and within the home inspired powerful debates over the future of childhood and society. This article surveys recent literature, raises key themes, and introduces the articles featured in this special issue on the relatively underresearched theme of child death.

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.

Historians agree that around 1900 the concept of adolescence was reworked, valorized, and given scientific legitimacy. In Western political, pedagogical, philanthropic, and literary circles, an understanding of adolescence as a distinct and universal stage of life achieved currency. However, broad studies have glossed over local differences in provision for and representations of adolescence. By comparing representations of adolescence drawn from voluntary provision and the workplace in two cities, Nottingham (England) and Saint-Etienne (France), this article highlights the cultural relativity of this construct, the different rhythms of its institutionalization, and the motives that led local interest groups to emphasize or underplay its significance.

Chapter 1. Combating nuisance: sanitation, regulation, and the politics of property in colonial Hong Kong / Cecilia Chu -- chapter 2. "Tropicalizing" planning: sanitation, housing, and technologies of improvement in colonial Singapore, 1907-1942 / Jiat-Hwee Chang

Intro -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- 1 China Rising -- 2 No Longer Chinese? -- 3 Twenty-Three Years in Migration, 1989-2012 -- 4 Globe-Trotting Chinese Masculinity -- 5 Textual and Other Oxymorons -- 6 The Autoethnographic Impulse -- 7 The Provocation of Dim Sum -- 8 Performing Bodies, Translated Histories -- 9 Dancing in the Diaspora -- 10 Tyranny of Taste -- 11 Reconfiguring the Chinese Diaspora through the Eyes of Ethnic Minorities -- Notes -- Bibliography -- List of Contributors -- Index.