Managing “White” Criminality: Disorderly Britons on the China Coast, c. 1918–1940

Disorderly white communities, which elites associated with crime, poverty, and the transgression of racial boundaries, were often perceived as a destabilising force in the colonial world. Drawing upon the life history and the 1926 fraud trial in Shanghai of a multiply marginal woman named Edith Brentnall, this article explores three key dimensions of the British consular management of colonial criminality on the China coast: concern about the mobility of marginal Europeans and Americans, the ambiguity of national status in the extraterritorial environments of the treaty ports, and a preoccupation with female “delinquency.” Using Brentnall as a common thread to explore the varied textures of “white” criminality in the treaty ports, this article contends that marginal Britons’ misbehaviour took on a heightened significance on imperial peripheries, where patchwork consular justice systems and mobile, cosmopolitan populations impeded monitoring “undesirable” behaviour. Moreover, the management of marginal mobility, which often took the form of circular journeys between East and Southeast Asian port cities, was an overarching concern in British consular excavations of white criminality. The fragmented biographies of individual “undesirables” demonstrate how marginal British subjects exploited gaps in colonial administrative and justice systems, resisted consular intrusions, and actively shaped their life stories’ written records.