Who Belongs in the Empire? Culture, Race, and Malleable Identities in (semi)Colonial Port Cities, 1840–1960

Identity in nineteenth-century British imperial port cities throughout East and Southeast Asia was imprecise and fluid, shifting according to socio-political, cultural, and racial exigencies. Such port cities have historically been understood as contact zones, nodes within or on the edge of imperial networks, or else as “in-between spaces,” “bridges” between the maritime world of commerce and migration and the coastal hinterlands, across which goods, ideas, and people flowed.1 In line with recent scholastic shifts, the papers collected here revisit these paradigms by examining semi-colonial and colonial port cities connected to the British Empire through the experiences of understudied communities living and working far from their purported homelands.2 Building upon scholarly shifts away from analyses of East-meets-West encounters and towards explorations of the “multidirectionality” of interactions in colonial port cities, the case studies in this issue are grounded in the lived realities of distinct populations and their particular interactions with other port-city communities and (semi)colonial authorities.3 The transient, mobile, and interconnected nature of these colonial and semi-colonial littoral spaces allowed engagement and encounter to erode not just geopolitical borders through the forging of expansive and wide-reaching networks, but also the boundaries that governed the positionality of various ethnic and national communities.