The Straits Chinese Between Empires
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Colonial Malaya, c.1890-1920
This ePaper investigates the Straits Chinese community and their positioning relative to the British Empire and the Chinese Empire around 1900. It studies their responses to and interactions with the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The Straits Chinese are framed as a cosmopolitan community in a cosmopolitan city who played an important role in the reconfiguration of imperial citizenship and the deterritorialisation of China. Through their own and others’ adoptio...
Éditeur : Graduate Institute Publications, Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement
Lieu d’édition : Geneva
Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 5 avril 2022
ISBN numérique : 978-2-940600-40-3
DOI : 10.4000/books.iheid.8895
Collection : eCahiers de l’Institut | 45
Année d’édition : 2022
This ePaper investigates the Straits Chinese community and their positioning relative to the British Empire and the Chinese Empire around 1900. It studies their responses to and interactions with the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The Straits Chinese are framed as a cosmopolitan community in a cosmopolitan city who played an important role in the reconfiguration of imperial citizenship and the deterritorialisation of China. Through their own and others’ adoption of racial discourses, they found themselves in a double bind, not quite Chinese and not quite British. This shaped their encounter with early Chinese nationalism. Consequently, this paper disrupts the teleology of decolonisation and demonstrates how the transformations taking place in the international system in the early twentieth century relegated certain communities to the margins by virtue of their ‘in-between’ position.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to the Vahabzadeh Foundation for financially supporting the publication of best works by young researchers of the Graduate Institute, giving a priority to those who have been awarded academic prizes for their master’s dissertations.
Christian Jones is a doctoral candidate at Freie Universität Berlin working on the history of race and decolonisation in Malaysia and Singapore. He previously studied history at the University of Cambridge and the Graduate Institute, Geneva. More broadly he is interested in the history of race, indigeneity and migration and their connection to the history of empires and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, he is a researcher on the SNSF-funded project ‘Patchwork Cities: Urban Ethnic Clusters in the Global South During the Age of Steam’ led by Prof. Michael Goebel.

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