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.4

Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

The first diaspora of Portuguese subjects originating from Macau (the Macanese) to various port cities in East Asia began in the 1840s with the British colonisation of Hong Kong. By the early twentieth century, their presence in Macau and resettlement in the Shanghai International Settlement, British Hong Kong, and Kobe led to complex diversification of the “Portuguese” identity. This study examines Macanese experiences in their navigation through notions of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in East Asian territories that were neither fatherland nor homeland. The debates show not only the vulnerability of Portuguese solidarity amongst the Macanese but also unprecedented ideas of being “Portuguese” in a relatively liberal British port city. Through the analysis of two national celebrations organised in British Hong Kong that caused tension, I explore how the shaping of cosmopolitan-minded Macanese in colonial port cities complicated notions of Portuguese patriotism, which oscillated between a love for the pátria (fatherland) and a sense of responsibility to fight for a progressive and just Macanese future. Their initiatives show that, away from the political centres of Portuguese power, the Macanese negotiated their relationship to the Portuguese Empire and competed for the authority to define “Portugueseness” across the East Asian littoral.

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.

In 1897, a diplomatic incident involving a Straits Chinese trader in Amoy who was arrested by Qing authorities, despite his claims of being a British subject rather than a Chinese national, set into motion a series of public and private debates about British subjecthood and the rights that it ought to accrue to those that held said status. Drawing from contemporary accounts from the time, this paper investigates how Straits Chinese with the status of British subjects conceived of their subjecthood and understood their place in the British Empire and beyond. In particular, I make the case that Anglophile Straits Chinese understood British subjecthood as a form of what historian Daniel Gorman calls “imperial citizenship”: legal and juridical rights in exchange for loyalty to the Crown. Drawing from the wider new imperial studies scholarship which has made a compelling case for how being British went beyond legal definitions of status and incorporated a cultural identification with the symbols, language, and style of the empire, I contend that this conception of subject as citizen derived from a sense of cultural citizenship developed through the inculcation of cultural “Britishness” within sections of the community.

This special issue addresses the concealment of slavery and other forms of coerced labour. It brings together contributions from scholars working on different regions and time periods between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The starting point is the observation that in the wake of abolitionism and imperial anti-slavery rhetoric, persisting areas of slavery and coerced labour became increasingly hidden. The term “hidden economies” helps to identify those areas that have been (and often still are) less visible for a variety of reasons, be it the development of shadow economies around them, the opacity of increasingly complex global supply chains, the remoteness of the region concerned, or the marginalisation of the economic sectors involved.

Gérants—plantation managers in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue—occupied a unique position as indispensable intermediaries and agents of a thriving hidden economy. Responsible for overseeing enslaved labour and maximising plantation productivity, they operated within the tensions of absentee ownership and the structural contradictions of the colonial economy. The cases of Binet and Arnaudeau, two gérants under absentee landlords, reveal how their autonomy facilitated fraudulent practices and illicit trade. These activities, driven by economic necessity and personal ambition, expose the complex interplay of trust, delegation, and exploitation at the heart of plantation life. By bringing these hidden economies to light, the role of the gérant emerges as central to both the economic prosperity of Saint-Domingue and the broader dynamics of colonial slavery and economic history.

This essay, by revisiting the capitalism and slavery debate, explores the material relations between the Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Black slavery in the British Empire from the perspectives of critical theory and global history. After suggesting that the debate has made capital invisible as a category of historical analysis, I argue that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a process of widening trade circuits around the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific within which the abolition debate should be understood. These new global circuits of trade became a powerful material mediation between the crisis of slavery in the West Indies; the rise of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil; and the advancement of New Imperialism in the East.

Between 1847 and 1876, the textile factory Todos os Santos operated in Bahia. During these almost three decades, it was the largest textile factory in Brazil and came to employ more than four hundred workers. Until recently, many aspects of the factory’s labour force were hidden. There was a hegemonic narrative that all of these workers were free and waged individuals and that their living and working conditions were extremely progressive for the period. Meanwhile, there was a silence about the employment of enslaved people in the institution as well as a lack of in-depth analysis concerning the legally free workers. This article analyses labour at the Todos os Santos factory. On the one hand, it provides evidence on why the myth about the exclusive use of free and waged workers in the factory was formulated and the interests behind this narrative. On the other, through analysis of data from newspapers, philanthropic institutions, and legal and government documents, it reveals the profiles of the supposedly different classes of free and enslaved workers employed at Todos os Santos—men, women, and children of different colours—showing how complex, and often how similar, their living and working conditions were.

When Cuban sugar planters saw the abolitionist movement prevailing worldwide, they realised that African slavery was no longer a sustainable source of labour. They then searched the globe for substitutes, finding success in South China. The Chinese coolie trade to Cuba occurred between 1847 and 1874, during which time over 141,000 low-paid, low-skilled Chinese workers became indentured labourers. They sustained Cuban sugar production, among other vital economic activities. This paper examines how these Chinese workers contributed to Cuba’s labour transition from an enslaved to a free workforce. It argues that the substantial contributions of los colonos asiáticos, as the workers were known, went beyond their work in the sugar plantations: their minimally remunerated labour in key industries and usually unpaid work in public services made critical contributions to transforming the Spanish island’s economy and to meeting the ever-growing global demand for cash crops in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century East Africa experienced a first and last, rather than second, efflorescence of slavery. Legal abolition occurred late, between 1897 and 1922. Nevertheless, unlike in many other formerly slave-owning societies, most slave descendants here do not form distinctive, marginalized communities today. Still, they hesitate to acknowledge slave ancestry. This paper investigates the dynamics behind this ambivalent outcome. Comparing two regions in today’s Tanzania, it argues that the role of colonial-era integration into global commodity markets varied between locations, and while it contributed to the obsolescence of slavery, it was neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for ending slavery and mitigating ex-slave marginality. Rather, ex-slaves’ efforts to acquire unspoiled identities profited from a range of factors, including the chaos of conquest and the First World War, the political and economic repercussions of both these events, and later the depression, on formerly slave-owning elites, and the wide availability of new religious identities. Since a majority of ex-slaves in the region were women, much renegotiation of status occurred within households, relating to markets indirectly.