British Colonialism and Indigenous Mobility: Chinese Waterborne Communities in the Colonial Archives of 19th-Century Hong Kong

This paper uses the case of Hong Kong to illustrate the transregional power of British colonialism in conceptualizing and transforming Asian littoral societies. It shows how a focus on littoral fringes—watery zones adjoining the land—sheds new lights on the relationship between the British colonizers and Chinese society and features of British colonial rule in early colonial Hong Kong. Examining censuses, population and watercraft registrations, administrative reports, and other writings by officials, the project demonstrates how the British authorities identified, classified, and described the Chinese people living afloat and the Chinese ships and boats of various types in the colony of Hong Kong. Focusing on the period from the beginning of British rule in 1841 to the eve of the lease of the New Territories in 1898, it charts the formation in the nineteenth-century colonial archive of a simplified yet increasingly well-categorized version of Chinese littoral society. Such categorization efforts exemplify the intention and ability of British colonial power to observe, record, and, in so doing, regulate and limit the mobility of the indigenous population. In a comparative perspective, this paper links the experience of colonial Hong Kong with other British possessions in South and Southeast Asia by looking at the colonizers’ efforts to construct and conquer indigenous societies through a variety of “modalities” such as the census and registration operations.