Historical scholarship on Asia has addressed various forms of mobility such as migration and the circulation of ideas during its modern era of empire and colonialism. To achieve a deeper understanding of mobility in modern Asia, this panel introduces the concept of “transimperial/transcolonial landscape” to emphasize the complexities of a region dominated by not only European (British, Portuguese, French, Dutch) but also Asian (Japanese and Chinese) imperial and colonial powers. Within this multilayered jurisdictional framework, mobility manifested itself in the physical movements of people as well as in the ways they crossed and manipulated the social, economic, technological, and legal demarcations imposed by foreign and indigenous regimes alike. Taken as a whole, the papers in this panel offers a transregional examination of how imperialism and colonialism conditioned mobility through Asia and how the imperial and colonized actors, in turn, negotiated the tangible and intangible boundaries being drawn and redrawn from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

This panel consists of four papers. Gary Luk explains how the British colonial authorities of nineteenth-century Hong Kong sought to regulate the mobility of the indigenous population by identifying and classifying the colony’s Chinese waterborne communities through ruling mechanisms such as census and registration. Comparing colonial Hong Kong with British-ruled South and Southeast Asia, he argues for the transregional power of British colonialism in conceptualizing and transforming Asian littoral societies. Helena Lopes examines the multi-directional movement of refugees, escapees, and spies, with particular attention to women, among and beyond British Hong Kong, Portuguese Macau, and French Guangzhouwan during the Second World War. She demonstrates how the neutrality of these European colonial possessions in South China due to the wartime contingencies facilitated the mobility of people across not only territorial limits but also across boundaries of class, race, and gender. Focusing on the local shipping networks in the port city of Osaka, Catherine Phipps explores how small enterprises fared under the new demands of Western trade and technology. She argues that rather than being subsumed, Osakans found new opportunities and took advantage of the shifting seascape to establish their own intra-Asian trade at a time when Japan began to emerge as an imperial power. Luther Cenci examines how diasporic Chinese mobilized and reinterpreted Qing legal culture to govern themselves under colonial rule in modern Southeast Asia. While institutions of legal pluralism gave state sanction to these activities in the Dutch East Indies, he argues that Chinese migrants had to develop new types of black-market law to contend with more direct, “liberal” forms of governance in the British Straits Settlements.