Julia Martínez

Claire Lowrie

Victoria Haskins

Frances Steel

Examining the role of Asian and indigenous male servants across the Asia Pacific from the late-19th century to the 1930s, this study shows how their ubiquitous presence in these purportedly 'humble' jobs gave them a degree of cultural influence that has been largely overlooked in the literature on labour mobility in the age of empire. With case studies from British Hong Kong, Singapore, Northern Australia, Fiji and British Columbia, French Indochina, the American Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the book delves into the intimate and often conflicted relationships between European and American colonists and their servants. It explores the lives of 'houseboys', cooks and gardeners in the colonial home, considers the bell-boys and waiters in the grand colonial hotels, and follows the stewards and cabin-boys on steamships travelling across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This broad conception of service allows Colonialism and Male Domestic Service to illuminate trans-colonial or cross-border influences through the mobility of servants and their employers. This path-breaking study is an important book for students and scholars of colonialism, labour history and the Asia Pacific region.

Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific

Illustrates the centrality of domestic politics to colonial rule and the ways in which mastery over servants was a key expression of colonial power

Cultures of empire in the tropics

Masters and servants

Victoria K. Haskins

This groundbreaking book brings together two key themes that have not been addressed together previously in any sustained way: domestic service and colonization. Colonization offers a rich and exciting new paradigm for analyzing the phenomenon of domestic labor by non-family workers, paid and otherwise. Colonization is used here in its broadest sense, to refer to the expropriation and exploitation of land and resources by one group over another, and encompassing imperial/extraction and settler modes of colonization, internal colonization, and present-day neo-colonialism. Contributors from diverse fields and disciplines share new and stimulating insights on the various connections between domestic employment and the processes of colonization, both past and present, in a range of original essays dealing with Indonesian, Canadian Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, African, Jamaican, Indian, Chinese, Anglo-Indian, Sri Lankan, and 'white' domestic servants.

Claire Lowrie

About

Books

Join the club