British colonial constructions of the “half-caste” category in world-historical perspective

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2024

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The word “half-caste” was coined by British imperial agents in the late eighteenth century to refer to people of “mixt European and Indian blood” in the South Asian context, specifically those who had European fathers and South Asian mothers. Despite its profound and largely harmful legacy, a history of the category “half-caste” has never been written. Taking a world-historical approach, this research traces how the phenomenon of “half-caste” was developed and diffused via British imperial and missionary networks across and beyond the British Empire from South Asia to Oceania and the Pacific, Africa, and the United Kingdom metropole in the period 1786 to 1960. I offer a discursive history of a British-made racial taxonomy of control that was used to segregate, subjugate, and sexualize mixed-race people in different parts of the globe. Using an intersectional lens whilst blending the global with the intimate, I interrogate the patterns and divergences within British policies towards mixed-race education, welfare, and status across time and place, track the gendered and socioeconomic knowledge production of the racial category “half-caste” in official and unofficial circles, and contextualize its transregional genealogy. Weaving together a tapestry of case studies from East India Company India, Aotearoa, Samoa, Hawaiʻi, Australia, Fiji, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that the “half-caste” classification was the product of a complex, cross-imperial network in which the perceived threat that mixed-race people posed to the empire’s class, race, and gender hierarchies was never strictly local in scope. Collapsing the boundaries of area studies as well as the line separating colony and metropole reveals a complex, sometimes incongruous set of British attitudes towards mixed-race people that in many ways reflected the unevenness of empire and conflicting ideologies about race and governance.

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World history, History, Africa, British Empire, Half-caste, Mixed-Race Studies, Pacific, South Asia

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185 pages

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