Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific

Julia Martínez · Claire Lowrie · Frances Steel · Victoria Haskins

nov 2018 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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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.

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Julia Martínez is Associate Professor of History at University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the co-author of The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network (2016).

Clare Lowrie is Senior Lecturer in history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Masters and Servants: Cultures of the Empire in the Tropics (2016).

Frances Steel is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.1870–1914 (2011).

Victoria Haskins is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Director of the Purai Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Studies Centre. She is the author Living with the Locals: Early Europeans' Experience of Indigenous Life (2016) and Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914-1934 (2012).