Associational culture played an integral role in the reproduction of Britishness beyond the British Isles. Using the multiracial civil society in interwar Hong Kong as a case study, this chapter argues that middle-class residents there actively used civic associational culture to define and perform Britishness. It draws from five voluntary societies: the international networks of Freemasonry and the Rotary Club, as well as the League of Fellowship, the Hongkong Eugenics League, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association. In exploring the varying activities of these institutional networks, this Chapter demonstrates how Hong Kong’s colonial setting and its connections with China and other Asian port cities shaped the way urbanites in Hong Kong understood Britishness, and how these urbanites used their participation in civil society to define Britishness as a cosmopolitan belonging.

On 1 July 1997, Britain transferred its sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. But even after British withdrawal from Hong Kong, its residents’ engagements with Britishness did not cease. This chapter explores Hong Kongers’ continued engagements with Britishness in the recent two decades. Drawing from findings of previous chapters, this chapter explains why, albeit the unfairness of colonial rule, rosy impressions of British colonialism linger, and Britishness continues to mean more than just a legal status in post-1997 Hong Kong. It also discusses the contemporary relevance of historic notions of Britishness beyond Hong Kong. What constitutes Britishness is still as much a debate today as it was in colonial Hong Kong. After empire, after Brexit, as Britain searches for a new world role, Britons also search for what it means to be British. Seeing how Britishness existed in multiple, varied forms in 1910–1945 Hong Kong, a colony where whiteness was supposed to matter most, help us unravel what it means to be British today.

How did Britishness interplay with rising anti-colonialism and nationalism in twentieth-century Asia? This chapter draws on the experience of Chinese students from Hong Kong, mainland China, and British Malaya at the University of Hong Kong, to explain the transmission of Britishness to colonial subjects and its implications for anti-colonial movements. British officials and the university administration carefully crafted a curriculum and campus life that would, on one hand, educate young Chinese with Western knowledge and British values, and on the other, steer them away from rising Chinese nationalism. This left visible social effects on the students of the University. Using writings produced by officials, University staff, and students and graduates of HKU, I uncover how Britishness shaped the co-existence of various diasporic Chinese identities on campus, and its student body’s curious response to Chinese nationalism. It argues that colonial Hong education – and more widely a colonial milieu – gave birth to a non-radicalism in Hong Kong amidst rising nationalism.

This chapter focuses on the British community in pre-war Hong Kong and explores how Britishness as a non-European identity translated to a colonial setting. Drawing from laws, social practices, and press debates, this chapter explores how white Britons viewed colonial British subjects and other non-British Europeans in Hong Kong. Many white Britons clearly saw ‘British’ as a racial category, and they worked hard to maintain the arbitrary boundary of the ‘British race’. But by the 1930s the latest, hostility towards other Europeans became visible as international relations deteriorated in Europe. Amidst talks of ‘Buy British’ and ‘Britons First’ were also vocal appeals to include colonial subjects as part of being British. Findings of this chapter uncovered in the British community in 1910–45 Hong Kong not only an increasingly inclusive attitude towards British subjects of colour, but also a determination to define Britishness as not only a race, but also a national identity.

This chapter lays out the legal framework that enabled Hong Kong’s multiracial residents to engage with Britishness. It explains how the British nationality law enabled multiracial inhabitants in pre-war Hong Kong to make claims to Britishness. Using immigration cases, guidebooks, and census reports, this chapter shows when, by whom, and to what extent this inclusive legal status was recognized. Racial presumptions often prompted officials to deny people of colour access to their legal entitlements as British subjects. Nevertheless, colonial subjects in Hong Kong became increasingly aware of their British status, with some making active claims to their rights. In exploring the understanding and usage of British nationality law in 1910–45 Hong Kong, this chapter illuminates how nationality and citizenship were understood in an era when such concepts remained relatively new.

Japanese occupation of British Asia challenged British prestige at an unprecedented scale, but what the War challenged about Britishness went far beyond the myth of white supremacy. This chapter explains how the Second World War shattered the cosmopolitan, inclusive notions of Britishness that developed in pre-war Hong Kong. Even before the outbreak of war, systemic discrimination involved in the 1940 evacuation scheme made colonial subjects realize that Britishness was reduced to a ‘race’ at moments of crisis. The chapter also explored the varied wartime experience of Portuguese refugees in Macau, students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and members of the British Army Aid Group (B.A.A.G.). Increased interactions with the British state made some acutely aware of the racism they experienced under British colonialism, and eroded their identification with Britishness. The practicalities of war, then, highlighted the fragility of the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism, and put the diverse forms of Britishness articulated in pre-war Hong Kong to a severe test.

As colonial subjects acquired Britishness, how did such newly acquired identities interact with their existing identities and identifications? This chapter explores the ramifications of colonial subjects acquiring Britishness by drawing from the experience of the Hong Kong-Portuguese (more commonly termed ‘Macanese’ now). Through education and participating in public services, Portuguese Eurasians in Hong Kong took both an active and passive role in acquiring Britishness. While on one hand institutional discrimination made it too obvious to them that state authorities never fully accepted their Britishness, on the other they became too British in the eyes of other Portuguese communities in the region. Using newspapers, family papers, and oral history, this chapter examines this acculturation process, and the tensions and backlash this process engendered for the community.

The introduction sets out the framework of the book by situating Hong Kong as a site of Britishness. It introduces the major aim of the book: to challenge widely made assumptions about the primacy of ‘race’ in determining the entitlements and benefits of being ‘British’, and to call for a full consideration of how racial and cultural diversity shaped Britishness. It explains how Hong Kong, a nexus of mobilities within and across the British Empire, Chinese treaty port world, and the Asia-Pacific, offers us a uniquely important site to understand identities and belonging in the British Empire. The case of Hong Kong, this book argues, illuminates the blurred distinctions between Britons and other Europeans in colonial Asia, and the possibility for colonial subjects to claim a British subjectivity. Building on recent literature on modern Asia and global history, this book will also challenge common assumptions about race and identities in colonial Hong Kong. It will also trace how rising nationalism and the global dispersal of cosmopolitan sensibilities created tensions in the colony, offering a global history of exclusivity and cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century.