Introduction

Eurasian family networks in colonial Penang were a product of interactions on a global scale. Mapping their genealogies from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries reveals migratory routes which stretched across Europe, Asia, and beyond: from Calcutta to Hong Kong, Paris to Sydney, and all the countries in between. The archive of memory within Eurasian families was built around narratives of inter-ethnic marriage and migration within, between, and beyond the empires of Southeast Asia. These histories described life trajectories lived across vast geographical and temporal spaces, and at the intersection of multiple cultural worlds. By the early twentieth century, many Eurasian families continued to live mobile lives, while others remained resolutely local. However, threads of their ancestral journeys were deeply woven into their constructions of the past and, often, their everyday lives. In challenging ethnic and cultural divisions, Eurasian family histories suggest the existence of an interstitial space within an apparently rigidly stratified colonial society in which ethnicity and cultural practices were blurred: through the public and private lives of Eurasian families, a more disordered, creole Southeast Asia comes into view.

On the surface, these histories seem to illustrate that Eurasian families lived lives of cultural syncretism, or an unproblematic and inevitable ‘cosmopolitanism’, but probing more deeply reveals that their family lives—like all others—were complex and messy, plagued by contradictions and lingering tensions, a bewildering combination of assimilation and rejection of ethnic identities and cultural practices.