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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2018
The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.
1 ‘Whiteness’ is treated in this article as a culturally and legally constructed category, the specific definition of which differed in different colonial contexts. See, for example, Pattynama, P., ‘Interracial unions and the ethical policy: the representation of the everyday in Indo-European family photo albums’, in Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late Colonial Indonesia, Protschky, S. (ed.), Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2015, pp. 137–8.Google Scholar
2 In this article, inverted commas are used around photographic captions to indicate that the caption or description is from the original photograph (as in the case of this photograph). Where the caption or description has been provided by the archival institution, inverted commas are not used.
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12 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, p. 209.
13 See, for example, Batman, cook and boy, Tonkin, Indochina, circa 1895–99, Archives nationales d'outre-mer, FR ANOM 8Fi435/90; Servants of the King, Luang Prabang, Laos, 1897, Bibliothèque nationale de France, FR BNF 41419540; French Officer and his servants, Indochina, date unknown, http://nguyentl.free.fr/html/photo_francais_fr.htm, [accessed 15 March 2018].
14 F. Gouda and J. Clancy-Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, pp. 4–5; Ballantyne, T., ‘Rereading the archive and opening up the nation-state: colonial knowledge in South Asia (and beyond)’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, Burton, A. (ed.), Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, p. 113Google Scholar.
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18 The census of Australia did not include the so-called ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal population and, as a result, the substantial numbers of Aboriginal male and female servants are not accounted for this figure. Census of the Philippine Islands 1903: Volume II Population, United States Bureau of the Census, Washington, 1905, p. 865; G. H. Knibbs, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911: Part XII Occupations, pp. 1300, 1314.
19 Census of 1930 in Netherlands India, Volume VIII: Summary of the Volumes I–VII, Department for Economic Affairs, Batavia, 1936, pp. 124–5.
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23 In addition to Figures 1–18, see Private residence, probably Hong Kong Island, circa 1875, Hong Kong Museum of History P1969.218; Four Chinese staff (two seated, two standing) pose on steps outside Government House, Darwin, circa 1911–18, Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library (hereafter NTL), PH0412-0008.
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28 Census of 1930 in Netherlands India, Volume VIII, pp. 124–5.
30 Locher-Scholten, ‘So close yet so far’, p. 136.
31 An exception to this is an image of adolescent Chinese male servants seated on the floor below their British masters in Singapore. It is possible that they were positioned in this way due to their young age. European men and two Chinese houseboys, late nineteenth century, National Museum of Singapore (hereafter NMS), ACC-1996-00089.
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34 See also American couple seated in the garden area of their house in Manila, circa 1910–15, Philippines, Japan, and China Travel Album, University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Library, PHLH121; Two European men having a meal in a garden, early twentieth century, NMS, ACC-XXXX-12753.
35 See also Two men drinking beer on the verandah of a home in the Dutch East Indies with a servant in the background, circa 1910, KITLV, 178818; ‘Always drink the best’, Straits Times, 26 January 1911.
36 See also American woman and others in a car with servant boy attending, circa 1910–15, Philippines, Japan, and China Travel Album, University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Library, PHLH143; Rickshaw puller with a European passenger and attendant, late nineteenth–early twentieth century, NMS, ACC-2001-01343: A doctor and his Chinese servant at the doctor's house in Soebang, Java, circa 1907–12, KITLV, 41735.
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79 For more information on the gender and ethnic division of domestic labour in Singapore, see Chin, In Service and Servitude, p. 71.
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