Introduction

Summary

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.