‘Half-Caste’ and Cast Aside : the Eurasian Experience in Colonial Singapore from 1919 to 1942

My thesis recovers the Eurasian experience in colonial Singapore as the community contested the pejorative category imposed upon them by the British and as they defined an identity of their own. That identity was largely realised in associational life where Eurasian men and, crucially, women congregated to assert their own sense of ‘Eurasian-ness’, though it also manifested in demands – partially realised – for inclusion in military and political institutions. Although this thesis offers chapters that survey earlier and later periods, the main focus is on the interwar years. This was the time when Eurasians in Singapore cohered as a community as never before, proliferating organisations serving their community, beginning with the Eurasian Association in 1919. These included other quasi-political groups, such as the Eurasian Women’s Association and the Eurasian Youth Movement, and the Eurasian branch of the local militia. Particular focus is given to the role played by sport as an arena for Eurasian women and men to question both the social conservatism of colonial life and the racially discriminatory order of the British Empire in Singapore. Utilising a wide range of sources including oral histories, memoirs, official records, newspapers and magazines, including Eurasian periodicals, of colonial Singapore, the thesis explores the phases of this period of effervescent community life and organisational development and reveals how it was brutally terminated when the Second World War overwhelmed Singapore. The historical path unearthed by this study was, in effect, was closed off, firstly by the Japanese Occupation and then by the rise of nationalism and decolonisation.