British Subjects by Birth, Imperial Citizens by Choice: The Straits Chinese and Cultural Citizenship in Colonial Malaya

Abstract In 1897, a diplomatic incident involving a Straits Chinese trader in Amoy who was arrested by Qing authorities, despite his claims of being a British subject rather than a Chinese national, set into motion a series of public and private debates about British subjecthood and the rights that it ought to accrue to those that held said status. Drawing from contemporary accounts from the time, this paper investigates how Straits Chinese with the status of British subjects conceived of their subjecthood and understood their place in the British Empire and beyond. In particular, I make the case that Anglophile Straits Chinese understood British subjecthood as a form of what historian Daniel Gorman calls “imperial citizenship”: legal and juridical rights in exchange for loyalty to the Crown. Drawing from the wider new imperial studies scholarship which has made a compelling case for how being British went beyond legal definitions of status and incorporated a cultural identification with the symbols, language, and style of the empire, I contend that this conception of subject as citizen derived from a sense of cultural citizenship developed through the inculcation of cultural “Britishness” within sections of the community.