Experiencing British Nationality Law in Twentieth-Century China: extraterritoriality, marriage, and ‘legitimacy’ on the edges of empire

The twentieth-century codification of British nationality, beginning with the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, had a profound impact upon British settler communities on the edges of empire, where the loss or acquisition of British status determined access to passports and extraterritorial protection. Although the 1948 British Nationality Act has often been privileged as a watershed moment in the intertwined histories of national belonging and post-war migration to Britain, this study instead draws attention to the longer genealogy of this political dialogue by positioning the inter-war period as a time when the parameters of British nationality were defined and refracted through the circumstances of putative Britons overseas. Consular responses to applications for British status in the Chinese treaty ports suggest that the parameters of British legal belonging, which required more careful definition against the backdrop of extraterritorial rights and protections, were worked out in detail in jurisdictional borderlands on the edges of empire. Petitions from individual constituents grappling with an evolving statutory landscape demonstrate that nationality became increasingly meaningful in concrete ways in the lives of ordinary settlers and sojourners in the twentieth century. The formal exclusion from this legal category of specific groups of people living beyond the boundaries of British territory, particularly 'illegitimate' children, married women, and children born to British mothers, had sharply felt effects upon the mobility, personal freedoms, and family cohesion of scores of settlers.