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Colonialism and Male Domestic
Service across the Asia Pacific
Colonialism and Male Domestic
Service across the Asia Pacific

Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel

and Victoria Haskins
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins, 2019

Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins have asserted
their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified
as Authors of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an

extension of this copyright page.

Cover image: Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an object related to
their job, Singapore, circa 1900. (© Leiden University Library, KITLV29190)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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 Contents

List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements x
Note on Authorship xii
List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1
1 Creating the Houseboy: Early Asian Influences on European
Cultures of Domestic Service 25
2 Indigenous Houseboys and Asian Ideals in Darwin and Suva 47
3 Intercultural Influences on American Domesticity in the Philippines 77
4 Colonial Patriarchy and Representations of Masculinity in
Photographs of Domestic Workers 103
5 Steamship Stewards: Encountering Asia on the High Seas 137
6 From India to Fiji: Cultures of Service in the Grand Hotel 169
7 Labour and Political Activism by Chinese and Vietnamese Male
Domestic Workers 195
Conclusion 219

Bibliography 225
Index 253
 Illustrations

Figures

0.1 Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an

object related to their job, Singapore, c. 1900. University of Leiden,
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean
Studies, 29190. 11
0.2 Native house staff employed by H. W. Dalfsen in Bandung, c. 1915,
The Netherlands East Indies. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands
Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 32825. 13
0.3 The Chinese servants of Government House, Victoria. Two
cooks holding dead game birds, and one servant holding an iron,
c. 1866–70. Photographer: Frederick Dally, courtesy of the Royal
BC Museum and Archives, D-09468. 15
1.1 Portrait of John Wombwell with an Indian servant, artist unknown,
India, c. 1790. Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris. 32
1.2 ‘A VOC Senior Merchant and His Wife’, Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1641.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, SK-A-2350. 33
2.1 ‘Sam on eastern terrace – the piazza at Government House,
Darwin’, 1938. Personal photographs of the Hon. C. L. A. Abbott
during his term as Administrator of the Northern Territory.
National Archives of Australia, M10, 11394836. 59
2.2 ‘George Cole and houseboy Jacky outside an Aboriginal dwelling’,
Darwin, c. 1930. George Hulme Cole Collection, Northern
Territory Library, PH0570/0146. 66
2.3 ‘Family group and ’Enry at our first station in Fiji’ from Thomas
Reginald St Johnston. South Sea Reminiscences, T. F. Unwin,
London, 1922. 68
3.1 ‘ “Boys” at 127 Caffe Marina, Ermita, Manila, P.I. From right to
left: Choy (cook), Andres, Col. Brainard’s boy, Juan, Col. Bellinger’s
boy, Bruno, Maj. Rassiter’s boy, Felix, Col. Richard’s boy’, 1910. D. L.
Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National Archives, College
Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3C, 179. 81
 Illustrations vii

3.2 Colonel Brainard with Coachman and Footman, Manila, c. 1898–9.

Prints of D. L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National
Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3A, 146. 82
4.1 A Chinese male servant in the household of Lister Smith with
Smith’s son William, Chilliwack, 1896. Chilliwack Museum and
Archives, P Coll 120 No. 46. 109
4.2 A male servant with a European child, Singapore, 1930. J. A.
Bennett Collection, courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore,
19980005147-005. 111
4.3 Billy Shepherd holding hand of Margaret Gilruth; ready to go
on their daily horse-ride, Darwin, c. 1911–12. Jean A. Austin
Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0190/0021. 115
4.4 A young servant poses beside Margaret Gilruth seated in a window
opening of Government House, Darwin, c. 1912. Jean A. Austin
Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0412/0011. 116
4.5 An American woman and a servant outside house, c. 1910–15.
Philippines, Japan, and China Travel Album, Special Collections
Library, University of Michigan, PHLH074. 117
4.6 A Dutch family having tea in a living-room, Netherlands East
Indies, 1921. Dudok de Wit, L. C. Collection, University of Leiden,
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean
Studies, 116969. 118
4.7 ‘303 – Chinese boy serving his master’, Singapore, c. 1890. Courtesy
of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board,
ACC-XXXX-12898. 120
4.8 C. A. Nieuwenhuijsen with a servant, in Manado, Netherlands East
Indies, 1913. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of
Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 118685. 122
4.9 European men and two Chinese houseboys, late nineteenth
century. Courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, ACC-
1996-00089. 124
4.10 ‘The stone house (Mount Kellet, next to the Peak), H. P. Smith with
house servants and chair coolies, 1924.’ Hong Kong Public Records
Office, Government Records Service, PH003517. 126
4.11 ‘Chinese staff employed by Dr. Gilruth. No. 1, Ah Chow (sitting),
Ah Bong (table boy), Dobie Ah How and Houseboy’, Government
House, Darwin, c. 1912–19. Gilruth Collection, Northern Territory
Library, PH0190/0033. 127
viii Illustrations

4.12 A mixed group of six domestic staff pose outside Government

House, Darwin, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1911–18. Jean
A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0412-0020. 129
4.13 ‘Aniceto + Felix placed this on the table in kitchen for my notice.
They were tickled to death. Felix, my cook, at right. Aniceto,
my house boy, on left. Pedro, in middle. He used to be Mrs.
McDonald’s house boy + was the one who told me that one day
that I could go home. Funny. Keep this for me’, Philippines, c. 1910.
Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, Special Collections
Library, University of Michigan, PHLH129. 130
4.14 ‘Felix – cook. Doesn’t he hold his hands gracefully. Veranda
upstairs. Aniceto Sico – Houseboy. He says he looks like a
chinaman’, Philippines, c. 1910–15. Philippines, Japan and China
Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan,
PHLH126. 131
4.15 ‘Chef ’, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1908. Phyllis Moyle
Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0112/0092. 134
4.16 Kitchen staff of the Bamfield Cable Station, British Columbia, 1903.
Royal BC Museum and Archives, G-06951. 135
5.1 Route map, from Eastern and Australian Steamship Company’s
Illustrated Handbook to the East, E&A, Sydney, 1904. National
Library of Australia. 145
5.2 The Advocate, 23 May 1904, 72. Enclosed with Indian and Chinese
discrimination 1897–1963, Herbert Otto Roth Papers, Alexander
Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, 94-106-14/24. 158
5.3 ‘Ejima, Tsunenosuke – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration
Certificate No 13077, issued 30 October 1921 at Thursday Island.’
National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6300171. 160
5.4 ‘Kurokawa, Kamezo – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration
Certificate No 2049, issued 4 March 1918 at Thursday Island.’
National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6323500. 161
5.5 ‘Matsushima, Kumazo – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration
Certificate No 4186, issued 14 February 1919 at Thursday Island.’
National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6317233. 161
5.6 Promotional images of dining-room stewards, c. 1951. P&O
Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich,
reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection. www.
poheritage.com/ 162
 Illustrations ix

5.7 Promotional images of dining-room stewards on board the Chusan,

c. 1950–54. P&O Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich, reproduced by kind permission of P&O
Heritage Collection. 163
5.8 Members of the Canberra’s Goanese crew lighting candles at their
specially created altar in the Goanese mess, 1965. P&O Heritage
Collection, PH-07392-00. 166
6.1 ‘Catering for island tourists: The Grand Pacific Hotel at Suva, Fiji,
recently opened for business’, Auckland Weekly News, 11 June 1914.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-
19140611-48-6. 173
6.2 ‘A Verandah, Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva, Fiji.’ Archives NZ Galleries,
USSCo Pocketbook (1927), R22848498, folio 39. 180
6.3 ‘Guests taking tea, 6 June 1950’, Whites Aviation Ltd. Alexander
Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, WA-24784-F. 190
7.1 ‘301 – Chinese boy on duty’, Lambert and Co, Singapore, c. 1900.
University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast
Asian and Caribbean Studies, 50196. 200
7.2 ‘House-coolie, boy, cook and no. 2’, Hong Kong, from Oliver G.
Ready, Life and Sport in China, London: Chapman Hall, 1904. 201
7.3 ‘Batman, cook and boy’, Tonkin, Indochina, c. 1895–9. Archives
nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, FR ANOM 8
Fi435/90. 201

Map

0.1 Asia Pacific. Map created by Ian Faulkner. 8

Table

4.1 Numbers of servants and proportion of male servants for British

Columbia, the Philippines, the Northern Territory of Australia,
Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands East Indies. 107
 Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Australian

Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Project grant (DP110100490, 2011–13),
without which we would not have been able to embark on this broad-ranging
transnational study of male domestic service. In 2010 we were also supported
by the University of Wollongong’s University Research Committee grant that
allowed Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie to undertake a pilot study of domestic
service in the American Philippines.
This project grew out of a conference panel on domestic service given at the
2007 International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS5) in Kuala Lumpur.
That panel included Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie and Christine De Matos from
the University of Wollongong, and Victoria Haskins from the University of
Newcastle. It was funded by the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation
Studies (CAPSTRANS) and encouraged by Lenore Lyons, then director of
CAPSTRANS. The ICAS5 panel set out to explore Victoria Haskins’ concept
of ‘transcolonial constructions’ of the domestic worker in Australian and
Asian geographical contexts. Claire Lowrie went on to develop this idea in her
2009 doctoral thesis on domestic service in Darwin and Singapore, which was
published by Manchester University Press in 2016. In 2010 our colleague at the
University of Wollongong, Frances Steel, joined us on the ARC grant application.
Her book Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism,
c. 1870–1914 (2011) approached the study of trans-colonialism with an emphasis
on the sea, bringing a Pacific Ocean dimension to our geographical framing.
Frances also encouraged us to expand our study of domestic service beyond the
colonial home, to include hotel staff and stewards on steamships.
Heartfelt thanks to our colleagues at the University of Wollongong,
University of Newcastle (Australia) and University of Sydney for their support.
Thanks also to the members of the Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies at the
University of Wollongong for their thoughtful comments on draft chapters, and
to G. Balachandran (Graduate Institute, Geneva) for his critical feedback on the
project. Thank you also to Claire Wright at the University of Wollongong for
research assistance during the editing process.
 Acknowledgements xi

Thank you to those who generously invited us to present our findings,

especially to Nitin Varma and Nitin Sinha, for the Servants Past Roundtable,
European Social Science History conference (Belfast, 2018); Penny Russell, New
Histories of Class Symposium (Harvard University, 2017); Marilyn Lake, Writing
the Pacific, Rewriting Australia (University of Melbourne, 2014); Shirleene
Robinson, History on a Tuesday seminar (University of Macquarie, 2014);
and Margaret Jolly, Laureate Project Reading and Writing Group (Australian
National University, 2014).
We also wish to thank the organizers and audiences for helping us to develop
our ideas at the following conferences: the International Convention of Asian
Scholars (2011 and 2013); the Australian Historical Association conferences
(2011 and 2013); Dragon Tails: Third Australasian Conference on Overseas
Chinese History and Heritage (2013); Sea Stories: Maritime Landscapes, Cultures
and Histories (University of Sydney, 2013); Race, Mobility and Imperial Networks
(RMIT University, 2015); the International Committee of Historical Sciences
(Jinan, 2015); the American Historical Association conference (Atlanta, 2016);
and the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas conference
(Richmond, B.C., 2016).
Our access to essential sources was facilitated by thirty-nine archives, museums
and libraries located in eleven different countries. We are sincerely grateful for
the assistance provided by the staff of these cultural repositories, which are
listed in full in the bibliography. For allowing us to reproduce images from their
collections, particular thanks goes to the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives
NZ Galleries, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Auckland Libraries, Chilliwack
Museum and Archives, Fondation Custodia, Hong Kong Public Records Office,
P&O Heritage Collection, US National Archives, National Archives of Australia,
National Archives of Singapore, National Library of Australia, National Museum
of Singapore, Northern Territory Library, Rijksmuseum, Royal BC Museum and
Archives, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
(University of Leiden), and Special Collections Library (University of Michigan).
We would like to thank the excellent team at Bloomsbury Academic for
making the publication process so enjoyable, particularly our enthusiastic editor
Emma Goode. Sincere thanks also to our families and friends whose support has
enabled us to complete this project.
 Note on Authorship

This book is co-authored by four authors, the result of a collaborative process

of research and writing. Nevertheless, individual authors took the lead on
particular chapters: Martínez and Haskins, Chapter 1; Haskins and Steel,
Chapter 2; Martínez and Lowrie, Chapter 3; Lowrie, Chapter 4; Steel, Chapter 5;
Steel and Martínez, Chapter 6; and Lowrie and Martínez, Chapter 7.
 Abbreviations

ANOM Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France

ASNCo. Australasian Steam Navigation Company

ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

BANC Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

BCA British Columbia Archives, Victoria, Canada

BL British Library, London

CL, NMM Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

CPR Canadian Pacific Railway Company

CSR Colonial Sugar Refinery Company

E&A Eastern and Australian Steamship Company

HC Hocken Collections, University of Otago, New Zealand

HKGRO Hong Kong Government Reports Online (1842–1941), Hong

Kong University

HKMH Hong Kong Museum of History

HL Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

KITLV Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean

Studies, University of Leiden, Netherlands

K.M.T. Kuomintang

MD, LOC Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

NA National Archives, College Park, MD

NAA National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, Canberra and Darwin

NAF National Archives of Fiji, Suva

xiv Abbreviations

NAS National Archives of Singapore

NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra, Australia

NMS National Museum of Singapore

NTAS Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin, Australia

NTL Northern Territory Library, Darwin, Australia

NYK Nippon Yusen Kaisha (Nippon Yusen Company)

P&O Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company

PMB Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University,

Australia

PRM Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, England

PRO Public Records Office, Kew, London

SCL Special Collection Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

SFPL San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco History Center, San
Francisco, CA

SLSA State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

TKK Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha (Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Company)

USSCo. Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand

VOC Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)

WCA Wellington City Archives, New Zealand

 Introduction

Across the tropical colonies of the Asia Pacific region a culture of male domestic
service evolved from about the 1880s, during an era of intensified (or ‘high’)
imperialism. Indigenous and immigrant Asian men formed a significant
component of the domestic service workforce, widely employed in private homes,
hotels and on board steamships. The predominance of male servants in tropical
colonies, including in South Asia and Africa, contrasted with employment
practices in the temperate settler colonies, and in the British, European and
American metropoles, where there was a preference for, and access to, local-
born and immigrant women.
Tracing the mobility of Asian workers across Asia and the Pacific, from China
and India, southwards throughout Southeast Asia, Australia and Fiji, and across
the Pacific to North America, we find ‘houseboys’ emerging as iconic figures
throughout the colonial tropics. Both immigrant and indigenous male servants
exerted a subtle, but significant, cultural influence, as they came to be closely
associated with colonial success, luxury and prestige. They spoke to colonists’
common desire for physical comfort and served as a constant reminder to
employers of their own personal stake in the colonial project. Acquiring a
household of efficient servants was viewed as tangible proof of European
mastery, a means by which employers sought ‘to romanticize the inequality and
celebrate the consequences of conquest’.1 Yet male servants were also a visible
presence in labour and political movements that soon challenged and subverted
colonial rule. This book explores these relationships and their transformations
to offer another perspective on colonial labour relations.
Historians of Asian male labour mobility under colonial rule have been, until
recent decades, more concerned with mass migrations of indentured workers
for plantations and mines, attention commensurate with the sheer numbers

1
Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 59, 75.
2 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

involved and their global reach.2 Yet from the late nineteenth century, men were
also visibly at work in European homes, and in hotels, clubs and steamships, all
sites with greater intimacy and potential for transgression than the plantation
or mine. It is these men who have become the subject of a rich, if fragmented,
literature in the fields of cultural labour history and new imperial history.
Until recently, most studies of male domestic service have focused on
individual colonies. This has led to many fine-grained analyses of daily
interactions in specific locales, but at the expense of the mobility of ideas and
practices between colonial sites and across empires. We argue that apparently
disparate sites came to share strikingly similar cultures of domestic service. The
first major trans-colonial history of domestic service to make this observation –
Claire Lowrie’s Masters and Servants – compares and connects the colonies of
Singapore and the Northern Territory of Australia, demonstrating how Chinese
men, in particular, were sought after by colonists in both locales.3 Julia Martínez
and Claire Lowrie recognized a similar preference for Chinese male domestic
workers in the American Philippines.4 Our book builds on this scholarship,
engaging a broader spatial arena so as to address at greater length questions of
circulation, interaction and comparison.
We explore how ideas about domestic service moved between individual
European metropoles and their colonies in Asia and the Pacific, as well as between
different colonies and empires. Cultural understandings of domestic servitude
were readily passed between mobile employers. Master–servant relations were
a topic of endless fascination for newspapers, advice manuals and memoirs.
Employers’ stories about their domestic successes (and failures) circulated
among audiences outside the colony, shaping the ideas of future colonists as well
as those of metropolitan law-makers. The peculiarities of individual colonies
were thus subject to regional discussion in these trans-local interactions.
Employers, travellers and professional photographers also produced images of
domestic workers, including paintings, photographs and postcards. Such images
were displayed and traded as objects of fascination, as a means of advertising

2
There is insufficient space to fully explore this expansive literature, but for an overview of the
indenture phenomenon, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor, In the Age of Imperialism, 1834–
1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the
British Empire 1834–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
3
Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2016).
4
Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The
Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines’, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 4
(2012): 511–36.
 Introduction 3

colonial success and even as propaganda designed to celebrate the supposed ease
of European mastery.
At the same time new cultural patterns were gradually incorporated, as
colonists and immigrant workers encountered local indigenous forms of
servitude. Immigrant servants also brought their own service cultures with
them, adding to this cultural mix. Colonial homes, hotels and steamships
were thus ‘contact zones’ where the domestic was intimately connected to
the international.5 In this book, we juxtapose and connect, or where possible
compare, these contact zones in the colonial Asia Pacific so as to present a
history of male domestic service in the region and its significance for colonial
histories in general.

Literatures and geographies of male domestic service

The historical literature on male domestic service remains small by comparison

with the rich literature on women in colonial domestic service, pioneered
by historians such as Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Ann Laura Stoler for the
Netherlands East Indies, Nupur Chaudhuri for India, and Jackie Huggins,
Victoria Haskins and Barry Higman for Australia.6 This may, in part, be
attributed to the rise of women’s history and its emphasis on making visible
the lives of women previously hidden from view. It is also a consequence of
the subsequent interest in intimacies – often associated not just with gender
relations but specifically with women’s lives and concerns – in new imperial
histories of colonial power relations. Another factor relates to the contemporary

5
Cf. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity,
1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial
Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
6
Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric of
Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900–1942’, in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in
French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1998), 131–53; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and
the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 8; Nupur Chaudhuri,
‘Memsahibs and Their Servants in Nineteenth-Century India’, Women’s History Review 3, no. 4
(1994): 549–62; Jackie Huggins, ‘White Aprons, Black Hands: Aboriginal Women Domestic Servants
in Queensland’, Labour History 69 (1995): 188–95; ‘ “Firing On in the Mind”: Aboriginal Women
Domestic Servants in the Inter-War Years’, Hecate 13–14 (1987–8): 5–23; Victoria Haskins, ‘On the
Doorstep: Aboriginal Domestic Service as a Contact Zone’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34
(2001): 13–25; B. W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press,
2002). See also Paula Hamilton, ‘Domestic Dilemmas: Representations of Servants and Employers in
the Popular Press’, in Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, ed. Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley
and Susan Sheridan (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993); Katie Pickles, ‘Empire, Settlement and
Single British Women as New Zealand Domestic Servants during the 1920s’, New Zealand Journal of
History 35, no. 1 (2001): 22–44.
4 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

gender division of paid domestic work. At present nearly 80 per cent of domestic
workers globally are women. Where men are employed it is usually as gardeners,
drivers and butlers.7 In the introduction to their edited global history of domestic
work, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Silke Neunsinger and Dirk Hoerder noted
that the current dominance of women workers had led them to focus almost
exclusively on women.8 However, as Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie have
noted, while the feminization of domestic work commenced in the eighteenth
century in Britain and Europe, in the formerly colonized world it was a more
recent, twentieth-century development.9 Indeed, taking a global view, men
continue to work in domestic service in some countries, with evidence also of
the ‘re-masculinization’ of such work.10
This book provides an alternative historical context for the recent feminization
of domestic work across Asia and the Pacific by exploring the broad colonial
preference for male servants which continued well into the 1930s. To some
extent this preference may be said to have expressed a particular idea of colonial
domination – of white superiority over supposedly backward, non-western
peoples embodied in the figure of the dominated male.11 Yet, as we will show, the
culture of male servitude was shaped by the expectations, material conditions
and personal choices not only of the colonizing classes but of the workers
themselves.
The historical scholarship on colonial male domestic service is well established
for Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific and northern Australia.
Monographs by Karen Hansen on Zambia and Janet Bujra on Tanzania, and
more recent work by Jeremy Martens, Prinisha Badassay and Robyn Pariser,
among others, focus on experiences of men as domestic servants in colonial

7
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Silke Neunsinger and Dirk Hoerder, ‘Domestic Workers of the
World: Histories of Domestic Work as Global Labor History’, in Towards a Global History of Domestic
and Caregiving Workers, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Silke Neunsinger
(Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1.
8
Ibid.
9
Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing Domestic Service: Introducing a
New Agenda’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed.
Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–18, 4, 6–7.
10
B. W. Higman, ‘An Historical Perspective: Colonial Continuities in the Global Geography of
Domestic Service’, in Colonization and Domestic Service, 19–37; Raka Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity,
and Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century’, Feminist Studies 26,
no. 3 (2000): 691–718; Raffaella Sarti and Francesca Scrinzi, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Men
in a Woman’s Job, Male Domestic Workers, International Migration and the Globalization of Care’,
Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 4–15; Majella Kilkey, Diane Perrons and Ania Plomien,
Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: Masculinities, Male Labour and Fathering in the UK and USA
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
11
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
 Introduction 5

Africa.12 Hansen underscored the role of colonial labouring hierarchies in

normalizing African racial subordination.13 In British Tanganyika, employment
in domestic service was potentially prestigious for African men but also
economically restrictive.14 This literature also reveals synergies between African
and Asian colonial practices.
In this book, we both combine a concern with local spaces of intimate
interdependencies (so pronounced in the work on Africa) and attend to
exchanges and circulation of people, ideas and practices, thereby offering
another perspective on the ‘shared preoccupations’ and ‘similar patterns in the
maintenance of European colonial order’.15 In emphasizing the trans-imperial
transmissions of colonial knowledge, Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper
challenged historians to look to ‘other routes’ beyond the ‘metropole–colony
axis’. Questions regarding how ‘knowledge of individual empires’ became
‘collective imperial knowledge . . . shared among colonizing powers’ continue
to remain relevant two decades later.16 As Simon Potter and Jonathan Saha have
recently observed, imperial historians ‘have not explored links between empires
as thoroughly as those within empires’.17
Our exploration of male domestic service began from within the British
Empire, but has extended to look beyond it to French, Dutch and American

12
Karen Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1989); Janet Bujra, Serving Class: Masculinity and the Feminisation of Domestic
Service in Tanzania (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Jeremy Martens, ‘Settler
Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 379–400; Prinisha Badassay, ‘ “And My Blood Became Hot!”
Crimes of Passion, Crimes of Reason: An Analysis of the Crimes of Murder and Physical Assault
against Masters and Mistresses by Their Indian Domestic Servants, Natal, 1880–1920’, Journal of
Natal and Zulu History 23 (2005): 64–93; Robyn Pariser, ‘The Servant Problem: African Servants
the Making of European Domesticity in Tanganyika’, in Towards a Global History of Domestic and
Caregiving Workers, 271–95; Robyn Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance in Domestic
Service in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, International Labor and Working-Class History 88
(2015): 109–29.
13
Hansen, Distant Companions, 30.
14
Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance’, 109.
15
Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial
Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13. See also Tony Ballantyne
and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Moving
Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and
Antoinette Burton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 1–28.
16
Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research
Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and
Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13, 28.
17
Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories
of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2015), https://muse.jhu.edu/
article/577738. See, however, Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski, eds, Imperial Co-operation and
Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also Paul A. Kramer,
‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States
Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–53.
6 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

colonies and their mutual relations of emulation, competition and rivalry. In

keeping with more recent research, our focus is not so much on European
metropoles as ‘imperial centres’.18 Instead we are interested in tracing horizontal
inter-colonial connections originating in and mediated through influential
regional hubs such as Calcutta and Hong Kong where mobile workers were
typically recruited.19 These connections were made more complex by recruitment
from mainland China, a place beyond empire but deeply enmeshed in this
regional transfer.
Our geographical focus includes Southeast Asia, northern Australia and the
southwest Pacific where a more recent scholarship challenges the emphasis on
divisions deriving from area studies, national historiographies and typologies
of colonial difference. For instance, Philippa Levine’s comparative study of
late nineteenth-century contagious diseases legislation in India, Hong Kong,
Queensland and Straits Settlements is premised on the colonial world as ‘a
highly mobile place’, shaped, in particular, by the migration of people from
Asia in search of work.20 Historians of labour mobility, too, have been forced
to confront the cultural impact of such displacements and networks and their
role in shaping colonial transformations. As Tony Ballantyne observes, it
is only when historians move beyond ‘fixed vantage points’ that the mobility
which underwrote imperial systems, including ‘economic traffic and cultural
interdependence’, can be revealed.21
Histories attempting to bring colonies across Asia and the island Pacific
into the same analytic frame, however, remain relatively rare. As we observe
here, Australia, particularly in its northern tropical and archipelagic setting,
was a key crossroads and consequently a strategic location for a connecting
perspective.22 We also argue that an emphasis on colonial mobilities, and the

18
Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 13.
19
This kind of spatiality underpins Tony Ballantyne’s metaphor of the ‘web’. See Orientalism and
Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See also Alan Lester,
‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4 (2006): 124–
41; Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds, Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial
World (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006).
20
Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 16.
21
Tony Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, Empire, Colonisation’, History Australia 11, no. 2 (2014): 8.
22
Regina Ganter with contributions by Julia Martínez and Gary Lee, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal
Contact in North Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Julia Martínez
and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s
Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015); Marilyn Lake, ‘Colonial
Australia and the Asia Pacific Region’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford
and Stuart Macintyre (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 535–59. For the ‘inland’
reach of Indian Ocean networks, see Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in
Australia (London: Hurst, 2018).
 Introduction 7

attendant reconsideration of boundaries and scale, demands closer attention to

entanglements of Asian, European and indigenous influences.
This book is concerned with what Lisa Lowe refers to as the ‘circuits,
connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples’.23
Though colonists claimed domestic service as distinct from the ‘coolie’ trade,
these labour networks and relations were not always separate. Domestic service
was presumed to be more prestigious than general labouring roles. In this
context, the position of ‘houseboy’, which connoted intimate service within the
home, entailed a degree of trust not necessarily granted to outdoor workers such
as gardeners. In some places, however, workers were diverted from plantations
to colonial homes, and at times employers took their managerial cues from other
sites, like plantations and shipping. Exploring such interconnections may help
further extend the historiography of male servitude.
In what follows we begin with early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
colonial experiences in India and Macau, before moving to consider late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century northern Australia, Fiji, the Philippines,
Singapore and Hong Kong. We juxtapose, and at places draw comparisons,
between these colonies and Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies and British
Columbia. The private home is our key site of enquiry. However, we also study
service in the more public setting of hotels and steamships, sites equally saturated
by colonial power. This expanded framework appears more suited to the wider
world of movement and exchange that informs our conceptualization of colonial
domestic service.
Throughout our study urban space figures prominently, and especially port
towns. Port towns acted as ‘crossroads’ where goods, ideas, cultures and people
from different parts of the world mixed and mingled. These urban spaces
were marked by their cultural, social and religious heterogeneity. At the same
time, they reflected and reinforced colonial systems of political and economic
stratification and the principles of racial segregation and hierarchy on which
they were based.24 In the period of our study, the predominance of local and
immigrant men employed in service roles was especially marked in urban areas.
Women’s mobility into towns and cities in search of work was either actively
discouraged or closely monitored and highly regulated by colonial authorities

23
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21.
24
John Sydenham Furnivall, The Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1944), 446; Rhoades Murphey, ‘On the Evolution of the Port City’, in Brides of the
Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1989), 225; Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations
and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 1–3.
 8
Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

Map 0.1 Asia Pacific. Map created by Ian Faulkner.

 Introduction 9

and indigenous and immigrant communities alike. Urban space fashioned a

particular culture of masculinized domestic service, we suggest, because it offered
residents routine opportunities to compare or emulate the practices of those
around them. Domestic labour shortages, master–servant conflicts and other
related issues were prominent preoccupations in urban areas, further fostering
among colonists a sense of shared struggle with the ‘servant problem’. All the
while, immigrant and local domestic workers negotiated the dialectical forces of
cultural exchange and racial segregation on their own terms.25 Sometimes they
acted as mediators for employers struggling to navigate the cosmopolitan urban
spaces in which they dwelled.26 At other times, as we examine in this book,
they used colonial cities in ways that contested and even challenged colonial
authority.
Moreover, urban areas, and notably ports, fostered particular cultures of
colonial service as they catered for the intermittent influx of visitors according
to the schedules of the steamship lines. Institutions such as hotels and clubs
were established to provide service in ways that mirrored the private home. Like
in the port itself, in hotel bars and steamship saloons, travellers from temperate
settler colonies, tropical colonies and European metropoles rubbed shoulders
with one another and with citizens of the ‘extra imperial’ world. Many came
with high expectations and tended to judge the service they received based on
their own domestic experience. For those who had never experienced personal
service by men, encounters with Asian bellboys and waiters in grand hotels
and male stewards on steamships provided a novel taste of an orientalized
service culture. Impressions recorded in diaries and letters suggest that such
experiences in these temporary dwellings were both unsettling and stimulated
new aspirations.
Our sources reflect servants’ primary concern with their life outside the
colonial home. In the evenings some servants went back home to their own
families. Others slipped out to nightly entertainments and in search of more
intimate relationships. Bonds of friendship and a sense of collective identity were
often fostered in public parks and on streets where servants gathered after work,

25
Domestic workers of the current era also contend with (and contest) the patriarchal and racialized
divisions of post-colonial urban spaces. For a discussion of Singapore, see Brenda S. A. Yeoh and
Shirlena Huang, ‘Negotiating Public Space: Strategies and Styles of Migrant Female Domestic
Workers in Singapore’, Urban Studies 35, no. 3 (1998): 583.
26
See, for example, Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870: All the Servants in Prison and
Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire,
1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), 366.
10 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

again pointing to the ways in which urban space fostered particular cultures
of labour and sociability, as well as routine opportunities for the exchange of
ideas and knowledge. Colonial employers rarely acknowledged their workers’
emotional and social lives, however, and were prone to imagine that they lived
only to serve them.
Domestic service relationships offer historians a window on the successes
and failures of colonial projects. For domestic workers, having intimate access to
colonial employers gave them new avenues to express social as well as political
protest. Domination could be a fragile fantasy, and subservience a façade easily
cracked by assertions of independence.27 The increased presence of women in
domestic service from the 1930s may well have reflected the decline of colonial
power and anxieties about colonial authority over non-European men. In their
ethnographic work on domestic service in contemporary Kolkata, Seemin
Qayum and Raka Ray conceive of an evolving ‘culture of servitude’ in which
‘social relations of domination/subordination, dependency, and inequality are
normalized and permeate both the domestic and public spheres’.28 Our research
would also suggest that such relations were unstable, and domestic workers
historically found ways to push back against colonial assumptions of inequality.
All the colonial sites considered in this book were either dominated by
men or they made up a significant proportion of the domestic workforce.
Race and ethnicity varied according to location. In most Asian colonies local
men dominated: Indians in India; Chinese in Hong Kong; and Vietnamese in
Indochina. That said, religious affiliations and internal migrant networks could
also be crucial factors. These networks might broaden to embrace employers
in other colonies seeking to recruit immigrant Chinese or Indian men for their
social cachet and a presumed reputation for skill, obedience and loyalty. As they
came to occupy leading positions in domestic service hierarchies, workers found
themselves obliged to uphold such hierarchies. In colonies with a strong pre-
existing culture of domestic service, colonists could not avoid adapting to local
practices and expectations.
Singapore, as a colonial trading entrepôt, attracted male domestic workers
from other parts of Asia. Figure 0.1 illustrates this deliberate self-fashioning in
a stylized way, depicting the typical colonial household as employing a mix of
Indian, Malay and Chinese workers, the last most often coming from Hainan

27
Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far’, 141.
28
Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray, ‘Male Servants and the Failure of Patriarchy in Kolkata (Calcutta)’,
Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 112.
 Introduction 11

Figure 0.1 Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an object related
to their job, Singapore, c. 1900. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of
Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 29190.29

Island. The predominance of male servants was also most pronounced in

Singapore, where they accounted for 95 per cent of the domestic workforce in
1883 and 64 per cent in 1921.30 In Hong Kong, Chinese men, mostly Cantonese,
made up a majority of domestic servants supplemented by Japanese, Filipino and
Vietnamese men.31 In 1891 approximately 88 per cent of domestic workers in
British households in Hong Kong were men, declining to 57 per cent by 1921.32
Chinese households in Singapore and Hong Kong had always employed young

29
Inverted commas are used around photographic captions to indicate that the description is from
the original. Where the description was provided by the archival institution, inverted commas are
not used (as in this photograph). The photograph also appears in an album held by the National
Heritage Board Collection, National Museum of Singapore where it is titled ‘20. Servants of a
European Resident’. Photographs taken by G. R. Lambert and Co., Singapore, c. 1890, were often
duplicated in this way.
30
Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese: The Malayan Travels of a Victorian Lady (Singapore: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 116; J. E. Nathan, The Census of British Malaya 1921 (London: Waterlow,
1922), 239.
31
David Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Transcolonial Childhoods in British and French Asia
(Stanford: Standford University Press, 2015), 62.
32
This percentage assumes that most of the ‘Chinese in the employ of foreigners’ were servants.
Population according to the Census of 20th of May, 1891, University of Hong Kong, Blue Book, 1891,
M2; Hong Kong: Report on the Census of the Colony for 1921, University of Hong Kong, Sessional
Paper, 1921, 217, 183.
12 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

female bond servants called mui tsai.33 By the 1930s Chinese female servants,
called maijie (or mahjeh in Cantonese), increasingly replaced Chinese male
servants in both colonies.34
In the American Philippines, men and boys accounted for 75 per cent of
domestic workers in the early twentieth century.35 Immigrant Chinese men
constituted approximately 17 per cent of the servant population in Manila;
while outside the city, Filipinos and indigenous men predominated, though
some of these locals were themselves of mixed Chinese heritage.36 In French
Indochina, the regions of Annam, Tonkin and Cochinchina employed mostly
indigenous male servants and some Chinese men, but here too, many of the
Chinese men were long-time local residents.37 Compared with Hong Kong
and Singapore, both dominated by recent male immigration, in Indochina
the proportion of male servants was lower, perhaps due to the more balanced
sex ratio.38 Young Vietnamese female bond servants were also employed.39
The Netherlands East Indies was an exception in Southeast Asia; here women
outnumbered men, yet male domestic workers still made up 40 per cent of the
workforce in 1930 (Figure 0.2).40 These workers were primarily Javanese, but as
Chapter 1 discusses, greater ethnic diversity had been encouraged during the
early colonial period.41
Similar patterns may also be found in northern Australia and in some South
Pacific islands. Male servants comprised over 60 per cent of the domestic
workforce in the Northern Territory of Australia in 1911. Aboriginal men
were employed alongside Chinese men before 1911, after which the Chinese

33
Ah Eng Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work
of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986),
45–55; Maria Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants: A Social History of Chinese Customs (Hong
Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8.
34
Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian
‘Modernity’ Project (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 69–92; Nicole Constable, Maid to
Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 41–56.
35
Census of the Philippine Islands 1903: Volume II Population (Washington, DC: US Bureau of the
Census, 1905), 865.
36
Ibid., 933–4, 894.
37
Christopher Goscha, ‘Widening the Colonial Encounter: Asian Connections inside French
Indochina during the Interwar Period’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2009): 1192; Alexander B.
Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 11;
Frank Proschan, ‘Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys and Graceless Women’,
GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 8, no. 4 (2002): 448–51.
38
Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 5, 63.
39
Ibid., 63–5; Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 45–55; Jaschok, Concubines and
Bondservants, 8.
40
Census of 1930 in Netherlands India, Volume VIII: Summary of the Volumes I-VII (Batavia: Department
for Economic Affairs, 1936), 124–5.
41
Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far’, 133.
 Introduction 13

Figure 0.2 Native house staff employed by H. W. Dalfsen in Bandung, c. 1915, The
Netherlands East Indies. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast
Asian and Caribbean Studies, 32825.

population declined because of restrictions on immigration.42 The culture of male-

dominated domestic service was replicated elsewhere in the British Pacific. In
Nauru, under Australian administration, Chinese ‘houseboys’ were also employed.43
Indigenous women were widely employed in domestic service in German New
Guinea and by the French in the New Hebrides, although the employment of men
was not unknown. This was in distinct contrast to Anglophone Pacific colonies,
notably British New Guinea where men predominated in service.44 In British
Fiji, Melanesian, Indian and indigenous Fijian men were commonly employed

42
G. H. Knibbs, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911: Part XII Occupations, 1300, 1314.
The so-called full-blood Aboriginal population was not counted in the 1911 census. As a result
substantial numbers of Aboriginal male and female servants who were employed in the Northern
Territory are not included in this statistic.
43
See Thomas Cude Diaries (1921–47), MLMSS 4390, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South
Wales. For an overview of Chinese immigration to the Pacific, see Paul D’Arcy, ‘The Chinese
Pacifics: A Brief Historical Review’, Journal of Pacific History 49, no. 4 (2014): 396–420.
44
Anne Dickson-Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, in Britishness
Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw
and Stuart Macintyre (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 219–20; Margaret Rodman,
Daniela Kraemer, Lissant Bolton and Jean Tarisesei, eds, House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers
in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Peter J. Hempenstall suggests that the
position of domestic servant was an ‘elite’ one for native men; see Pacific Islanders under German
Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: ANU Press, 1978), 143.
14 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

as domestic workers.45 Fiji also served as a regional recruitment hub from where
servants intermittently accompanied Europeans for the duration of their travels
throughout the Pacific.46 This tradition of male domestic service was also common
for relatively isolated sites of colonial employment, such as cable stations and the
emerging island infrastructures for aviation.47
Men constituted a significant proportion of the domestic service workforce
in North America, particularly on the Pacific coast and areas that formed part of
what Henry Yu has described as the Cantonese Pacific.48 In California, Chinese
men dominated until 1880 by which time they had also gained in popularity
in New York.49 In Hawai‘i until 1920, the majority of domestic servants were
male, first Chinese and later Japanese.50 Chinese men were common in domestic
service in British Columbia until the introduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1923.51 On Vancouver Island in 1901, male servants made up 73 per cent of
the total domestic workforce, and Chinese men comprised approximately two-
thirds of the male servant population.52

Colonial masculinities and the gendered

politics of domestic service

Colonial discourse sought to underline European dominance by describing

male domestic workers, regardless of age, as ‘houseboys’ or, more generally,
‘boys’. Domestic workers were also often treated as single men without family

45
Legislative Council Fiji, Census, 1911, Council Paper No. 44 (1911).
46
Frances Steel, ‘Servant Mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand: The Transcolonial Politics of
Domestic Work and Immigration Restriction, c. 1870–1920’, History Australia 15, no. 3 (2018).
47
Julia Martínez, ‘Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian
Ocean Colony before 1914’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 227–43; William Stephen
Grooch, Skyway to Asia (New York: The Reader’s League of America, 1936), 38–9, 42–3.
48
Henry Yu, ‘The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific’, in Connecting Seas and Connected
Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s, ed.
Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 393–414.
49
Andrew Urban, Brokering Servitude, Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long
Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
50
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial
Division of Paid Reproductive Work’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 1
(1992): 9; Andrew Urban, ‘Imperial Divisions of Labor: Chinese Servants and Racial Reproduction
in the White Settler Societies of California and the Anglophone Pacific, 1870–1907’, in Towards a
Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, 296–323.
51
Paul Yee, Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas and
McIntyre, 1988), 81–2.
52
This includes domestic workers in the house and the garden but not laundry workers. City
of Victoria and Vancouver Island 1901 Census, http://vihistory.ca/search/searchcensusocc.
php?show=y&year=1901 (accessed 28 November 2016).
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