Educating the China-Born: Colonial Cosmopolitanism in Shanghai’s Schools for Settler Children, 1870–1943

Abstract

By the 1920s, the schools of the Shanghai Municipal Council aimed to teach “China-born” children, whose upbringing in the International Settlement’s littoral milieu meant they were in danger of becoming deracinated and déclassé, how to be both productive Shanghailanders and imperial Britons. Whereas the history of colonial education is often considered in national, imperial, or exclusionary terms, Shanghai’s schools for foreign children instead shaped and responded to understandings of education that were multinational, local, and reluctantly inclusionary. Through an exploration of the council’s education policies, the ideologies of childhood that governed admissions decisions, and the ways in which graduates of these schools employed their education professionally and politically, this article contends that the political and demographic features of the colonial periphery shaped alternative visions of imperial Britishness that went beyond nation and empire. As this case study makes clear, discussion of these British spaces overseas should be anchored in specific social, spatial, and political conditions rather than analysis of “sentiment” alone. Colonial ideologies of childhood and the ways in which it was produced by the educational experience were central to these articulations of a cosmopolitan Britishness that could be sustained beyond the boundaries of British territory by social and cultural institutions such as schools. In Shanghai, young settlers, and especially mixed-race “Eurasian” children, who together embodied both elite fears about racial and cultural degeneration and also their hopes of cultivating a firmly rooted settler society, were at the center of debates about community identity, status, and cohesion.

In 1923, Lily (aged eighteen), Allen (seventeen), and Reuben (fifteen) Noblston, all of whom had lived in Shanghai for their entire lives, applied for British subject status at the consulate, attaching testimonials as to their British sentiments from three teachers at the Shanghai Municipal Council’s (SMC) schools for foreign children. “There is no British Subject with a more honourable school record than Lily Noblston,” wrote Edith Murray, headmistress of the Public School for Girls, noting that she had passed the Cambridge Senior Examination with distinction. As for Allen and Reuben, “their influence in the school has been everything one would wish for as from public-spirited clean-run British boys,” declared their headmaster. “Their upbringing has been British, they are fine footballers, fine boxers and of unimpeachable sportsmanship,” he concluded, while the Public School’s scoutmaster confirmed that they were “excellent lads” who had “honestly tried to live up to the Scout Law.” The fact that the children had “spent all their school life in the Public School” was the crux of their claims to British protection, besides which there was not much that tied them to Britain or its territorial empire besides the brief sojourns of their father, Raphael Edelstein, to Britain and Canada before the children were born.¹ Raphael, who worked as a storekeeper in the Shanghai Waterworks Company, was born in Vladivostok in 1874 and had Anglicized his name to Noblston on traveling to Britain at the age of eighteen years. He had registered as a British subject in Shanghai on the strength of his claim to have been naturalized in Canada in 1897. Unfortunately, however, he could not produce any documentary proof of citizenship, with the result that the Shanghai consul downgraded the family’s national status to that of British Protected Persons in 1922. The letter of the law notwithstanding, the teachers’ accounts of the transformative power of education on the sensibilities of China-born children were so persuasive that the consul wrote to the Governor of Canada requesting that the family be issued with grants of imperial naturalization.² In a scenario familiar to many treaty-port residents whose life stories exemplified the intricacies of national and communal identity in an extraterritorial enclave on the colonial periphery, the Shanghailander members of the Noblston family, who at various points had been Russian, British, and stateless, were once again established as British subjects.

As the Noblston family history suggests, while the British government increasingly attempted to exclude children on the edges of empire from the benefits of British nationality, local colonial institutions, such as the SMC schools, found it politic to promote an inclusive vision of cosmopolitan Britishness. The municipal schools for “foreign” children, which educated pupils belonging to over forty nationalities, deliberately cultivated a hierarchy of overlapping political and cultural identities among its students in the service of local colonial politics. While their curricula, admissions policies, and ethos underscored the paramountcy of imperial British “values,” the schools also emphasized their pupils’ shared geographical and cultural roots in Shanghai, which cut across national divides. In the case of the municipal schools, both transimperial ideologies of childhood and Shanghai’s specific demographic and administrative realities, such as the International Settlement’s status as a multinational, politically independent enclave with a transient population, informed this ideal of Shanghailander unity overlaying the city’s national and racial diversity.

Scholarship on the British Empire, and that on the “British world,” has explored the interplay between British, national, and imperial identities principally in the context of settler colonies, while early twentieth-century discussions about the desirability of an inclusive “imperial citizenship” have been viewed largely through the lens of metropolitan intellectual debates.³ Through an exploration of the SMC’s education policy, the ideologies of childhood that governed school admissions, and the ways in which graduates of the schools employed their education professionally and politically, this article contends that the political and demographic features of the colonial periphery shaped alternative visions of imperial Britishness that went beyond nation and empire. Settler articulations of a deterritorialized British identity in Shanghai, which was as much local and cosmopolitan as it was national or imperial, thus help to make the case for, in the words of Tamson Pietsch, “multiple, produced British world spaces.”⁴ As this case study makes clear, analysis of these British spaces overseas should be anchored in specific political, spatial, and social conditions rather than a nebulous conception of British sentiment.

Childhood and the ways in which it was produced by the educational experience were central to these articulations of a cosmopolitan Britishness that could be sustained beyond the boundaries of British territory. Whereas the history of colonial education is often considered in national, imperial, or exclusionary terms, this essay instead demonstrates how schools shaped and responded to understandings of education that were multinational, local, and reluctantly inclusionary.⁵ By the mid-1920s, the SMC’s five schools for foreign children had a shared agenda of teaching the “China-born,” many of whom were Eurasian and whose upbringing in the International Settlement’s littoral and cosmopolitan milieu meant they were considered to be at risk of becoming deracinated and déclassé, how to be both productive Shanghailanders and loyal imperial Britons. This was a matter of considerable public interest, with settler children and their education featuring prominently in debates about the governance of the International Settlement, consular discussions about the foreign community’s welfare and claims to extraterritorial protection, newspaper op-eds, and China-coast memoirs.⁶ According to the SMC’s Education Committee, providing an academic and civic education to settler children was necessary to ensure the long-term survival of foreign Shanghai in the face of encroaching Chinese nationalism by equipping “the future generations for their careers of citizenship.”⁷ Despite this contemporary commentary, settler childhoods in the treaty ports have, with a couple of exceptions, received very little scholarly attention, tending to be overshadowed by the dynamic story of Chinese youth activism and its importance to the political tumult of the twentieth century.⁸ Nor do children feature in the sizable recent literature on the intertwined histories of China’s different foreign communities as a category of people who, because of their youth, performed distinct social and political functions.⁹ Yet, as David Pomfret has argued, “youthful activities, mobilities and identities were central to the fashioning of empire and global modernity.”¹⁰ In Shanghai, ideologies of childhood and family were entangled with discussions about the long-term viability of foreign power and residence in the face of burgeoning Chinese nationalism, the formation of national and racial sensibilities, and the extent of government responsibility toward different communities.¹¹

Specific local exigencies shaped responses to these dilemmas. The extraterritorialized nature of colonialism in China and the autonomous status of the British-dominated SMC meant that the pragmatic need to educate a multinational and often stateless youth population tempered efforts to diffuse British ideals through the replication of educational practices overseas.¹² As an SMC Education Committee report put it in 1922, an educational model suited for “home” was not “equally good for children who will spend all their time in the Far East and not in the West.”¹³ Similarly, the persistent “colonial trope of the endangered child” took on a distinctive treaty-port hue, not least due to fears about the disruption to proper childrearing caused, ostensibly, by Shanghai’s morally dissolute urban environment combined with the International Settlement’s cosmopolitan and mobile population.¹⁴

The following explores how the SMC dealt with the problem of Shanghai’s “endangered” settler children by attempting to mold them into both useful Shanghailanders and “imagined Britons,” regardless of national or racial status, whose coeducation would strengthen and unify the foreign community in the face of encroaching Chinese nationalism.¹⁵ The essay begins by explaining how an initial nineteenth-century impulse to segregate schools along national and racial lines foundered on the realities of serving a largely mixed-race, multinational population of settler children. In doing so, the essay then identifies a pragmatically inclusive impulse in colonial schooling, which acts as a counterpoint to well-documented attempts to exclude children with ambiguous racial identities from colonial schools intended for white pupils.¹⁶ The third section considers how applications for reduced school fees not only highlight the economic and familial difficulties caused by Shanghai’s increasing political and economic instability, but also reveal how transcolonial fears of racial “mixing” influenced the Education Committee’s efforts to protect children it perceived as vulnerable. As the penultimate section shows, the SMC struggled to balance its safeguarding of at-risk children with its attempts to maintain British values through the municipal schools’ curriculum. The essay ends by considering the post-school careers of certain graduates, who mostly went on to serve the settler establishment. As the petitions submitted by the Noblston siblings suggest, settler children with liminal national and racial identities on the China coast were not passive recipients of this tutelage. Rather, they deployed their education in ways that were sometimes unanticipated and unwelcomed by both the SMC and the consular establishment, as a badge of Britishness that could be parlayed into protection and passports. Above all, this essay shows how specific demographic, political, and spatial circumstances on the edges of empires sometimes forced colonial authorities to put aside their segregationist inclinations in favor of cultivating cosmopolitanism, an ideal which was given tangible shape through educational and cultural institutions. This communal identity was worked out through discussions about the welfare and education of China-born children, who embodied both the fears of settler elites about racial degeneration and also their hopes of cultivating a firmly rooted settler society capable of flourishing outside the territorial boundaries of the British Empire.

“Promising boys of the kind intended”: From Segregation to Cosmopolitanism

The social and political barriers to racially and nationally segregated education, combined with a gradual ideological shift toward the assertion of a more cosmopolitan Shanghai identity between 1890 and the 1930s, are none the more apparent than in discussions about the education of mixed-race children, who were referred to as Eurasians in treaty-port parlance.¹⁷ In 1891 trustees of the Thomas Hanbury School and Children’s Home reported to the SMC that the new school building, which had been funded by a generous donation from its namesake and benefactor, Sir Thomas Hanbury, was almost empty. The recent enforcement of a “Eurasians only” policy and the subsequent expulsion of Chinese boys had caused student numbers to dwindle to less than twenty. Nonetheless, the committee remained optimistic that the schoolroom would soon be filled “with promising boys of the kind intended.”¹⁸ Yet, the Hanbury School never did manage to maintain an exclusively Eurasian student population in keeping with its initial remit. When Willie Lee, a boarder at the school, applied for a reduction in fees in 1924, the Education Committee noted that his immediate relatives, including his mother, father, and grandfather, were Chinese. Nonetheless, his request should be given favorable consideration, the committee decided, because “the family and their connections have attended the Thomas Hanbury School for some years.” Two of Willie’s uncles, one of whom was a “registered American,” were Hanbury old boys and were currently supporting two daughters studying at the girls’ branch, while his two Eurasian cousins from Hong Kong were enrolled in the boys’ school on reduced fees.¹⁹ In this case, multigenerational connections to the school and a record of service to China’s other colonial institutions (the committee noted that several of Lee’s relatives had worked for the foreign-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service) was a sufficient substitute for being Eurasian. Furthermore, as Willie Lee’s family tree suggests, attempts to define Eurasian racial heritage foundered due to the complexities of Shanghailander genealogies, in which Chinese and foreign extended families belonging to multiple national and ethnic communities were intertwined.

The shift away from impractical attempts to educate children according to discrete racial and national groupings accompanied a dramatically increased concentration of settler education in municipal, rather than private, hands after 1910. By 1938 the SMC presided over a network of five schools for foreign pupils and seventeen for Chinese students, which together educated 8,809 children.²⁰ Initially, however, the SMC (founded 1854) had been a reluctant provider of education. Having emerged from Shanghai’s multinational foreign trade, the SMC was a largely independent body whose elected members were answerable to the International Settlement’s ratepayers rather than to an imperial metropole. This was in contrast with the councils of other foreign-administered settlements in China, including the neighboring French Concession, where ultimate authority resided with foreign governments by way of their consuls. As a result, the SMC tended toward business-oriented conservatism in many social matters and its quasi-constitution, known as the Land Regulations, made no mention of education.²¹ Therefore, before the 1890s the SMC partially supported various charitable, missionary, and private schools with ad hoc SMC grants-in-aid instead of managing schools directly.²² With the exception of orphans and destitute children, who usually attended St. Xavier’s College (founded 1864), most settler children in the nineteenth century who had not been sent “home” for their education attended national schools, which included French, Jewish, German, Japanese, and American establishments, while the Cathedral School was widely understood to be British. Because most of these private schools excluded Eurasians, the Honkew School for Eurasians, which later became the Thomas Hanbury School, was established in 1870 and came under the SMC’s official management in 1912.²³ Additionally, almost twenty years prior, in 1893, the SMC had assumed the management of the Shanghai Public School, which began life as the Masonic School in 1886. While national schools continued to operate in the twentieth century, municipal schools now dominated the International Settlement’s educational landscape.

The SMC’s history as a multinational, autonomous, colonial institution interested in preserving the longevity of the International Settlement, combined with Shanghai’s demographic shifts, provided both the practical and ideological underpinnings of a more expansive education policy. While the provision of public education was in tune with international trends in progressive municipal governance, it also contributed to Shanghai-specific myth-making, particularly the SMC’s self-legitimizing belief that it presided over a “model settlement” which had a “moral obligation” to set “an example to other cities in China.”²⁴ Meanwhile, as earlier fears about the insalubriousness of Shanghai’s environment for children lessened, there was a seven-fold increase in the number of “foreign” children residing in the International Settlement, from 1,389 in 1895 to 9,237 in 1935.²⁵ The expansion of Shanghai’s child and youth population was accompanied by a rise in the number of working-class families and the arrival of impoverished Russian refugees. Both groups required low-cost schooling, which created a higher demand for public schools while also stimulating elite concern about the welfare of Shanghai’s child population.

Particular disquiet was reserved for Eurasian and “country-born” foreign children, whose liminality could be diminished and whose moral and political sentiments could, in the eyes of the SMC, be given firmer shape through a proper education. Settler elites perceived Eurasians, who were mostly the children of working-class foreign fathers and Chinese mothers who could not afford to pay high fees for schooling, to be in particular need of a corrective education. In 1911, Eurasians formed by far the largest category of pupils being educated at the schools for foreign children, numbering 670 out of a total of 1,897.²⁶ As a reminder of the transgression of supposedly immutable racial boundaries and, by implication, a perceived lack of moral probity on the part of white men, Eurasians were a source of social discomfort.²⁷ The lack of a politically distinct Eurasian community such as those that existed in Singapore or India, which stemmed from the tendency of treaty-port Eurasian children to be integrated into either foreign or Chinese family and social networks rather than forming a discrete sociocultural group, exacerbated this unease. The establishment of the Eurasian School in 1870, which was initially funded by subscriptions from foreign businesses and which later became the Thomas Hanbury School and Children’s Home, eased the foreign community’s sense of moral responsibility toward Eurasians and served as an attempt to institutionalize their presence. Like other colonial regimes that established separate schools for mixed-race children, Shanghai’s early attempts to educate Eurasians in a specific school had a practical aim of training and co-opting intermediaries who could staff the machinery of colonial administration, while also diminishing the potential for discontent among a class of young settlers who were, treaty-port elites supposed, neglected by their European fathers and raised in a Chinese environment.²⁸

Although certain prominent voices advocated for separate schooling for Eurasian children, on the whole, settler enthusiasm was muted. Recent scholarship has questioned the long-established narrative that inter-marriage was generally accepted before the migration of larger numbers of white women to the colonies in the later nineteenth century, at which point such relationships began to be discouraged.²⁹ Durba Ghosh, for instance, has shown that there was considerable ambivalence about relationships between Indian women and British men from the earliest days of British colonialism, while Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, on the other hand, have argued that Dutch Indonesia was a “Creole empire” until after the First World War, in which class hierarchies mattered at least as much as racial ones.³⁰ The view from Shanghai, where by the turn of the century an official policy of inclusion replaced a short-lived attempt to confine Eurasian children to the Hanbury Schools, further complicates the narrative of intensifying condemnation of mixed marriages. Public resistance overturned an SMC move to exclude all pupils who were not “of Western parentage on both sides” from the Shanghai Public School in 1897, as Emma Teng has shown in her detailed examination of this episode.³¹ The characterization of Eurasian children as a morally corrosive influence on white children due to both their disreputable European fathers and exposure to Chinese cultural influences justified this attempt at separate schooling. It was, however, met with vocal opposition, which rested on a recasting of Eurasians as respectable members of the foreign community, at the SMC’s town hall meetings and in the form of petitions with hundreds of European, American, and Japanese signatories.³²

Wealthier settlers who met the property qualification had a vote in the International Settlement, while regular town hall meetings ensured that ratepayer voices could be heard, as the furor in 1897 demonstrated. Although the Chinese community was denied both a vote and representation on the SMC until 1928, this distinguished the International Settlement from other nineteenth-century colonial sites, such as Hong Kong, where government policy was less easily influenced by popular dissent. Answerable as it was to the ratepayers, the SMC needed public support and, as is apparent from Shanghai’s marriage and baptism registers, Eurasians were an integral part of that public by the late nineteenth century.³³ Working- and lower-middle-class male settlers in Shanghai frequently married or sustained long-term relationships with the Chinese mothers of their children, despite the attempts of employers such as the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the Shanghai Municipal Police to solve the “Eurasian problem” through the introduction of marriage restrictions for younger staff.³⁴ “Mixed” families were thus an integral part of Shanghai’s social fabric, which meant that many residents were supportive of, or at least ambivalent about, the right of Eurasian children to be educated alongside other “foreigners.”

These voices and their elite supporters won the battle in 1897, but racist opposition persisted, especially on the part of middle-class ratepayers who, according to one member of the Education Committee commenting in 1911, boycotted the Public Schools because of a “fear of the results of their association with children of the lowest class of native mothers.”³⁵ Class-accented prejudice against Eurasians remained a powerful undercurrent in treaty-port society until the end, manifesting itself in unofficial barriers to employment, lurid caricatures in treaty-port fiction, and everyday insults and violence. Eurasian children were considered to be more vulnerable to urban Shanghai’s pernicious moral influences than other youths, partly due to their exposure to a Chinese family environment, and these assumptions were explicitly gendered. These concerns filtered into Education Committee discussions of pupils’ backgrounds. Kitty Tui, for example, a student at the Public School for Girls who “ran away” from school in 1928 and was later found by the police in “most undesirable surroundings,” was refused readmission because she might impair the morals of other “innocent” pupils. Everyone was “well aware of the type of house kept by her mother,” wrote A. M. Kirk, the teacher in charge of the Boone Road branch school, in a comment that spoke to the widespread assumption that Eurasian girls were simultaneously potential agents of moral corruption and more susceptible to sexual exploitation.³⁶

These prejudices notwithstanding, the SMC made no further attempts to institutionalize Eurasian identity through separate schooling, an initiative which had foundered on the political and social realities of the International Settlement, instead recognizing that “it is a mistake to regard the Eurasian people as a unit in a consideration of this sort. Undoubtedly there are good and bad among them, as among all other groups.”³⁷ Eurasian students continued to enroll in large numbers at all the schools for foreign children and constituted a majority of students at the Hanbury Schools, numbering 75 out of 103 pupils at the girls’ school and 76 out of 110 pupils at the boys’ school in 1911. At the same time, a significant number of Eurasians were also enrolled at the Public Schools: 58 out of a total of 145 students at the girls’ school compared with 87 out of 197 at the boys’ school.³⁸ Racially inflected class hierarchies combined with the Hanbury Schools’ lingering reputation as the “Eurasian schools” explain this variation, with their semi-charitable status cementing their reputation as establishments that served children of the lowest socioeconomic strata, to which many Eurasians belonged.

The impossibility of disentangling Shanghai’s Eurasian population from other groups of settlers living in the International Settlement made it difficult to designate Eurasians as either a separate political class defined as such in government policy, as was the case in Singapore, or a racial–cultural group with distinctive educational needs, as in twentieth-century Dutch Indonesia.³⁹ The SMC’s desire to be seen as a “model settlement,” which could serve as an example to cities in China and beyond, further influenced its treatment of Eurasians. When the British Municipal Council in Tianjin, which found itself in a quandary about the admission of Eurasian children to its public school, enquired about Shanghai’s policy in 1925, the SMC was quick to assert its progressiveness. No, Eurasian children were not turned away without an explanation, the SMC replied. “This has always been recognized by the Council as the only fair attitude to adopt, inasmuch as Eurasians also pay their share of the rates.”⁴⁰ Perhaps most importantly, cleavages within the foreign community, especially those that would alienate a significant slice of ratepayers, were best avoided in a time of swelling Chinese nationalism. Thus, the Council stuck to the policy adopted in 1911 of guaranteeing “all foreign and Eurasian children a sound elementary education without regard to race (except Chinese which are dealt with separately), creed, wealth or social status.”⁴¹ “Eurasian” no longer appeared as a “national” category in school registers after 1911, while any residual hint of a racial distinction between the Hanbury Schools and the Public Schools was erased—at least officially—when they merged in 1934.

Eurasians may have been reluctantly incorporated into Shanghai’s foreign communities, but the SMC was unwavering in its belief that Chinese students should be educated separately from foreign pupils. Despite official policy, however, tuition fees from Chinese pupils kept many “foreign” schools afloat in the late nineteenth century. Chinese students even formed a majority at the Hanbury School in the 1880s, while in 1890, the first year in which the Shanghai Public School began receiving a grant from the SMC, around 35 students out of a total of about 150 were Chinese, as were several teachers.⁴² The number of Chinese students in the Hanbury and Public Schools diminished after the first SMC school for Chinese boys opened in 1904, an event that was followed by the opening of three more similar schools between 1912 and 1917. This provision for “the model training of a limited number of youths” was intended to appease Chinese ratepayers while bolstering the SMC’s self-pronounced status as a “model settlement,” while the construction of a secondary school for Chinese girls in 1934 further cemented the council’s progressive credentials.⁴³

David Pomfret has shown how the opinions of colonial elites on the desirability of educational segregation differed across time, space, and imperial borders according to prevailing ideologies of childhood. In nineteenth-century French Indochina, for example, educational segregation sat uncomfortably with the ideal of the civilizing mission, whereas in Hong Kong it played an important role in the policing of racial boundaries.⁴⁴ Shanghai’s colonial elites shared Hong Kong’s political concerns while also espousing colonial ideologies which identified childhood as a time of emotional as well as intellectual malleability, when it was possible for children born overseas to learn correct racial, class, national, and imperial sentiments.⁴⁵ This tutelage was considered essential to Shanghai’s, and indeed East Asia’s, colonial future, and could only be achieved if foreign children were educated separately. As one member of the SMC’s Education Committee, a proponent of segregation named W. W. Bartlett, put it in 1923, “One of the great hopes of the Orient rests in these European and American children brought up in the East. But if in the years to come they are to make an impression on the ideals of the Orient their own ideals must be kept high until they cannot easily be lowered.”⁴⁶ The SMC’s efforts at putting segregation into action were, however, stymied by the political and spatial arrangements of the densely populated International Settlement. Here there were physical impediments to introducing strict residential racial segregation laws such as those enforced in Hong Kong, which reserved Victoria Peak and Cheng Chau Peak as white-only enclaves until 1946, although the SMC did succeed in barring Chinese residents from using its parks until 1928.⁴⁷ Certain schools in China, notably the school for foreign children in the mountain resort of Kuling and the China Inland Mission School in the seaside town of Chefoo (Yantai), replicated the attempts in the hill stations of the British Raj to erect a cordon sanitaire between foreign children and Indian society.⁴⁸ By contrast, in Shanghai, the municipal schools were by necessity located in the heart of a densely populated urban settlement in which the almost 30,000-strong foreign population rubbed shoulders with 860,000 Chinese residents by 1930.⁴⁹ As a result, thirty-three students of Chinese nationality were still enrolled in the Hanbury School for Boys in 1911, while Chinese names continued to appear on the Municipal Gazette’s annual list of successful examination candidates at the foreign schools in the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, as one member of the Education Committee, Reverend A. J. Walker, pointed out grudgingly in 1911, public schools had a duty to serve all residents and therefore “cannot possibly make racial or social distinctions” within the foreign community.⁵⁰ In keeping with this principle, 43 of the 186 pupils at the Thomas Hanbury School for Boys were Japanese in 1922, while twelve Sikh boys, who were the sons of Indian policemen, were being taught in a separate classroom.⁵¹ In the same year, 14 of the Hanbury School for Girls’ 290 pupils were Japanese, while the Public School for Boys educated six Parsee students. As was the case in other littoral colonial sites, the plurality and mobility of Shanghai’s society, in which racial categories were not ossified but rather responded to local understandings of cultural attributes, nationality, and class, made it difficult to enforce absolute racial segregation in schools.⁵²

In his study of the acceptance of intermarriage in colonial Samoa, Matthew Fitzpatrick has urged historians to “seek to understand the diversity of intercommunal relations in colonial sites without simply reverting to the assumption that the racial awareness or racial anxieties of some colonizers (or metropolitan commentators) were seamlessly translated into a clear, racially stratified colonial order.”⁵³ As shown by the tenor of debates about the coeducation of foreign children from “respectable” families with Chinese and Eurasian pupils, Shanghai’s social hierarchies were determined by class and nationality as well as by race. What is more, as the multiracial and multinational student body at the municipal schools suggests, the implementation of ideologically desirable colonial policies was often thwarted by the nuances of local politics, governance, and demographics, as well as by the spatial realities of urban environments. In the International Settlement, which lacked the political and military weight of a colonial government answerable to an imperial metropole, the need to mold a generation of settlers united in their cosmopolitanism and committed to preserving foreign Shanghai subdued the voices calling for the national and racial segregation of “foreign” children by the 1920s.

Deserving and Undeserving Children: Charitable Admissions to the Municipal Schools

Eurasians formed one component of Shanghai’s “large rising generation” of country-born foreign children, for whom the municipal schools were primarily established. “It is from the ranks of this generation and similar generations of the future that the citizens of Shanghai will be drawn, men whose homes are here and who are intimately connected by family ties with the place and its welfare,” wrote the Education Committee in its 1911 report on the educational needs of the settlement.⁵⁴ China-born children may have been indispensable to sustaining foreign control of the International Settlement, but this conviction was tempered by disquiet about the erosion of national, racial, and moral sensibilities caused by a childhood spent entirely in Asia.⁵⁵ Without government intervention, the SMC warned, settler children would “grow up ignorant, unable to keep the relative position of their parents with regard to the Chinese amongst whom they live, and likely sink into idleness, vice and crime,” thereby undermining foreign claims to political and moral authority.⁵⁶

This perceived chain of causation, which began with a lack of education, led to downward social mobility, and ended in indigence and criminality, drew upon the circulation of colonial theories about the physical, moral, and racial degeneration of country-born mixed-race and white children. Periodic sociological and medical studies across colonial Asia lent authority to these concerns and shaped patterns of family separation by determining if and when white children would be sent “home,” in addition to informing the educational, medical, marriage, and welfare policies of colonial governments.⁵⁷ Shanghai’s location outside the territorial and legal boundaries of the British Empire, the transience and relative poverty of its settler population, and the International Settlement’s national and racial diversity intensified these colonial fears about childhood deracination. Shanghai was “a place where we all have difficulty in keeping up our native moral vigour,” wrote a member of the Education Committee in 1911.⁵⁸ More than in other colonial sites, “the White man here is limited in his economies” and could rarely afford to send his children home, or even to Hong Kong, to be educated, complained the Education Committee, meaning that the majority of children belonging to multigenerational settler families knew no other environment than the treaty ports.⁵⁹ By the 1920s, the ever-increasing number of children on the China coast who lacked a clear national status due to their birth outside of European colonial territory, the fact that their parents had been unmarried at the time of their birth, or because of their refugee status, heightened the liminal status of China-born children. As the following cases from the schools’ admissions files suggest, the SMC constantly had to balance its desire to provide a moral and national education with the need to protect the welfare of these “vulnerable” children. Like the debate about Shanghai’s “Eurasian problem,” this documentation of settler poverty demonstrates how alternative conceptions of whiteness and Britishness, which differed from those defined in the metropole or in other colonial centers, arose on the imperial periphery and were fleshed out through discussions of endangered children.

While official education policy increasingly leaned toward an inclusive cosmopolitanism that guaranteed schooling for all foreign children resident in Shanghai, deliberations about which children were deserving of charitable admissions demonstrate the SMC’s continuing disquiet about the perceived erosion of the racial and national statuses of children in the treaty ports.⁶⁰ In keeping with the Hanbury Trust’s mission to “afford relief to Eurasian children,” the Hanbury Schools received the majority of applications for fee waivers. In the early 1920s, the boys’ and girls’ branches each reserved twelve places for free scholars and a further twelve for pupils on reduced fees, while the Public Schools reserved only two places in each category at both the girls’ and boys’ branches. Such was the demand for fee reductions, however, that the Hanbury Schools regularly exceeded these limits by as much as 100 percent.⁶¹ Because general school admissions were determined by place and length of residence, it is largely through correspondence about these special cases that the SMC’s contradictory perception of poor white and Eurasian children as simultaneously in need of rescue and a danger to the longevity of the foreign presence surfaces. Fears about the endangerment of European children in Asia took on local Shanghai accents, stemming as much from the city’s littoral character, which encouraged demographic mobility, national diversity, and vice, as much as by its proximity to a Chinese milieu.⁶²

Competition for these limited assisted places was fierce and evidence of poverty or parental incapacitation did not alone suffice. Such was the volume of applications that beginning in 1932 the SMC empowered the King’s Daughters Society, a charity that provided assistance to destitute foreign women and children, to enter applicants’ homes to investigate the authenticity of their requests.⁶³ White and mixed-race “subalterns,” whose ambiguous racial and class statuses destabilized racialized colonial political orders, were the objects of similar scrutiny elsewhere in the empire world. Colonial governments and philanthropic organizations exerted social control by providing work, education, and shelter to poor whites or by implementing punitive measures such as incarceration in prisons and asylums or deportation, as exemplified by the Hong Kong Vagrancy Ordinances.⁶⁴ Younger children, however, who were usually regarded as innocents who should not be punished for the ostensible failings of their parents, complicated efforts to determine whether a family merited charity. The Education Committee’s investigations into the backgrounds of applicants, therefore, focused on two things: whether the child in question needed to be removed from a culturally dangerous home environment and whether the parents’ financial situation and character made them deserving of the SMC’s charity.

Above all, the fiscally conservative SMC was concerned that the recipients of fee waivers would not become a long-term burden on the public purse, in which case they were usually referred to charitable mission schools such as St. Xavier’s or St. Joseph’s. Recommendations to waive fees were often accompanied by an assurance that the parents were not irreversibly impecunious but in fact hardworking and had temporarily fallen on hard times. Thus we learn that Amparo and Isabel Estanislas’ father had reliably paid tuition in the past, but currently was unable to find work as a pianist due to competition from recently arrived Russians.⁶⁵ The head teacher of the Thomas Hanbury School for Girls, E. M. Mayhew, was “confident” that Grace (four), Phyllis (five), and Ruby (six) Harvey, whose eighteen-year-old sister had been paying their fees since their father “failed in business,” “will pay again” once “matters mend.”⁶⁶ Similarly, in 1923, Mayhew advocated that Clara Paskaloff, who had been a student at the school since 1915, be allowed to stay on as a free boarder after her father, a former officer in the Russian Volunteer Fleet whose boarding house venture had recently failed, departed for America. “The man is honest enough to stand by his word” and pay the fees after finding work, Mayhew surmised. The Education Committee was not convinced, foreseeing that, because Clara’s mother had died many years previously, “the Council may find itself with a ‘ward’ which would be very difficult to dispose of,” but was saved from making a decision when her father’s departure was delayed indefinitely.⁶⁷ In contrast, the 1923 petitions of Edward and Albert Fair, aged six and seven years, for places as free boarders because their father was in prison and could not pay their fees, were rejected immediately due to the likelihood that “the children will be left upon the bounty of the Council altogether.”⁶⁸

Eurasians, who were more likely to live in poverty than other foreign groups and whose home lives often straddled Chinese and foreign social worlds, preponderated among the free and reduced-fee pupils. As the headmistress of the Public School for Girls, Edith Murray, surmised in 1924, the persistence of prejudice toward women “of Eurasian birth” on the employment and marriage markets, meant that children such as nine- and ten-year-old Lily and Mabel Faithful, on whose behalf she was advocating, will “need all the assistance education can give them.”⁶⁹ The SMC was likely aware of the numerous colonial precedents for placing mixed-race children in institutional care in South and Southeast Asia. From 1890 onward, for instance, a combination of governmental and private child protection societies systematically institutionalized métis children in Indochina in order to remove them from Vietnamese cultural influences, bolstered by the French government’s 1917 ruling that Eurasian children abandoned by their French fathers would be permanently removed from their mothers’ care after the age of ten years.⁷⁰ In other French colonies, a range of state, church, and philanthropic forces were marshaled to teach “abandoned” mixed-race children how to be useful colonial subjects, both in their territory of birth and also through educational migration schemes to other colonial sites.⁷¹

In Shanghai, the business-oriented SMC lacked the power and the inclination to enact such severe policies of removal and was further discouraged from doing so by the proven unpopularity of segregating Eurasians from other foreign children. Nonetheless, the Education Committee reserved special concern for Eurasian and poor white children deemed to be at risk of losing their national and cultural attributes because of their upbringing in a Chinese domestic environment.⁷² Eight-year-old Joan Barclay, a day scholar whose British father had not been heard of since he left for the Western Front some years earlier, was admitted to the Hanbury School for Girls as a boarder on reduced fees in 1919 because her mother’s factory job meant that “the child is left in charge of her grandmother, a Chinese woman, from 6 a.m. until her mother returns at night.” Joan’s grandmother did not take her to school, Mayhew reported, meaning that she “would lose what little she knows.”⁷³ Ten-year-old Charles MacKenzie, the son of Ah Ho, a servant, and the now-deceased British chief officer in a Hong Kong shipping firm, was admitted as a subsidized boarder in 1923 in part because he “lives among native surroundings.”⁷⁴ Rosa and Elsie Bone were transferred from the Public School to the Hanbury School after their father’s death because their mother’s mental illness meant that the girls were left “in the charge of a Chinese Amah,” meaning it was “urgent that they be cared for at a boarding school.”⁷⁵ Many of these cases involved the children of former municipal employees toward whom the SMC felt a degree of paternalistic responsibility, including that of the Faithful children mentioned above, who were the daughters of the late prosecuting solicitor of the SMC, and that of the eleven-year-old son of the late Shanghai Municipal Police inspector, T. H. Steele, who was described as “living with his mother, under Chinese conditions.”⁷⁶

These discussions speak to the transcolonial circulation of fears about the erosion of European moral and cultural sensibilities thought to result from the delegation of childcare to native female servants and the perceived abdication of European parental responsibility it represented.⁷⁷ Rose Nielsen, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Danish and Portuguese parents, must be “kept under strict discipline,” warned a note on her application for transfer from the Hanbury to the Public School, because “she has been in the habit of having her own ways with the Chinese servants by whom she has been constantly surrounded.”⁷⁸ In these circumstances, school provided the moral and physical control that was considered to be so necessary for children brought up in Shanghai’s urban environment, yet which was often lacking at home. Similarly, Joan Barclay was considered to be “under no control all day” while in the care of her grandmother and the previously mentioned Charles MacKenzie, who lived with his Chinese mother, needed to be placed “under control during the evenings.”⁷⁹ Residence in the disciplining environment of the SMC’s boarding schools would act as a substitute, albeit an inferior one, for European parental authority.

Whereas Chinese women were often regarded as unsuitable guardians for poor Eurasian or white children, white women who were unsupported by their husbands tended to be discussed as sympathetic victims, providing that they fulfilled the SMC’s definition of good character, which included a strong work ethic, diligent housekeeping, and an avoidance of leisure pursuits the SMC deemed to be unwholesome and frivolous.⁸⁰ “Mrs. Yang is a respectable hardworking English woman” who had been abandoned by her husband, wrote an investigator from the British Women’s Association in 1933, recommending that her children, Muriel and Evelyn, be admitted as free boarders.⁸¹ Yet, some years previously the SMC had refused the repeated applications of Mrs. Fanny Goldstein, a widow with four children, for places as free boarders for her two sons, Moses (eight) and Sam (nine). “I have been everywhere to secure work, but my search has been fruitless,” she explained in 1921. Although the family was being supported by Mrs. Goldstein’s son-in-law, who was married to her seventeen-year-old daughter, the couple would soon depart for Australia, meaning that the boys “will starve” unless they were admitted as boarders. A. G. Stewart, headmaster of the Hanbury School for Boys, saw matters differently, surmising that the intention of Mrs. Goldstein and her younger daughter, Esther (fifteen years), was to “get rid of their responsibilities in connection with the children.” While sympathetic to the boys’ situation, “the thriftlessness of the mother and the girls is accentuated in pursuit of entertainments such as thé dansants [afternoon tea dances] at the Astor House,” he concluded, recommending that the boys should be provided with free meals but would only be permitted to board on the condition that their mother and sister found work.⁸²

Determining whether families were “deserving” or “undeserving” of assistance involved documentation and scrutiny of a family’s home environment and social life, and often required investigators to enter the private space of the home. This was in spite of the fact that male settlers had successfully framed the proposal to exclude Eurasians from the Public School in 1897 as an attack on mixed marriages and, by implication, on the sanctity of the home life of white men.⁸³ In keeping with the colonial impulse to monitor and police female behavior elsewhere in Asia, there were few such qualms about violating the right of poor women, who were most often the subject of these investigations, to a private life. The most striking aspect of these dissections of the family life of assisted pupils is the latent assumption that a confluence of China coast-specific circumstances encouraged child-rearing practices and domestic arrangements that were not conducive to the formation of a proper moral character or intellectual development. The precariousness of employment for working-class foreigners meant that some fathers were unable to fulfill proper paternal obligations to their dependents, while the mobility of Shanghai’s population meant that children were in danger of growing up rootless, with only a hazy conception of their belonging to locality, nation, and empire. The normally reluctantly interventionist SMC’s willingness to engage in this intrusive project is evidence of how the cultural and physical welfare of poor white and Eurasian children had become a locus of concern about safeguarding the International Settlement’s future as a foreign-governed enclave. More than anything these discussions suggest that, on the edges of empires, where multiple colonial ideologies converged and collided with local exigencies, the tension between inclusionary and exclusionary forces was brought into clearer view.

Teaching Britishness, Teaching Cosmopolitanism

The schools’ curricula and activities produced an ethos centered on cosmopolitan Britishness, which acted as a corrective, albeit a limited one, to the concerns about the moral and cultural dangers of Shanghai’s broader urban environment which surfaced in deliberations about assisted pupils. While admissions policies were pragmatically inclusive, the syllabi of the municipal schools were decidedly British, as were almost all of the teachers. Yet, as the table below indicates, while Britons formed the single largest national contingent in all the schools in 1923, the overall composition of the student body was international. Russians followed Britons numerically in the Public Schools, while Americans and Japanese formed the second largest contingents in the Hanbury Schools for girls and boys, respectively. Eurasians ceased to be listed as a separate “national” group after 1911, although “Portuguese” on the China coast usually referred to Eurasians born in Macau. Only the Public School for Girls counted Jewish students in a distinct category. Despite the Education Committee’s rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, race and nationality, and their attendant class inferences, continued to determine social status in the International Settlement. This meant that the academically superior Public Schools had the greatest preponderance of British students and were notably less nationally and racially diverse than the Hanbury Schools, with no Indian and very few Japanese scholars on the registers.

The “imperial diffusion” of British education and the ideals it embodied across the empire world looked different when it was applied to cosmopolitan communities on the edges of empire.⁸⁴ Even the Education Committee had misgivings about the ability of schooling to transform China-coast children into imperial Britons, admitting that there were “peculiar difficulties in such matters as the teaching of English history, English geography, English literature, and English money and weights and measures, to children of whom the great majority have never been out of the Far East, and many of whom are not English and will never go to England.”⁸⁵ Nonetheless, the SMC justified its choice to follow a British model in its school structure and curriculum with the fact that English was the lingua franca of the International Settlement and that Britons, who numbered 6,221 according to the 1930 census, formed the largest foreign component of its population after the Japanese, who had their own public schools in Shanghai funded by the Japanese government.⁸⁶ The structure and policies of the schools were modeled after those of minor British public and grammar schools, and thus were divided into primary and secondary branches with prefects, houses, and colors.⁸⁷ All the schools had large playgrounds, in keeping with European theories that emphasized the necessity of outdoor physical exercise for proper child development, while team sports and athletics, deemed by British elites to be essential to instill “manly” qualities of fair play, confidence, and endurance, featured heavily on the timetable at the boys’ schools.⁸⁸ These were socializing institutions that taught children about place and race at the same time as they cultivated a broad sense of belonging to Shanghai. Accordingly, N. Teasedale Mackintosh, a registrar at the University of Hong Kong who was appointed to inspect all the municipal schools in 1922, noted approvingly that free boarders at the Hanbury School for Boys were required to act as servitors for fee-paying pupils by waiting on them at table, washing up, and cleaning the dormitories, a system which was “necessary to prevent the boys from becoming discontented when they leave school and have to adopt a less luxurious style of living.”⁸⁹

The scholastic program at the boys’ schools deviated from that taught at elite British schools, adding bookkeeping, mechanical drawing, and natural sciences to the established public school curriculum of mathematics, English, geography, and history, and it favored instruction in modern languages rather than Latin. As with schools for European children in colonial India, academics were adapted to suit local employment prospects, which were largely in the low and mid levels of the SMC and the commercial sector. It follows that Chinese was offered as a second language at both schools for boys, although it was never mandatory, while the Hanbury School, with its more nationally diverse and largely working-class student body, offered remedial English classes and the opportunity to replace history with shorthand. In addition to sitting the Cambridge Junior and Senior examinations, boys in the upper school had the option of taking the Hong Kong University matriculation exams.⁹⁰ Both the curriculum and the examination system were in keeping with the SMC’s practical and ideological aims of producing economically useful Shanghailanders, whose formative experiences were firmly embedded in the British educational, institutional, and social networks of the China coast.

The SMC was mainly referring to boys when it argued that educating foreign children was vital to ensuring the future prosperity of the International Settlement, while its members considered the intellectual development of girls, who it presumed would marry young and perform unpaid labor in the home, to be of lesser value. A smaller proportion of the budget was devoted to the girls’ schools, in spite of the fact that they enrolled more pupils due to the continuing preference for sending boys to Hong Kong or Britain for their education, and the tangible evidence of this could be observed in the crumbling state of the buildings in which the girls were taught throughout the 1910s and 1920s.⁹¹ While much of the curriculum mirrored that at the boys’ schools, botany replaced instruction in the natural sciences and French replaced Chinese, while needlework, cooking, singing, and drawing lessons meant that there was less time for academic subjects at the Public School for Girls.⁹² The Hanbury School for Girls rarely entered its pupils for the Cambridge Senior exams, but both schools taught shorthand and bookkeeping in recognition that many of its graduates would need to support themselves after school.⁹³ Official indifference toward the girls’ schools, especially at the lower-status Hanbury School, however, gave their teachers greater freedoms. In 1922, school inspector N. Teasedale Mackintosh was dismayed to find that the teachers at the Hanbury School for Girls, whom he deemed to be over-qualified for “children of this sort,” were permitted to specialize in their “pet subjects” and taught Tennyson and Shakespeare rather than engaging in the “regular plodding Form teaching” better suited to working-class children. It was no use engaging in an “ambitious but useless attempt to put old wine into new bottles,” he declared, arguing that a greater emphasis should be placed on domestic science instead.⁹⁴

Despite the school inspector’s admonishments, the curriculum at the Hanbury School for Girls was most in keeping with the SMC’s aim of creating a “model settlement” which exemplified modern educational ideals. In many ways, all the schools were forced to be reluctantly progressive, charged as they were with teaching children of multiple nationalities how to be both imperial Britons and cosmopolitan Shanghailanders. The Britishness taught in Shanghai’s schools, while drawing on overarching imperial ideologies of education, gender, and empire, was centered primarily on the institutions, communities, and politics of the China coast, thereby fashioning a highly localized conception of British identity. Above all, the schools aimed to safeguard the International Settlement’s future by providing a practical as well as a cultural education, which would produce moderately well-educated nurses, clerks, and policemen who could provide useful services for the SMC while at the same time averting the specter of an unemployed and deracinated population of settlers with the potential to undermine the foreign community’s privileged economic and political position.

Life after School: Becoming Shanghailanders, Becoming Britons

Ultimately, the twin forces of the Japanese occupation and two decades of Chinese nationalism, rather than the deteriorating reputation and economic status of the second and third generations of settlers, brought about the dismantling of Shanghai’s foreign settlements in 1943. Even in the Settlement’s end days, however, the perception of a community given cohesion, a sense of belonging, and economic worth through municipal education remained tenacious. In September 1941, two months before the Japanese occupation of the foreign concessions, the North-China Daily News ran an article headlined “Public School Education High as Graduates Hold Big Jobs.” Intended as a rebuttal to the months-long debate played out in letters to the editor about whether an education in the municipal schools was worth the high fees, the article listed dozens of Old Boys who had become prominent Shanghai residents, including several editors, publishers, teachers, and SMC officials. “It is these former pupils of the schools who today are holding up the fifth greatest port in the world and who look with optimism on the future of this metropolis,” the writer claimed. The girls’ schools received only a cursory mention for their work in the city’s “secretarial and executive departments.” According to this article, at a time when the International Settlement was, unbeknownst to the SMC, almost at the end of its life, the municipal schools had proved a resounding success in training a class of loyal Shanghailanders, whose commitment to the economic well-being of the city overrode their national differences.⁹⁵

Details of the careers and destinations of former pupils are difficult to piece together, but it is clear that many graduates from the municipal schools went on to staff the settler establishment in Shanghai or in other treaty ports. Former pupils at the girls’ schools tended to work as nurses or teachers, in the case of those who passed the higher examinations, and as stenographers or shop assistants in the case of those who did not. Graduates or attendees of the boys’ schools found work in the mid-levels of treaty-port commerce and industry as journalists, clerks, mercantile assistants, ship’s officers, printers, teachers, and customs officials. Most of those who graduated into the Depression-era economy of the 1930s, the hardships of which were intensified by on-going civil wars and by the Japanese occupation of eastern China after 1937, drifted from job-to-job, punctuated by periods of unemployment. Shanghai-born Danish Eurasian Peter Bojeson’s employment history was typical. After failing the French portion of his exams and therefore leaving school without obtaining the Senior Cambridge Certificate in 1936, Bojeson worked for a shipping firm until the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, after which he found a temporary position with the International Red Cross providing aid to refugees, followed by commission-based work at an insurance company. Bojeson then sought a job in 1938 as a warden at the Shanghai Municipal Gaol, deciding, like many of his former schoolmates, that working for the council offered more stable employment.⁹⁶ The adult lives of other alumni were more ignominious. Harold Thorpe embarked on a spree of gambling, embezzlement, and theft after leaving the Hanbury School in 1932, according to a police background check conducted when he applied for a post as a prison warden six years later.⁹⁷ Valentina Chapeau, a Russian émigré and former Shanghai Telephone Company employee who left the Hanbury School in 1925, had since been “kept” by several men and was “frequently seen in the company of foreign naval officers,” according to an investigation into associates of the Comintern’s Shanghai agent, Hillaire Noulens, in 1932.⁹⁸ Police commentary on these post-school life trajectories was informed by assumptions about the gendered moral deficiencies thought to be endemic to Shanghai’s urban environment, which an education in the public schools had failed to counteract.

As competition for jobs on the China coast increased, many former students began to use their municipal education in unforeseen ways, as evidence of British sentiment that could override the absence of a concrete claim to British nationality. Obtaining a foreign passport became an urgent matter for the growing number of settlers who lacked a clear national status in the treaty ports in the late 1920s, not least because they were more often required for international travel in an age when mobility was increasingly policed using documentary technologies of control, such as visas and passports.⁹⁹ Besides the stateless Russian and Jewish refugee populations, the move toward exclusionary nationality laws in early twentieth-century Europe and the colonies made it difficult for China-born foreigners to claim their parents’ nationality.¹⁰⁰ The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914, for instance, which only permitted nationality to be passed down through the “legitimate” male line for one generation to children born outside of British territory, had life-changing reverberations for many China-born children. This was amended by the 1922 act, which permitted indefinite transmission overseas of British nationality by descent providing that a child was registered at a consulate within a year of its birth. However, an Order in Council issued in 1921, which required all British subjects in China to register annually at their local consulate or risk losing consular protection, empowered consuls to request documentary evidence of British nationality from those who were reregistering.¹⁰¹ Dozens of passports were subsequently confiscated from treaty-port residents who did not meet the exact criteria for British nationality but who had nonetheless been able to register previously at the consulates as British subjects and thereby enjoy the benefits of extraterritorial protection.¹⁰² At the same time, not only was possession of a British passport increasingly a prerequisite for employment in British firms on the China coast, it also lessened the stigma of “illegitimacy.” As Hiram Parkes Wilkinson, the Crown Advocate to the British Supreme Court for China and Japan, put it in 1923, “their recognition as ‘British’ was of the utmost importance to the boys when leaving school and engaging in business, and to the girls on, or before, marriage.”¹⁰³ Intermittent conflict in China, both with Japan and between Nationalist Party and communist forces, combined with a steady erosion of foreign privilege in response to anti-imperialist sentiment, meant that an increasing number of China-born children, who had been schooled to be useful Shanghailanders, took their education elsewhere from the 1930s onward, primarily to Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Canada, and Europe. Peter Bojeson’s sister and one of his brothers, both of whom had been educated by the municipal schools, were living in Canada and Denmark, respectively, by 1938.¹⁰⁴ In these uncertain times, obtaining a British passport was a long-term exit strategy for young people who had previously imagined living on the China coast indefinitely, to be held in reserve in case the political and economic situation deteriorated further.

Like the Noblston children, many other pupils in the municipal schools, both current and former, attempted to parlay their education into British subject status. Graduates certainly wore their municipal education as evidence of Britishness. “I am a natural born British Subject of British Parentage and not a Foreigner temporarily enjoying British protection, I was brought up and educated in the Thomas Hanbury School in Shanghai a British Institution under British traditions and registered in the school records as a British Subject,” declared Arthur Maitland in his 1934 application to have his marriage to a Russian woman solemnized at the British consulate in Tianjin (Tientsin) so that she could, he believed erroneously, become a British national. His wife had also been “brought up in a British institution” on the China coast, declared Maitland in reference to her education at the Tientsin Grammar School. The son of a British father and Chinese mother, Maitland had left school in 1916 at the age of fifteen and first registered as a British protected person at the Shanghai consulate in 1917 on the strength of a letter written by a master at the Hanbury School on behalf of Maitland and his three brothers. Alongside his education, Maitland cited his service to other British settler institutions, including the Tientsin British Municipal Volunteer Corps, and his time as a juror in the British consular court as evidence of his British credentials.¹⁰⁵ Maitland’s British identity, like that of many other putative Britons overseas, was rooted in social, cultural, and professional links to the British world, which were given tangible shape by China coast settler institutions such as the municipal schools, rather than bona fide claims to British subjecthood.

Conclusion

Children such as Maitland may have been taught to be “imagined Britons,” but increasingly this sentimental education was at odds with the insistence of metropolitan and colonial governments on hard, documentary proof of nationality.¹⁰⁶ When Joseph Henry, a seventeen-year-old Eurasian who had boarded at the Thomas Hanbury School since the age of ten years, applied to be registered as a British Protected Person in 1925, the Shanghai consul surmised that there was “no guarantee that he will retain his British affiliations after leaving school.”¹⁰⁷ An education in the Shanghai schools prepared children to be productive settlers, but it did not, in the eyes of consuls, make them Britons. These doubts about the ability of this tutelage to bring about a permanent transformation on children born and brought up in a cosmopolitan Chinese city speak to a growing mistrust between settlers, whose future lay in Shanghai and other colonial outposts in Asia and Oceania, and their consular guardians. This was a localized community of Britishness, rooted in the multinational and multiracial environment of the treaty ports and sustained through the replication of educational, social, and political institutions that sought to perpetuate British “values” on the China coast, rather than through enduring ties to Britain itself.

In highlighting how the welfare and education of settler children were placed at the heart of the SMC’s attempts to ensure the longevity of China’s foreign communities and the privileges that sustained them, this article has sought to demonstrate how ideologies and experiences of childhood on the imperial periphery gave shape to an alternative conception of cosmopolitan Britishness that could be perpetuated beyond the territorial boundaries of the British empire through institutions such as schools. While the history of the development of public education is often couched in imperial, national, or indeed nationalistic terms, the story of Shanghai’s municipal schools instead demonstrates how global histories of Britishness must, as Rachel Bright and Andrew Dilley put it, “build from local and unique manifestations of self-declared Britishness.”¹⁰⁸ The SMC’s increasingly inclusionary education system emerged from the specific demographic and political conditions of the International Settlement and, by extension, of other colonial communities on the edges of empire. Statelessness had a profound effect upon the life opportunities of children born outside the bounds imperial territory, while the multinational and multiracial character of treaty-port settler communities created distinctive family genealogies and perceptions of national belonging. In these circumstances, promoting the idea of a community of children united in their cosmopolitanism, while also espousing British values, was politically and socially expedient.

This vision of cosmopolitan Britishness was made palatable by its centering of children. Whereas British adults on the China coast were prone to exclusionary displays of jingoism, as demonstrated by anti-German violence and vandalism during the World War I, childhood was seen as a time of sentimental malleability, which presented the possibility of nurturing new types of idealized “‘hybrid’ interactions” alongside teaching racial and national difference.¹⁰⁹ This was especially true of “foreign” children who were born over the seas, among whom national culture and loyalties were inevitably weaker. While, as in many histories of childhood, the voices of the children who were educated in the SMC’s schools are frustratingly difficult to recover, this article has argued that settler children and their education were often placed at the center of elite debates about community identity, status, and cohesion. Above all, as the education of foreign children in Shanghai’s municipal schools shows, the relationship between inclusionary and exclusionary colonial impulses is thrown into even sharper relief on the edges of empire, in places like Shanghai’s International Settlement that, on the one hand, replicated the exclusionary ideologies of empire, yet, on the other hand, found it politic to promote an inclusive vision of Britishness in which all children, regardless of parentage, could try to learn to be British.

Notes

This research was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, project number HKBU 259213.

Endnotes