The White British League Debate

A British crown colony located on the coast of the South China Sea, Hong Kong was home to a multiethnic population. Since the British first occupied the island in 1841, the thriving economy of this colonial regime had attracted not only white Britons but also many migrant workers from neighboring regions. Its population grew from 7,450 in 1841 to 840,473 in 1931.Footnote ¹⁸ While the Chinese comprised the vast majority (96.7 percent) of the population, the 1931 census recorded 27,000 non-Chinese, including 6,684 British civilians, 4,745 Indians, 3,197 “local Portuguese” (today termed Macanese), 2,036 “other Europeans and Americans,” and 837 Eurasians.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite its reputation as a “sleepy colonial backwater,” interwar Hong Kong was in fact quite the opposite.Footnote ²⁰ Its geographical and political position made it a point of convergence of various shifts in geopolitics during the early twentieth century. Strikes and boycotts rooted in Chinese nationalism had paralyzed Hong Kong's economy for much of the 1920s. Only just recovering from the economic aftermath, Hong Kong in the 1930s was confronted with further crises—the effects of the Great Depression, the rise of nationalism and anti-imperialist movements in China, and the spread of nationalist extremism in Asia and Europe.Footnote ²¹ The colony's fate was never more intertwined with the sociopolitical upheavals in China and the British Empire—and with the world economy.

Thanks to Hong Kong's thriving press industry, residents were well informed about political and economic crises taking place outside the colony. Hong Kong was often seen as the hub of journalism in modern China.Footnote ²² By the turn of the 1930s, it was home to at least eleven Chinese-language and four English-language newspapers. Notably, although the British dominated the readership of English-language newspapers, Chinese and other communities played an increasing role in these papers in the twentieth century.Footnote ²³ For instance, in 1901 the Eurasian tycoon Robert Hotung and a group of Chinese investors purchased the Hongkong Telegraph, one of the colony's primary English-language newspapers. The following year, a local Portuguese J. P. Braga, was appointed as its manager, a post he held for the next eight years.Footnote ²⁴ Although its advertisers were mainly British, the Telegraph was known to be sympathetic to non-Britons in Hong Kong.Footnote ²⁵ Its major competitor was the South China Morning Post, founded in 1903 with Chinese capital to “project the viewpoint of the British colonial regime.”Footnote ²⁶ The appointment of Henry Ching as its editor in 1924, however, altered the Post's stance. An Australian Chinese, Ching would lead the Post for thirty-three years with his “often trenchant editorials” that more than once provoked its advertisers to withdraw their business.Footnote ²⁷

It was in such a setting that the debate about the White British League took place in 1933. Cassel's league (sometimes also referred to as the League of British Whites) first became known to the Hong Kong public when the South China Morning Post and the Hongkong Telegraph reported a joint interview with Major Louis Cassel, then editor of a weekly journal, The Critic, on 5 August that year. The reports of the interview in the two papers were identical, hinting that Cassel had placed the article in the papers. The reports opened by stating that there were rumors across town about a secret society formed for the “protection and advancement” of British “whites.” The rumors, the reports stated, led the two newspapers’ representatives to visit Cassel's office, where he confirmed the existence of the league. However, he denied that it was a secret organization formed in Hong Kong. “The Society has its headquarters in the heart of the empire, London, and, far from being secret, it invites publicity,” he claimed. “The movement now under way not only concerns Hongkong, but the whole Empire. Its primary object is to look after the interest of the British white race, and its headquarters are in London.”Footnote ²⁸ When asked why he was its Hong Kong representative, Cassel's “fairly shrewd guess at the reason” was that a “great part of my life has been spent in the Colonies, and though I do not arrogate to myself that I have been so much as a cog in the wheels of forging the links of Empire, I may have been a little breath of the air used in the bellows to heat the links . . . His Majesty and the British Empire have no more loyal subjects than the members of the League of British Whites, otherwise I would on no account be connected with it.”Footnote ²⁹

The league promoted economic protectionism. Cassel stated that it aimed to safeguard “the British Empire for the British White People, who made it and intend to keep it ‘white.’” The major aims of the league were clearly targeted at fostering employment among British subjects in the colonies: “to enact laws to provide jobs for ‘white’ British subjects”; “to do away with unemployed ‘white’ British subjects”; “to create employment for time-expired Service men who wish to remain in the Colony”; “to enact laws forbidding public utility companies from employing foreigners in key positions”; and “to enact laws compelling British registered companies to employ a percentage of ‘white’ British employees in proportion to their capital, turnover, or profits.” In the interview, Cassel particularly criticized the Hong Kong Peak Tramway Company for not employing enough Britons, despite having the financial capacity to do so. One of the league's foremost objectives was to secure and promote the economic and political advantage of British subjects within the colony. Cassel asserted, “This does not necessarily mean the exclusion of the other races. Let them all come. But it means that where there are jobs going which are suitable for British ‘whites,’ men or women, those jobs must be offered to them first.”Footnote ³⁰ What the league advocated, however, reflected a much less inclusive attitude toward the other “races” and communities in the colony. Its plan “to abolish Chinese Justices of the Peace,” “to prevent the exploitation of the Empire Preferential Tariff, either by exporters or importers,” “to abolish the abuse of aliens including Chinese, trading under foreign, and, more especially, bogus British names,” and “to compel private firms to register and publish the names of their partners” displayed a strong determination to exclude other communities from enjoying trading advantages within the British Empire.

Cassel admitted that it would be extremely difficult to compel the current Hong Kong government to enact such stringent and exclusionary laws. The only way to accomplish this, he believed, was to form an autonomous government. In his eyes, the colonial government, which he called “the old order,” was “effete” and too autocratic.Footnote ³¹ He blamed the cadet system—through which a cadre of British administrative officers was trained for service in Hong Kong—for making officials “inclined to look on affairs of State more from the Chinese point of view than from ours . . . when cadets come out from Home they are immediately sidetracked into the yamens of Canton and Macao . . . [and] inoculated with the ancient thoughts of China.”Footnote ³² The Executive and Legislative Councils in Hong Kong always had an official majority in government, and he complained that members all had to vote “as they were told.” He therefore thought the “only remedy” for Hong Kong was to have self-government. In the meantime, Cassel suggested “methods of persuasion” to “bring the recalcitrant into line,” which included boycotting businesses that employed other nationals instead of white Britons.Footnote ³³

The publication of the interview with Cassel on 5 August stimulated a debate in the correspondence columns of the two newspapers.Footnote ³⁴ Despite being short-lived—less than three weeks—the debate provides us with a case study to understand 1930s Hong Kong and the “global 1930s.” As readers wrote letters on whether the colony needed such a radical organization, their writing revealed fears about losing control of the empire—to fascism, to undesirable European “intruders,” and to anti-imperialist movements in China. Although those fears predated this debate, Britons in Hong Kong were confronted with these issues during period over which the debate took place more directly than they had ever been before. Powerfully evocative letters provoked further discussion on issues such as poor whites and British prestige, alien “intrusion” into the empire, and the rights of “coloured Britishers.” The anonymity of the letters—a convention in the Hong Kong press—makes it difficult to determine the identities of the writers. However, anonymity allowed them to be tremendously blunt in expressing their opinions, making their letters valuable sources for candid viewpoints that might otherwise have been muted.Footnote ³⁵ The different nuances of views in the letters suggest a multiplicity of writers, indicating that the debate drew responses from across Hong Kong's reading public.

It should be noted that no records confirming the existence of the White British League have been found in archives or British newspapers in either London or Hong Kong. The interview and several letters to the editor written by Cassel in the following two weeks are the only support for his claims regarding the formation of this organization. He was also the only person who promoted it publicly. The 5 August interview appears to be the sole cause of all the subsequent debate following its publication. This prompts a further question: why did the news receive such an immediate and heated response, when there might not even have been such a political movement?

The Rise of Fascism

To understand how the White British League debate came about, we need first to understand it in the context of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The colony's English-speaking community was well informed about fascist movements across the globe, including those in Britain. Notably, only a year before the White British League's ostensible formation, Sir Oswald Mosley had formed the British Union of Fascists.Footnote ³⁶ Although other groups such as the British Fascisti and the Imperial Fascist League had started in Britain in the 1920s, they were overshadowed by the British Union of Fascists, which acquired a limited level of success in its early years.Footnote ³⁷ Journalists in Hong Kong also followed very closely the formation of organizations closer to home opposing the spread of communism in 1920s Shanghai. These included the Constitutional Defence League, formed in late 1925 to counter communist activism among Chinese workers, and the Shanghai Fascisti, formed in August 1927 with the aim of protecting British interests in Shanghai from communism.Footnote ³⁸ Only months before Cassel's announcement about the White British League, the South China Morning Post had reported on Chinese Marshal Zhang Xueliang's visit to Italy to study fascism. Zhang was an influential figure in Republican China, the effective ruler of northern China, and it was his declaration of support of Chiang Kai-shek that allowed the nominal reunification of China in 1928. His visit therefore sparked much public discussion in Chinese treaty ports and Hong Kong on whether fascist ideology would be applicable to China.Footnote ³⁹

Highly cognizant of global movements, journalists in Hong Kong quickly associated Cassel's views with fascism. The report of 5 August in fact mentioned that he was asked whether he and his organization were running along fascist or Nazi lines.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Hongkong Telegraph's editor, Alfred Hicks, associated Cassel's statement with the British Fascists (formerly the British Fascisti): “‘Our attitude towards the non-British section of the Empire's population is that the interests of the British nation come first and the other Empire peoples should have rights proportionate to their loyalty and usefulness to the British nation.’ This reads amazingly like a resume of the gallant Major's announcements, but is nothing of the kind. It consists of an extract from the officially authorised statement of policy of the British Fascists.”Footnote ⁴¹

In his editorials in the following days criticizing Cassel's league, Hicks argued that fascism was not the political regime for Hong Kong: “We trust and believe that Hongkong is definitely the wrong place in which to attempt to implant the narrow aggressive type of Nationalism which the promoter of the organization preaches . . . Fascism merely means the substitution of a benevolent type of autocracy by something far more alarming . . . If fascism and a puerile spirit of nationalism is the alternative, we have no hesitation in our choice.”Footnote ⁴²

Cassel continuously denied that he was working along fascist or Nazi lines: “There is nothing compulsory about it, and the Society is not subversive in any way.”Footnote ⁴³ On the other hand, he showed sympathy for Hitler's racial supremacism: “On that point, and that point only, I agree with Herr Hitler. I am a Briton and proud of it and I believe we Britons are superior to any race on earth.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The limited surviving records of Cassel's writings and speeches make it hard to examine his ideological framework more closely, but their rhetoric suggests that the global rise of fascism precipitated his political views.Footnote ⁴⁵ The pride that Cassel took in the empire, his endorsement of the “biological” superiority of the “British race,” his open sympathy for Nazism, and his wish to uphold British privilege against alien intrusion all emulate characteristics of contemporary fascism.

The debate on the White British League soon became intertwined with discussion of whether fascism could be applied to the British Empire. A letter from Empire Crusader argued that “many would like to see fascism established under the British Flag.” The writer believed that British fascism was “the only one under which Imperial Government should work.” The writer denied being a fascist or a member of the league, not thinking it necessary for such an organization to exist in Hong Kong at that time, but added, “I do, however believe that such organizations will become necessary later. Then many who are not at present will become fascists.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Journalists at the Hongkong Telegraph and South China Morning Post clearly believed that fascism would harm an empire that was international and multiethnic. Hicks thought that under the current political circumstances, “most peoples will have to make a choice between Fascism and Democracy.” For him the choice was clear: “In our view, Capitalism is doomed and the only hope for the future is the gradual development of a new world order of society with an international outlook. Socialism is arid. Communism of the Moscow type is against human nature. Fascism means an end to liberty. Another solution is necessary, and it must be based on the proposition that the true aim of the society is the good life of every individual.”Footnote ⁴⁷

While the South China Morning Post's editor, Henry Ching, expressed it more subtly, his view that fascism was not suitable for the British Empire was still obvious. In his editorial of 22 August, he decided to analyze the origins of fascism, because “in recent controversy Fascist rule has been hotly discussed.” Arguing that fascism meant a “constant threat of war,” he concluded, “Internationally considered, the ‘Fascist’ is no friend of humanity: he is too much his own friend. Nationally considered, he is only tolerable if he consents not to live too long.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Ching's assertion was uniquely forceful compared with contemporary media coverage of fascism in Britain. Fascism had appeal for some in the metropole in the 1920s and the early 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1933, the British Union of Fascists was steadily expanding and would reach a membership of no less than thirty thousand by the following year. The British Union of Fascists gained increasing support until its meeting in Olympia in June 1934, during which some of its members inflicted violence upon anti-fascist interrupters. Known as the Olympia Rally, the event badly hurt the party's public image.Footnote ⁵⁰ Due to the personal fame of its founder, Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists received more press coverage than previous British fascist organizations, but prior to the rally, more press attention was given to Mosley's family than to his political beliefs. Even when the British press expressed opposition to the British Union of Fascists after the Olympia rally, the criticisms seldom extended to other forms of fascism. Although views varied according to party lines, the mainstream British press in the early 1930s, with the exception of the Daily Herald, generally showed tolerance toward fascist regimes in Italy and Germany—if not admiration of them.Footnote ⁵¹

On the other hand, the Hong Kong press in 1933 not only devoted significant attention to the rise of fascist regimes around the world but actively denounced the growing trend. As Bryna Goodman and Su Lin Lewis have argued, by linking together a transnational public readership and exposing them to a variety of political perspectives, the press in Asian port cities provided a platform for overlapping “print-worlds” to discuss modern ideas of identity, citizenship, and society.Footnote ⁵² Expressing the firm belief that fascism was not what the empire needed, the writings of Hicks and Ching were representative of contemporary press discourses on modernity and liberalism that were taking place in Asian port cities during the 1930s.

In articulating their opposition to fascism and racial nationalism, some readers refuted the core components of Cassel's political views. Writing to the Hong Kong Telegraph, Blonde Beast stated, “Fascism simply means tyranny, a dictatorship by a group.” While at first glance the letter appeared to be simply a condemnation of fascism, it was also a critique of racial nationalism. Blonde Beast questioned Cassel's white nationalist view. Sarcastically calling him “the new saviour of the white race,” the writer asked, “But what is it, or who is it, that the Major feels superior to? And can he produce any evidence to show that in his life and career he has demonstrated such superiority? Handsome is as handsome does.”Footnote ⁵³ In opposing racial nationalism, the letter pointedly criticized the narrow, racially exclusive mindset that Cassel had demonstrated in his interview. As sections below show, the debate throws light on an increasing recognition of the British status held by non-white subjects.

Such rhetoric about fascism and racial nationalism hints at a colonial perspective that existing literature on fascism and empire has largely overlooked. Fascism in interwar Britain is a much-explored topic, and attention has been given to the role that the empire played in the rise of fascism in Britain.Footnote ⁵⁴ Paul Stocker, for instance, has examined how, as a result of Britain's imperial culture, British fascist ideologies differed from those in other European countries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Other scholars have explored the influences of fascism in the Dominions.Footnote ⁵⁶ British fascism, for instance, affected the ideology of the New Guard, a monarchist and right-wing organization formed in Sydney, known most famously for instructing a member to upstage, on horseback, the premier of New South Wales by cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. But less—if anything—has been said about fascism in the wider empire.

Despite Cassel's continuous denial of following fascist ideologies, there is no doubt that fascism profoundly affected the debate. Not only were his political views parallel to the general traits of fascist ideologies but the fear of fascism in the empire was the prime generator of editors’ and readers’ radical reactions to the claim that a White British League had started in the colony. While the contemporary mainstream press in the metropole was relatively lenient toward fascist movements in Britain and Europe, readers and journalists in Hong Kong felt otherwise. Along with its discussion on the rights of “coloured” British subjects (examined below), this debate allows us to understand how living in a multiethnic colony allowed some in Hong Kong to foreground and applaud multiculturalism and appreciate the Britishness of people of color.

Cassel and Treaty Port Settlers

Cassel's talk of economic protectionism was another reason why his interview generated such a vigorous public exchange. Both his conscious use of inflammatory language and his deliberate attempt to associate economic issues in the colony with the arrival of European immigrants prompted Hong Kong Britons to discuss the economic threats they faced and to debate whether the colony and the wider empire needed to safeguard British interests. We cannot fully understand this debate and Cassel's role in it without understanding the man and the colonial society that he came from.

In fact, we know very little about Major Louis Cassel. The adjective that his colleagues, his friends, and writers frequently used to describe him was “mysterious.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Even his wife, an American whom he met in California, later admitted that she remained puzzled about the life of the man she had been married to for more than ten years: “There was no doubt,” she wrote in a memoir forty years after his death, “that he was a very mysterious person.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed he was. No records about him before 1915 have been found in archives and newspapers. From scattered records and the biography written by his wife, we know that he claimed to be born in England in 1872, although no birth record has been located. He served in the military in Hong Kong briefly between 1915 and 1920, but it was not a regular appointment: he joined as a staff officer (deputy assistant adjutant) in 1915, worked his way up to press censor, and received an OBE on the “special list” in 1919 for his work for the Army's South China Command.Footnote ⁵⁹ He left the army and obtained a coal concession agreement in 1920 as a representative of a syndicate with the Guangdong Province government, then controlled by one of the Guangxi “warlords.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The agreement was profitable; Cassel held the right to a monopoly over railway building and mine development in the province and received an annual £5,000 royalty payment every year from Jardine Matheson & Co.—his share of the profits from the province's yearly coal output. He was a member of the Committee of the Hongkong Automobile Association and the owner of a new Cadillac. He paid off all of his wife's debts at a stroke without any difficulty shortly before they were married in the United States in 1923. He even purchased the house that his wife's parents had been renting.Footnote ⁶¹

However, Cassel's private circumstances went downhill as Chinese nationalists began to force foreigners out of China. The Guomindang's Nationalist revolution of 1926–28 was indeed an unfinished revolution. Firstly, although warlords such as Zhang Xueliang, Yan Xishan, and Feng Yuxiang accepted on paper the authority of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, they retained most of their former control over their respective regions and armies in the province. Secondly, although after 1927 the Nationalist government had launched a program to drive foreign imperialism out of China in order to restore the country's sovereignty and pride, this effort too remained uncompleted. Almost all preexisting treaties with foreign powers and the legal principle of extraterritoriality, which enabled foreigners not to be subject to Chinese laws but to the laws of their own nations, remained intact. Not that foreign interests in China were unaffected: the Chinese successfully regained sovereignty in various areas.Footnote ⁶² Sir Cecil Clementi, then governor of Hong Kong, admitted in 1926 that “the old order in China is changing, and the times are sadly out of joint.”Footnote ⁶³ Like the British retreat from their concession in Hankou, Cassel's loss of his coal concession was a manifestation of this changing order.

By 1928, the Guangdong government was refusing to recognize Cassel's coal concession, putting the once rich and influential major through great financial hardship. In a letter to his wife, he summarized how this had happened almost overnight:

His concession never was restored, leaving him more or less financially stranded. He ceased sending remittances to his wife, and his overdue bills became so high that the Hong Kong Club, then Hong Kong's most prestigious and exclusive gentlemen's club, terminated his seventeen-year-long membership. In 1931, he wrote to his wife, “China has gone from bad to worse and, as far as I can see, I with it. Unemployment is rife all over the world.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1932, he started his weekly journal, The Critic, in which he discussed topics ranging from “Local Firms Victimized by Nanking's Folly” and the “Scandalous Neglect of British Officers” to the “Meaning of Gandhi's Fast.”Footnote ⁶⁶ He claimed that The Critic had a wide readership but brought him very little in the way of money. Friends had to pay for his passage back to England for cancer treatment in 1934, and when he died the following year, he left extensive debts and about £10 in cash.Footnote ⁶⁷

While it was the change of political leadership in China that led to the dramatic change in his personal fortunes, Cassel clearly believed that the Hong Kong government could, and should, have offered him more help in regaining recognition for his concession. In a letter to his acquaintance William Shenton, a member of both the Executive Council and Legislative Council in Hong Kong in 1932, he wrote resentfully about how the colonial secretary had once promised to provide official support for his concession—“even to the use of force”—but never provided such assistance when needed: “The Government, once they had got the financial group in power, ignored me, and even then I never said a word or even hinted that it would be wiser if they helped me. I subordinated my own interests to those of the State, and I always have.”Footnote ⁶⁸

In many ways, Cassel was not only a Hong Kong Briton but a treaty port settler as well. His circumstances greatly resembled those of the “Shanghailanders,” a group of treaty port settlers studied by Robert Bickers. As Bickers has argued, treaty port settlers were not temporary sojourners in a foreign land; they saw themselves as settlers.Footnote ⁶⁹ They saw their identity as indeed “always British and imperial,” but also “local, imagined.”Footnote ⁷⁰ At moments of crisis, such as when rising Chinese nationalism threatened British interests in China, they identified themselves more strongly with their local British community and defined themselves against officials and diplomats who prioritized Sino-British relations over the interest of British settlers living in China. This complicated, multilayered identity explains Cassel's outward loyalty to the British Empire while he displayed obvious disdain for Hong Kong's colonial administration and his desire for autonomous government.

Shanghailanders’ livelihood depended on the Chinese treaty ports remaining under foreign jurisdiction. Cassel's livelihood was similarly tied to his colonial status, and China was all he had. He vehemently refused to move to the United States where his wife was working: “With no friends, no work and no club to go to! No.”Footnote ⁷¹ Like the Shanghailanders, he was completely reliant on the privileges that Britons enjoyed through the treaty port system. When such privileges came under threat as anti-imperialism spread through China during the mid-1920s, he, like the Shanghailanders, was faced with the end of his livelihood.

Understanding Cassel as a Shanghailander is important, because it explains his reasons for later claiming to have formed the White British League. When he realized that the British state was not going to preserve his privileges as a colonial subject, he sought to use the press to marshal public support for his criticism of the Hong Kong government. By talking about the supposed racial and economic threats facing Britons in China, he aimed to incite disquiet among the English reading public in the colony, as the Shanghailanders did when they formed the British Residents’ Association during the crisis over treaty reforms in 1931.Footnote ⁷² The weekly publication of The Critic as his platform to “discuss politics” was one example, and his alleged formation of the White British League was another.Footnote ⁷³ Cassel might have been sincere when he claimed that only an autonomous government in Hong Kong could help its resident Britons to protect their own “kith and kin.” However, he was more likely trying to use the press to mobilize support among the Hong Kong reading public for those British settlers in mainland China whose interests were threatened by the rise of Chinese nationalism and the Great Depression.

He succeeded, in the sense that he provoked impassioned public debate by articulating the supposed economic threats facing Britons in the colony and in China more widely. Britons in Hong Kong who felt that the Hong Kong government did not prioritize their assumed rights wrote to newspapers in support of Cassel's proposed initiatives. Journalists and readers vociferously debated what was best for the economic interests of the colony. Concerned with British unemployment and “intruders” from other European states, their discussion reflected not only the economic anxieties that preoccupied Hong Kong Britons but also how Britons on the colonial periphery defined Britishness as a racial and class identity against other Europeans.

Poor Whites and British Prestige

Much of the debate surrounding Cassel's interview in 1933 centered on the anxiety concerning British unemployment in Hong Kong. Although some doubted whether unemployment was actually a serious problem for the local British population, all those who wrote on the issue showed concern about having “poor whites” in the colony. As imperial authorities consciously constructed colonial hierarchies, they ensured that whiteness was never simply about appearances and ancestry but was also about having a “respectable” social status to consolidate their asserted superiority over people of color.Footnote ⁷⁴ Colonial authorities in India, for instance, categorized both Eurasians and lower-class Europeans (poor whites), despite their “unmixed” ethnicity, into a single social grouping—the domiciled community.Footnote ⁷⁵ Were Britons beyond the colonial administration in the empire aware that, in addition to being white, they also needed to meet a minimum standard of affluence in order to be considered respectable among their European peers? Did they readily accept such social expectations? In following the public discussion about “poor whites,” this section explores how Britons overseas constructed the edifice of respectability.

Such anxieties had been looming over the local English-language reading public since the 1920s. Before Cassel alleged to have founded the White British League in 1933, letters had appeared in the correspondence column of the South China Morning Post discussing British unemployment in Hong Kong. A “Britisher's Grievance” in 1928, for instance, revealed how a British resident “with excellent references, and a wife and family to support” was unable to find employment for two months.Footnote ⁷⁶ A reader in 1931 also observed that “there are at present a number of Britishers out of employment.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Only months before the White British League's alleged formation, local newspapers ran reports on three white Britons who had been arrested and charged under the Vagrancy Act, which empowered the governor to send any non-Chinese persons without a “visible means of subsistence” to the House of Detention.Footnote ⁷⁸ Practically a prison—its inhabitants were only allowed to go out to look for employment if they had completed work assignments given to them by the superintendent of police—it was actually located in one.Footnote ⁷⁹ In August 1933, Cassel's Critic published an article featuring a “local Ex-Policeman's Terrible Ordeal,” apparently discussing in detail the experience of an unemployed Briton in the “House.”Footnote ⁸⁰

This press coverage of unemployment was accompanied by public discourse about the need to prioritize British job seekers in the colony. An “unemployed” Briton wrote in 1932 that he was “more than a little disgusted” at the practice in which “opportunities in government departments and reputable British firms are given in preference to people of any but British nationality.”Footnote ⁸¹ In July 1933, only a month before Cassel's supposed formation of the league, a local businessman named Sylvester Firth-Bernard wrote to the South China Morning Post recruiting members for his Association of British Traders. Despite primarily being formed for the “promotion and protection of British business interests in the Colony,” it also aimed to “open up every possible avenue for the employment of Britishers in Hong Kong.” Interestingly, Firth-Bernard acknowledged that “others had been working on this problem for some time” and that “Major Cassel [had] an extraordinarily sound grip of the position.”Footnote ⁸²

With some popular support, when newspapers reported the apparent formation of the league, many welcomed the initiative. For instance, a letter-writer going by the pseudonym Briton wrote, “Yes! It is high time a White Britons Society was formed.” Such a society, Briton believed, would help unemployed Britons in Hong Kong: “There is, unfortunately, a large number of Britons here, who have absolutely no niche in the Colony . . . A couple of years ago, I met an Englishman who was so illiterate that—incredible as it may seem— he could do barely more than write his own name; he had been ‘sacked’ . . . and was loudly complaining because he could not find another [job].”Footnote ⁸³ Possibly a government employee, Briton criticized the colonial administration for posting jobs vacancies with the Post Office internally instead of allowing external unemployed British applicants to apply. Briton considered such practices “decidedly exasperating, [as] they allow a man to reach a state of penury, then calmly ‘pinch’ him for vagrancy and lodge him in the ‘House.’”Footnote ⁸⁴

Such rhetoric in support of Cassel's radical proposals implied that white British subjects should have an elevated social status compared with all others in the colony. Briton believed that, “strictly speaking, every Briton in Hong Kong should be holding a responsible position.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In a House of Commons meeting in May that year, Gordon Hall Caine, a British Conservative MP, had asked the secretary of state for the colonies about the number of impoverished Europeans receiving support from the European Unemployment Fund in Malaya and whether the British government would repatriate Britons there who could not be locally supported.Footnote ⁸⁶ Referring to this meeting, Briton complained that the British government did not assist unemployed Britons overseas: “Hong Kong . . . was originally intended as an outlet for British trade, not for disposal of surplus population.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Another writer, under the name Cast Off, agreed with Briton that “a ‘poor white’ British class has been existing for years in Hong Kong”: “If we go just a step into ‘class gymnastics’ we will find many married Britishers with deplorable remuneration, not to mention married British ‘Tommies’ with much less, struggling along in this Colony and faring worse than second class Chinese clerks and their concubines.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Grumbling that the Chinese enjoyed a higher standard of living than some segments of the British population in Hong Kong, this letter underlines a “colonial myth” that simply associates whiteness with economic superiority. While not uncommon in the empire, this axiom was far from the historical reality, as Harald Fischer-Tiné has shown with his case study of the “white subalterns”—soldiers, seamen, railway, workers, and sex workers of “unmixed” European ancestry—in British India.Footnote ⁸⁹ White but “low and licentious,” these working-class white men and women were so visible in the colonial society that both state and non-official agents deemed them a threat to the British rule of India. The perception that their ambiguous “whiteness” challenged the asserted colonial authority of the British in turn motivated authorities to expend extensive effort in putting them under social control to reinforce the colonial myth of white supremacy.

While others argued that fears regarding British unemployment in the colony were largely unfounded, they still appeared to believe to some extent in this colonial myth. Henry Ching, the Australian Chinese editor of the South China Morning Post, argued that the case made by Cassel and his supporters was deceptive, since “most British adults in the colony were in fact in employment.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The 1931 census supported Ching's view, as it recorded that the majority of the “European”—predominantly British—population were in professional occupations (as medical practitioners and engineers, for example) or in the commercial and finance industry.Footnote ⁹¹ Accordingly, Ching dismissed the economic grievances of Cassel and his supporters as “a few people in unfortunate circumstances [making] a lot of noise.”Footnote ⁹² Ching also believed that introducing compulsory regulations for the employment of British subjects could produce an opposite effect from what it intended: “The total population, according to the census, is about 900,000, and, in view of the fact that the Briton requires a certain standard of living, the question is whether the body economic can support many more. In different ways it would be excellent could we increase the number of British residents. Any effort, however, to force the pace of absorption must result in reducing the living standard—perhaps in creating a ‘poor white’ class largely British.”Footnote ⁹³

In this debate, we see a determination to maintain the respectability of Britons on the colonial periphery. Colonial authorities may have constructed a notion of “respectable” Britons, but the debate shows that such notions were not only unilaterally imposed on Britons travelling, living, and working in the colonial periphery: Britons overseas internalized these notions and were in fact active in preserving such “respectability.” Whether or not they believed in economic protectionism, they still attempted to maintain the racial hierarchy that ensured the prestige and economic primacy of white British subjects in colonies such as Hong Kong.

“Intrusion” of Other Europeans

As global unemployment skyrocketed after the Great Depression, the blaming of immigrants for “stealing” already scarce jobs became an international phenomenon not only in the United States but also in the Caribbean and Latin American countries and Asia.Footnote ⁹⁴ Britons residing in treaty ports in China were not immune from this mentality. Sophie Loy-Wilson and Marcia Reynders Ristaino have explored the experience of white “latecomers” who left their home countries for jobs and opportunities in Shanghai during the Depression years, as well as the “White Russians” who left their homeland because of opposition to the “Reds.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Nevertheless, we know little about the interactions between Britons and the wider European population in the empire. Did the British welcome the arrival of their white counterparts? Or did they, like those in the metropole, see the white newcomers as the cause of the hardships they were facing?

In 1934, Hong Kong governor William Peel formed an economic commission to study local effects of the Great Depression. The commission discovered that, compared to neighboring regions, the colony had suffered far less from the consequences of the economic crisis: “One does not see processions of unemployed or an undue number of empty premises and shops,” it observed.Footnote ⁹⁶ It also concluded that the population's “standard of well being” had been “well maintained.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Although the annual government reports regarding social and economic conditions in the colony for the years 1932 and 1933 noted that the prices of most goods imported from Europe were suffering from the fluctuating exchange rate, “no noticeable effect was apparent in the local prices of articles imported from England.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet while the lives of Britons in Hong Kong were generally no worse off than before, they felt that the economic downturn would likely affect their prestige, if it had not done so already. As discussed above, British unemployment was a pressing concern shared by Cassel and his supporters. Their commentary concerning the threat that other Europeans assumedly posed to Britons in the colony highlights the precarious relationships among the white population in Hong Kong. Britishness was defined in contrast to other Europeans, especially those whom they saw as potentially undermining their prestige—or even worse, presaging their own future.

Some of Cassel's proposed initiatives, such as the abolition of Chinese justices of the peace and the prosecution of Chinese aliens trading under bogus British names, demonstrate a sense of distrust and hostility toward Chinese in the colony. As scholars have pointed out, the Hong Kong government intended to promote more Chinese within the colonial administration in the 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁹ (Similarly, in the early twentieth century, the government of British India underwent “Indianisation”—a term first used by former Indian politician Hriday Nath Kunzru in 1917 to refer to the process in which Indian officers were promoted to more senior ranks in the government formerly only available to Europeans.Footnote ¹⁰⁰) Might anticipation of this policy have been the reason why Cassel proposed adopting protectionist measures to guard British interests in the colony, or was he mostly concerned with ensuring Chinese inferiority in the colonial racial hierarchy? If we look at his suggested “methods of persuasion” to be undertaken before Hong Kong could have an autonomous government, it appears that the Chinese were not the group whom he worried the most about:

This specific reference to Russians reflects how Cassel perceived other Europeans in the colony to be a threat to working-class Britons there. This view was also apparent in a letter he wrote to the Hong Kong Telegraph a week later:

Cassel was not alone in the colony in his ambivalence toward other Europeans. Cast Off, one of his supporters, maintained that “this Colony is fast being choked up with other nations’ job seekers . . . particularly noticeable of late is the influx of Russians (both sexes) and Germans.” Cast Off believed that local Britons were at a competitive disadvantage compared to these relative newcomers: “Britishers in Hong Kong strongly deprecate the all too frequent practice of giving preferential treatment to foreigners because they are cheaper to employ and easier to get rid of.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Another reader regarded Cast Off's opinion as being “very close to [that of] all Britons in the Colony.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A reader using the pseudonym Briton elaborated further on the strain that a growing Russian community placed on the colony's job market: “Within the last three years Russians have been arriving in such numbers, that the district round and about Hankow Road is known to Kowloon residents as ‘Little Moscow,’ and I am surprised that a Russian newspaper has not yet made its appearance. These Russians are not living on pre-Revolution wealth: they've all got jobs here.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another writer agreed that “now is not the time to have any foreigners intruding our premises, Russians in particular,” stating that “no one can deny the fact that the above-mentioned are occupying positions which should have been filled by Britishers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The comment clearly reflected the perception that other Europeans were intruders in the Hong Kong job market.

These particular references to Russians relate to a more deep-rooted apprehension about the Russian diaspora in China. The Russian October Revolution and subsequent civil war drove many Russians to leave their homeland. By the mid-1930s, their population in China (outside of Manchuria) numbered about thirty thousand.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the eyes of the foreigners already living there, they were not particularly welcome. Britons and other Europeans considered that these White Russians undermined their “white prestige.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Marcia Ristaino explains why the Russian presence was seen as an embarrassment to the Europeans in China: “These impoverished refugees were white and yet willing to do menial labour alongside Chinese.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

While they were seen as a threat to the livelihood of working-class Britons in Hong Kong, Russians and Germans were not in fact a significant portion of the population. From the start of the twentieth century, Britons formed the majority of the colony's non-Chinese population. Among the 5,061 European and American residents in Hong Kong in 1906, 3,709 were British.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Russians and Germans, the two European immigrant communities of most concern to the resident British population, made up only a small part of the non-Chinese population. Germans had once been the second-largest European community in the colony after the British, but the First World War completely changed that. After war broke out, German women and children were expelled, and men of military age were interned until the war's end.Footnote ¹¹¹ Although some Germans returned to the colony after the war, the community's size never quite recovered. The 1921 census recorded only three Germans and thirty-six Russians in the city.Footnote ¹¹² The 1931 census recorded 179 Germans and 127 Russians. If we compare the 1931 figures with the fact that there were then 6,684 British civilians in the colony, it is hard to imagine that these 306 people (only 15 percent of the non-British European population) posed any great threat to the livelihood of Britons in Hong Kong.Footnote ¹¹³

Yet fears of “alien penetration” were indeed pervasive among Hong Kong Britons throughout much of the interwar era. Such concerns had been voiced in local newspapers since the 1920s. An impassioned discussion about “the increasing numbers of Russians who are flocking into the Colony” took place in the South China Morning Post in September 1925.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1928, a reader wrote to complain about losing out to other Europeans in the local job market: “At one leading British firm I was informed that there was no vacancy at present, but my name was taken for the first vacancy which might occur. Judge, then, my surprise when I found, three days later, that a Russian who was absolutely inexperienced at the work had been given the vacancy. At many other firms I found Belgians, Russians, Germans, in fact every nationality other than British, were employed.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Three years later, another reader complained that “British firms are employing so called White Russians, to a certain extent because they are cheaper than the Britishers.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ These disgruntled Hong Kong Britons not only expressed their concerns in the press but also raised them with the colonial administration and more senior-level authorities in London. In 1934, Sir Alfred Knox, MP, questioned the secretary of state for the colonies, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, about the employment of Russians in the Hong Kong police force.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Historians of immigrants and minorities in Britain have pointed out that the presence of “other” Europeans—such as Germans and East European Jews—in Britain helped shape British national identities.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As Hong Kong Britons similarly distinguished between themselves and European “aliens” in Hong Kong, their discussion of this dynamic can enhance our understanding about British encounters with other whites in the wider empire. Even though Hong Kong Britons usually referred to themselves as “Europeans,” they did not always regard other Europeans as part of their community. Just as Britons in mainland China started to define themselves against the newly arrived White Russians after 1917, Hong Kong Britons began to see other Europeans in the colony as intruders in their imperial territory.Footnote ¹¹⁹

At first glance, these concerns may seem only an issue of nationalism. It is worth noting, however, that in prewar Hong Kong, white Britons were increasingly seen as a distinctive “race” within the European population. Authorities often used the term “race” instead of “nation” in official publications when referring to the British population. Census reports between 1897 and 1931, for instance, always presented the British “races”—English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and “other natives of British race not defined as above”—separately from the other European and American “races.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Within the wider British community there, the term “European” was undeniably used as a euphemism for “white.” But after the turn of the twentieth century it was also evident that white Britons defined themselves as a distinctive “race” against other Europeans. Journalists often wrote about the mission and supposed supremacy of “our race”—the “British race.”Footnote ¹²¹ This usage echoes with the statement that Cassel made during the White British League debate: “I believe we Britons are superior to any race on earth.”Footnote ¹²² If we situate the debate within these perceptions about the “British race,” it is then clear that the debate was not only about nationalism but also about racism.

While drawing a line between themselves and some other Europeans, Hong Kong Britons engaged as well in discussions regarding whose interests a British colony should serve. Those worried about Russian and German “intrusion” clearly believed that Hong Kong, a British colony, should serve the interests of the British whites. Cassel stated openly in his interview that the British Empire should be “for the British White People, who made it and intend to keep it ‘white.’”Footnote ¹²³ His supporter, Briton, complained that it was common practice for “local concerns [to] give preference to anybody but a Briton,” even though, he maintained, it was “an indisputable fact that any Briton has a prior right over any other nationality to employment in this Colony.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Some argued that a British colony like Hong Kong should prioritize British interests, basing this view on the hiring policies of other European empires. Another Briton, for instance, wrote, “Take for example the Dutch Colonies, the French Colonies and also the Portuguese Colonies, and I venture to say there are no Britishers employed in any of them.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Cast Off agreed: “If a Britisher desires to land in the Dutch East Indies to sell his firm's manufactures, in addition to the heavy tax levied on the goods, he has to cough up a head tax of about 260 guilders before he can land for any length of time and that's not the end of it. This is but one instance of what goes on in other colonies.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Cast Off condemned the Hong Kong government for not following similar practices, blaming the influx of aliens on the failure to introduce such measures. “So long as [his] passport is in order, and the foreigner has a few dollars in his pocket, anybody can land free and unmolested in HK and almost do as he likes, for this Colony in the foreigners’ eyes, is simply a ‘walk on velvet.’” The writer ended the letter with a telling comment implying that Hong Kong had failed in its mission as a British colony: “This British Colony: how British is it? Almost.”Footnote ¹²⁷

The anxieties underlying this question reflected fading British interests in China more widely. Cast Off was alluding to the rhetorical question “This British Colony: how British is it?,” in Henry Ching's editorial of several days earlier. Ching agreed that the colony was insufficiently British in its ownership and composition: “As to real estate, the Colony is now almost entirely ‘owned’ by Chinese, and, as to public companies, Britain seems to retain only the narrowest margin of control.” He added, “As a naval and military station purely, the Colony can be all British. As a trading entrepot it can only be as British as British capital can make it, and as competition permits.”Footnote ¹²⁸ He therefore responded to his own question, “‘Not at all,’ some Britons will reply, nor observe that the answer condemns them too,” implying that his view was that the British in Hong Kong caused the problem. We should note that this “problem”—which echoed Cassel's criticisms concerning “Chinese trading under bogus British names” and a lack of capital inflow from Britain—was a fairly typical aspect of the British colonial experience in China and not unique to Hong Kong by any means.Footnote ¹²⁹

However, one reader, Peace Lover, writing to the South China Morning Post, worried that the introduction of economic nationalism in Hong Kong could have negative repercussions on British interests in foreign concessions throughout the rest of China: “My point is, if in the British colony of Hongkong, the British Government enforce that British occupy outstanding positions in all big concerns with Chinese or American or French capital, what will the American Government do in American territories and the French Government, in the French possessions? The result will be revenge and retaliation which are enemies to peace.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Such references to other foreign powers in China are revealing. While discussion of “European intruders” undoubtedly relates to racism, it also points to an awareness of competing imperialisms. Even though not everyone agreed that the government should prioritize British interests through compulsion, the debate reached the consensus that a British colony like Hong Kong should do its best to serve British interests in order to remain competitive as a colony. But what exactly constituted “British” interests, especially in an empire in which those of non-white ancestry were also considered British subjects?

Rights of Other British Subjects

While previous sections show how some Britons in Hong Kong articulated a notion of Britishness as a racial identity exclusive to “British Whites,” the 1933 debate also highlights the increasing recognition of the “British” status held by non-white subjects in the empire. Prior to 1948, all who owed allegiance to the crown by virtue of being born in the empire were entitled to be British subjects.Footnote ¹³¹ Hundreds of thousands of those born in Hong Kong were—legally speaking—as “British” as subjects from the British Isles, regardless of their ancestry. While Cassel and his supporters advocated the protection and advancement only of those they considered to be “British whites,” many questioned whether such a narrow definition of Britishness could apply in the multiethnic empire in which they resided. These skeptics included some “coloured Britishers,” a term one participant of the debate used to describe individuals who, like the writer, were people of color and British nationals.Footnote ¹³²

Possibly due to the government's censorship of the local Chinese press—empowered by the Emergency Regulations Ordinance, a legacy of the strikes in the 1920s—Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong did not report on the formation of the League of British Whites.Footnote ¹³³ It is therefore hard to know whether the wider Chinese population was aware of its existence, let alone their views on the radical reforms proposed by Cassel. However, we can still examine the reactions of Chinese readers of English-language newspapers in Hong Kong. One “British Chinese” reader clearly took issue with Cassel's racist ideas and the implied revocation of British subject status for the colony's non-white population: “Have the coloured British ever failed the Empire in any manner of way, in peace or in war, that a sharp line is to be drawn dividing Whites and non-Whites? . . . couldn't the League of British Whites spread its Fascist-like wings without too much flutter and flapping and without injecting the serum of race hatred and prejudice?”Footnote ¹³⁴

Lusimania, presumably a Portuguese reader, deplored the notion of providing protection only for “British Whites,” considering that “coloured Britishers” had contributed just as much to the empire: “When the whole world was fighting Germany, why wasn't a White British League formed? When the Gurkhas and Eurasian Britishers were fighting side by side with the White Britishers why wasn't a league formed? There was no discrimination between white or coloured Britishers, so why now?”Footnote ¹³⁵ Even some “British whites” wrote to the press to advocate for the interests of “coloured Britishers.” Despite speaking out against Russian “intrusion” in the colony, Another Briton considered the league to be an infeasible project, as it neglected to preserve the rights of locally born, non-white British subjects: “Though appreciating his scheme for fostering employment for the British Whites in Hongkong, the majority of British Whites in Hongkong would never tolerate the idea of cutting out the Hongkong-born British subjects, which of course is unthinkable, and as far as one can gather the Hongkong born Eurasians and Chinese are as proud of the Colony as we Britishers are, and such a scheme could only be workable for British subjects only, and might be given the name ‘British League’ instead of ‘White British League.’”Footnote ¹³⁶

Claiming to be “proud of . . . Hongkong-born British subjects,” Another Briton believed that “it is just as important for the British Whites to be in perfect harmony with the British-born subjects of Hongkong as it is for them to be in harmony with us.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Peace Lover asked that newspapers refrain in future from publishing letters that expressed views similar to Cassel's, because it would “kill the Chinese love for the British and the British love for the Chinese.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Those sharing similar views on censoring inflammatory letters did not necessarily do so out of a belief that non-white British subjects deserved equal treatment in their own right but were instead concerned about preserving political stability and economic prosperity. A presumably British reader using the pseudonym Goodwill wrote,

Calling the league “dangerously provocative,” the writer worried that Cassel might arouse the Chinese to boycott British goods or to mobilize in other ways that would have a negative impact on British interests.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

If we consider these letters alongside those in earlier sections, we can see how an internationalist view enriched notions of Britishness in the interwar period. A growing literature sees colonial-era port cities as sites of cosmopolitanism where regional and racial boundaries broke down.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Although colonialism generated and intensified ethnic divides through its construction of racial hierarchies, the increasing flows of people and ideas it brought about also encouraged some to appreciate multiethnic interactions and an international outlook. Using the case study of the overseas Chinese community in Penang,Footnote ¹⁴² scholars have noted that the English-language press became a tool for many who sought to reform hierarchies of race and nationality under the colonial order.Footnote ¹⁴³

The White British League debate shows how such discourses emerged among both white and colonial subjects. One of the two identifiable contributors to this discussion was the Post's editor, Henry Ching. Born in Queensland to a white Australian woman and a Chinese storekeeper from Hong Kong, Ching had—as his obituary in the Post would state—“learned a great deal about the ways of the world” since his childhood.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ His world, like that of many Australian Chinese at the time, was turned upside down by the White Australian policy, a set of laws and administrative policies targeted at preventing people of color (most specifically Asians and Pacific Islanders) from immigrating to Australia before the Second World War. Racist assumptions regarding Chinese and Pacific Islanders stealing economic opportunities had underpinned the implementation since the 1850s of various exclusionary acts restricting Asian immigration to the six colonies in Australia. After Australia became a federation, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and subsequent laws reinforced the policy—and, effectively, the notion that Australia was to be a white outpost of the British Empire.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Such a hostile environment affected Ching's family: his father was forced out of business, leading to the premature end of Ching's education at the age of fifteen. Much like the Chinese residents of the Straits Settlements, Ching pledged loyalty to the British Empire; he had intended to join the British army in Egypt during the First World War, although instead he took his terminally ill father to see Hong Kong one last time before his death. What was originally intended to be a short visit eventually led to long-term residence for Ching. He began working for the Post in 1916 as a reporter and was promoted to editor in 1924, a position he held for the next three decades.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Along with other “coloured Britishers” who contributed to the 1933 debate (such as Another Chinese and Lusimania), Ching envisaged an empire that was both liberal and international, and he articulated this ideal through the debate with Cassel and his supporters.

Hong Kong Britons such as Another Briton, Blonde Beast, and the Hongkong Telegraph's editor, Alfred Hicks, held a similar vision to that of Ching. Hicks, born in Cornwall, came to Hong Kong in 1908 and lived there until his death in 1937. Much like Another Briton and Blonde Beast, Hicks explicitly set forth in his editorials his strong opposition to fascist and ethnocentric ideologies. More than simply believing that interracial harmony was a crucial component of maintaining the imperial equilibrium, he affirmed the idea that others in the empire were just as “British” as white subjects. He and those who sympathized with his perspective were keen to protect the rights of these “coloured” British subjects—or, at the very least, keen enough to oppose initiatives that sought to disenfranchise them.

As some Hong Kong Britons articulated a desire to protect their own “kith and kin” through economic protectionism, they attempted to define exactly what constituted “British interests” in the colony, and more importantly, who was “British.” Given our understanding of the 1930s as a decade rife with nationalist agitation, not many would be surprised by the jingoistic exclusiveness voiced by Cassel and his supporters. But perhaps what is most striking about the White British League debate is that it also exhibits the voices of those contesting this insular mentality. As Britons in Hong Kong debated the boundaries of being “British,” their discussion revealed how Britishness was understood not only as an ethno-national identity but also as an inclusive national identity available to people of color in the empire.