Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

摘要

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women producednracially mixed offspring in all of Europe’s empires. Recent interdisciplinarynscholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressingnthe interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical differ-nence upon which colonizers’ prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge tonthe elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” wasndefined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its ten-ndency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuingncommon interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, con-nstructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colo-nnial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.”n1nThisnarticle aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired col-nlaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empirenduring the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and auth-nority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood andnadolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this groupnposed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.