The Many Lives of the "European Vagrant" in Colonial Singapore, c. 1890-1940

Abstract

Amidst mounting anxieties surrounding European vagrancy across Asian port cities, a murder in Hong Kong constituted a tipping point in the push for vagrancy legislation in colonial Singapore, resulting in the enactment of the 1906 Vagrancy Ordinance. This chapter examines the ways in which the “European vagrant” in Singapore was constructed in relation to notions of work, clean-liness, and space, by law and in the English-language press. The imagined European vagrant body thus given corporeality, was contested by alleged vagrants and used, in times of economic down-turn, by commentators and impoverished Europeans alike to make claims to respectability. Using newspapers, colonial records, letters, memoirs, and fiction, this chapter shows how discourses on the European vagrant body exemplified the relational character of seemingly dichotomous categories, not least that of respectable-disreputable, that were simultaneously ascribed to and juxtaposed against it.