Table of Contents
Something called the 'half-caste problem' was noted in many colonial situations during the interwar period. Numerous books and chapters addressed it.[2] At least one global survey was attempted (Dover 1937). Half-castes also figured in fiction, images, and song. Noel Coward, better known for 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen', sang a ballad 'Half-caste Woman' which I listened to from an old record as a child.[3] Later, during the course of research that was not particularly concerned with miscegenation, I was struck by contrasting attitudes towards half-castes in several locations in the southwest Pacific during these decades. Two questions puzzled me. First, why, in New Zealand, was indigenous and European miscegenation actually celebrated by some proponents while advocates of a parallel process in Australia were less than jubilant? Second, why did New Zealand administrators revile and vituperate half-castes in Western Samoa when politicians and officials back home rejoiced in their nation's outstanding men of mixed race? While these views on half-castes were not universally held in their time and place, they were nevertheless prominent and I wondered how their differences could be explained. The following discussion is my attempt to do so.
I begin by reviewing the ancestry of the term 'half-caste', comment on the 'half-caste problem' between the wars, and outline some very general variants — in time, space, and racial reasoning — that can help explain the contrasting evaluations of miscegenation to which my opening questions refer. I then turn to the three main sites of this inquiry — Australia, New Zealand, and Western Samoa — while also drawing some illustrations from Australia's mandated territory of New Guinea and the British Crown Colony of Fiji. Although writing for a volume devoted to the science of race, I remain uncertain as to how the science of race can be defined in these locations and how its influence on policy and action can be tracked and measured.[4] Instead, I suggest some differences in broad patterns of racial thinking relating to half-castes and correlate them with the differences between the imperatives of 'settler' and 'managerial' colonialisms, at least in this quarter of the world — imperatives which were in turn determined to a considerable degree by environment. Though I have no qualms about alluding to environmental influences upon colonial formations, in conclusion I mention some of the difficulties in proposing the 'imperatives' that I outline as historical explanations, despite the fact that my own efforts have led me to them. These difficulties raise questions that remain unanswered as I finally reflect on the postcolonial fortunes of the term half-caste.
The word half-caste has an imperial genealogy going back to the Roman Empire, which exported the Latin adjective castus, 'pure', 'unpolluted', to its subjects. From these origins, modern English derives 'chaste' but half-caste was a later child of linguistic miscegenation between the empires of Portugal and Britain. In Portuguese, the adjective casta in the phrase casta raça, 'pure race', was nominalized and from the mid-sixteenth century came to denote the large endogamous groupings of India.[5] The English adapted this Portuguese term and from the late-eighteenth century, in order perhaps to differentiate this specialized sense from all the meanings associated with the homonym 'cast' (the verb of non-Latinate derivation meaning 'to throw'), began spelling 'caste' with a final 'e'. Simultaneously, the term half-caste appeared. Referring to persons of combined European and Indian parentage, it coincided with the introduction of employment policies in the British East India Company that discriminated against men of mixed race. From the start, half-caste had pejorative connotations. It also appealed to what the British understood as 'Indian notions of birth', with the concept of caste, more so than race, entailing injunctions of physical, sexual, and marital exclusiveness (Ballhatchet 1980:4, 97‑8). With the expansion of Britain's empire, half-caste was applied loosely to any person of mixed race.
[1] Despite the ugly implications of terms like 'half-caste' and 'mixed race', I use them freely in this discussion because of their historical aptness. Inverted commas are omitted except when quoting but are always implied.
[2] See, e.g., Keesing 1934; Pitt-Rivers 1927; Roberts 1927; Tindale 1941.
[3] The record is lost but the song was composed in 1930 (Coward 1982:396).
[4] I am grateful for comments on this subject from Tim Rowse, referring particularly to doctoral research currently being done by Mark Hannah at The Australian National University on the regulation of Aboriginal marriage, and from Donald Denoon. See also Markus 1982.
[5] Most of the etymological information derives from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson and Weiner 1989, II:953-4; III:55; VI:1035).