What is a British colony for, and who is it for? These were the questions at the crux of a public debate in 1933 in Hong Kong sparked by a British resident claiming to have formed an organization for the “protection and advancement” of the “British white race.” This article explores how anxieties about fascism, white privilege, and “others” in the empire allowed the very idea of such a political movement to be elevated to the subject of heated debate. The discussion on British unemployment, poor whites, and European “intruders” in the colony tells us less about the actual socioeconomic conditions that Hong Kong Britons faced than about their subjective experience of being “British” in an imperial context. The articulation of imperial anxiety also shows us how the fluid, ambiguous borders of whiteness and Britishness were negotiated at the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, class, and race. Highlighting the global perspectives demonstrated in the debate and the various transnational networks across Hong Kong, this article argues that the debate was as much about global sociopolitical circumstances as about what was happening in Hong Kong. It therefore offers a timely opportunity to rethink how the local, “national,” regional, and global were interwoven in the “global 1930s,” even among the English reading public in the British colony of Hong Kong.

The rise and fall of the office of sheriff is a frequent theme in English administrative history. In medieval times sheriffs were the principal representatives of the king in the local community and bore the king's authority and acted in his name. Their courts entertained a wide variety of criminal and civil proceedings. By Tudor times such powers and authority were things of the past. Edward IV had effectively ended the sheriff's power by removing all indictments before the sheriff in his tourn to the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace for trial. The sheriff's judicial powers passed to the justices of the peace and his military powers to the deputy lieutenants. What powers did remain were exercised under the supervision of the magistrates both in and out of formal sessions. When James I came to the throne in 1603, the once powerful sheriff presided at elections, distrained and sold goods for the payment of fines, summoned juries, hanged criminals, and carried out other miscellaneous tasks. For most gentlemen of England a year's tenure as sheriff was an expensive inconvenience.

By 1640, however, the sheriff was once again a public figure of some consequence. The first two Stuarts, especially Charles I, had turned to the sheriff to execute many of their financial and administrative programs. Three times James I ordered sheriffs to collect extra benevolences. It seemed to many that Charles I had used the office for inappropriate political purposes. A sheriff had to be resident in his county throughout his term of office so he could not serve in parliament. In 1625 Thomas Wentworth was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, and the even more troublesome Edward Coke was appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire. Two years later Walter Long, M.P. was appointed sheriff of Wiltshire, an affront to the electors of Bath who had recently returned him to the House of Commons. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, these events were remembered with considerable bitterness; and the Grand Remonstrance noted “the usual course of pricking sheriffs [was] not observed, but many times sheriffs made in an extraordinary way, sometimes as a punishment and a charge unto them, sometimes such were pricked out as would be instruments to execute whatever they would have done.”

Since the horrific bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the declaration of war against terrorism, policy makers have repeatedly urged us to spend. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to encourage home sales and purchase of “big-ticket” items. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani suggests that we travel, go shopping, seek entertainment, attend plays, rather than, as in World War II, buy bonds, recycle tin, and ration consumer goods.

Yet the current connection of luxury and war frames a historical paradox. Medieval and early modern prescriptive literatures link luxury not with times of war but with peace leading to decadence. The de-moralization of the idea of luxury, historians of consumption argue, only took place in the later seventeenth century when writers such as Nicholas Barbon and Bernard Mandeville recognized the importance of luxury to the economy. Eighteenth-century luxury consumption, fueled by new wants and new wares purchased by middle-class consumers, it is argued, marked a sharp departure from the court centered consumption of previous centuries.

When the officials at the British Treasury sat down to sketch out their proposals for the 1937 budget, they knew that they had a problem. During the previous year the Government had been forced to embark upon a costly five year rearmament program by the massive growth of the German military establishment, and the bills for that program were beginning to fall due. £180 million had been spent for defence in 1936, £60 million more than during the previous year, but £100 million less than the military services estimated would be necessary in 1937. The Services' estimate was in the words of Edward Bridges, a Treasury under-secretary, “a good deal higher than anything which I anticipated in my gloomier moments.” He knew, however, that there was little chance that it would be reduced. The question immediately at hand was where the funds could be found to pay for the burgeoning cost of defence not only in the coming year, but in the years to follow.

Another Treasury under-secretary, Fredrick Phillips, estimated that they could not realistically expect to raise more than £180 million of the £280 million they required from existing taxation. Although the canons of orthodox finance, to which the Treasury usually adhered, dictated that taxes should be increased to meet the deficit, everyone at the Treasury realized that such a measure would extinguish the growing prosperity which the Government had so laboriously and successfully nurtured since the economic collapse of 1931. Reluctantly they decided to resort to the fiscal device which Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had once disparaged as “the broad road that leads to destruction”: borrowing.

By the late twelfth century, the principle that hereditary succession guaranteed title had triumphed in English feudal land law, and this threatened lords' rights to choose their tenants freely. Henry II's assizes were providing mesne tenants with security of tenure. They separated title to a tenement from lordly acceptance of the tenant when the the tenant was a direct descendant of the previous landholder. An undoubted male heir could take possession at once, not waiting for his lord to put him into possession, denying the lord his right to take the land into his hand and hold it until relief was paid.

The new actions available to mesne tenants did not apply to direct tenants of the Crown, however. The Angevin monarchs resisted following rules that their courts were enforcing against other feudal lords in their treatment of their own tenants-in-chief. The king held to the old view that an heir does not succeed to his ancestor's property automatically, but only has a customary claim to be accepted as tenant. As Glanvill noted, the king claimed primer seizin, his right to take possession of a barony and to place the heir in possession only once the heir had done homage to him and made arrangements to pay relief.

An extensive literature that has appeared over the past two decades on the Hanoverian electorate and political culture at the constituency level provides a more sophisticated understanding of party conflict in Britain during the long eighteenth century than earlier work focused on high politics or other subjects. H. T. Dickinson points out that most people experienced politics at the constituency level where negotiations between different political groups within communities and the voters provided a voice for competing interests that an older historiography focused on high politics failed to recognize. These local aspects of Hanoverian politics established the context for two important developments in the early nineteenth century; a greater appreciation for the impact of public opinion on politics at Westminster and the development of a two-party system. The emergence of a self-conscious provincial identity sustained by new economic and institutional forces drove both trends. Christopher Wyvill's Yorkshire Association formed in 1779, the General Chamber of Manufacturers founded in 1785, anti-war petitioning efforts by local groups during the conflict with Napoleon, and the successful campaign in 1812 against the regulatory Orders in Council demonstrated the growing impact of provincial activism. The intersection between new provincial interests focused on issues debated at Westminster and constituency politics with its own rituals and dynamics provides an opening to explore the final decades of the Hanoverian political order. Connections between local and metropolitan drew into sharper focus as party conflict at Westminster extended into national politics.