With Youth and Empire, David M. Pomfret has made a valuable contribution to the growing field of colonial childhood studies. In this engaging monograph, he shows how European childhood came to occupy an important place in imperial ideology and practice in Southeast-Asia between 1880 and the beginning of the Second World War. The work focuses on four urban centres in “tropical” British and French Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi, and Saigon.

Pomfret argues that in the period at hand, childhood emerged as one of the focal points of a more morally motivated form of imperialism that hinged on ideas about racial respectability and domesticity. The idea of a “new, morally informed governance built around the home” (2) sounds familiar to those who are aware of the literature about empire and gender that has emerged since the late 1990s. Pomfret’s approach, however, is very fresh in the sense that he foregrounds not gender, but age.

Recent years have seen a surge in historical research that operates on the crossroads between histories of childhood and histories of colonialism. As Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight have pointed out, in many ways, children were “central to the imperial project, burdened with its hopes and anxieties”. Colonial regimes regarded children as “subjects in the making”.Footnote ¹ The connections between imperial thinking and thinking about childhood, therefore, provides historians with an intriguing topic, as do questions about children’s lived experiences in colonial contexts. While earlier writings about the position of mixed-raced children within colonial societies—notably Ann Laura Stoler’s and Emmanuelle Saada’s work—remain of interest, scholars of colonialism have begun to explore other themes, such as the importance of scouting and other youth organizations, juvenile delinquency and child labour.

Pomfret not only elaborates upon themes that are somewhat more common in the field, such as education, mixed-race children and European child-rearing practices in colonial contexts but also considers topics that are not typically explored by historians. In chapters 4 and 5, these include public displays of childhood, such as children’s Christmas events and baby pageants. Chapter 6, about the impact of childhood on colonial urban planning and the development of hill stations, is also highly original. It reveals, for example, how in Hong Kong, claims about European children’s vulnerability were used as arguments for the exclusion of Chinese residents from the elite Peak Reservation district (149-153 and 157-163). Examples such as these are important because they demonstrate the influence of children beyond the domestic sphere. In Pomfret’s own words, “the performance of childhood in public as well as in domestic spaces” was crucial in establishing the link between the intimate realm of the colonial home and “the power wielded by the colonial state” (281).

The author focuses on four Asian urban centres that were part of the two largest European colonial empires. Throughout the chapters, comparisons are made across and within these spaces. This allows the author to delve deep into local contexts, foregrounding case studies that sometimes focus on social units as small as single schools or neighbourhoods. He shows in fascinating detail how ideas about childhood worked out on the ground. At the same time, the comparative aspect ensures that the bigger picture of trans-colonial linkages is never lost to the reader. It also allows Pomfret to show how ideas about childhood travelled between different colonial centres in South-East Asia, and how these changed in the process. Even though the “global impact and significance of youthful mobility” (14) that Pomfret promises to shed light on is not adequately explored—because this still is a story that is very much grounded in Southeast-Asia and, to a much lesser extent, in Europe—this multisite approach is very convincing.

Many histories of childhood are, in fact, written about adults: scholars tend to focus on cultural ideas about childhood and pay less attention to the agency of children. In Youth and Empire Pomfret’s inventive use of source material allows him to successfully frame children not only as objects who are “acted upon” by adults but as agents in their own right. By citing sources such as children’s diaries, personal correspondence, and autobiographies, he attempts to “nuance adults debates and representations of childhood” (7). These sources serve to add children’s voices to what is already a wide array of source material, including medical and pedagogical advice literature, novels, newspapers, governmental sources, censuses, photographs and even artworks.

Crucially, Pomfret notes that children in French and British Asia took their own initiatives and that these possibilities were not limited to children of European descent. In Hong Kong, for example, the Ministering Children’s League opened space for elite Chinese girls to become involved in charity. These girls raised funds and made handicrafts such as blankets for working-class children in their own city and, tellingly, in metropolitan Britain (109).

For Pomfret, examples such as these “exposed the fragility of supposedly fixed notions of racial hierarchy” (109). Social interactions between French and Vietnamese children in Hanoi and Saigon (68-69) formed another example of how children’s agency could be unsettling to adults who fretted over colonial prestige. It is very interesting to note how, contrary to the general image in the literature, childhood could serve not only as a space in which racial boundaries were set: in some cases, these boundaries were blurred by the agency of children. This is perhaps the biggest difference between Pomfret’s book and other works, that tend to look at childhood and empire mainly from an angle of colonial anxieties and symbolic circumscribing of difference. Pomfret pays due attention to the ways in which youthful people succeeded in carving out a space of their own.

However, Youth and Empire is not free of faults. As the author touches upon many side-themes and on four different geographical contexts in each chapter, the work is very dense, and many of the issues that are now hinted at would have deserved more space. In other cases, Pomfret’s conclusions seem somewhat laboured. Can, for example, the fact that European children in Hong Kong dressed up as fairies be read as performing “crossings between the real and the spirit world” and reflecting “adherence to the orthodox elite view of colonial childhood as a kind of limbo before the essential return ‘Home’?” (90). Finally, even though Pomfret repeatedly refers to the childhoods produced in colonial Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi, and Saigon as “modern”, he nowhere particularly engages with this concept. There are hints throughout the book about how this modernity might be defined—in the case of the Singapore baby shows, for example, childhood was starting to become conflated with consumer culture. Still, some theoretical reflexion on the term would have been most helpful.

All in all, Youth and Empire can genuinely be said to break new ground. It is hoped that this book will inspire scholars of colonialism to turn to the study of childhood in other geographical contexts. The proximity of the centres that Pomfret focuses on to the Netherlands Indies, for example, may provoke scholars of the Dutch empire in South-East Asia to think about how his approach could be usefully extended to that area, especially in a comparative perspective.