ARI Working Paper Series

Colonial parochial attitudes played a key role in perpetrating injustice against women in metropolitan imperial cities such as London and Singapore that highly valued merchants’ and foreign rulers’ contributions to imperial coffers. Yet, historical sources are mostly silent on white women. This article probes how colonial legal courts situated white women in the colonies from the perspective of law reports of two cases in the late nineteenth century. Both cases involved two prominent men whose high stature made their subordinate status as imperial subjects ambiguous. European women in the colonies were closely monitored. The first case, Regina v. Syed Mahomed Alsagoff was a lawsuit against a prominent Arab merchant based in Singapore on the charge of causing a woman to miscarry in 1893. It was brought to the attention of the court by a young European woman. The second court case, Mighell v. Sultan of Johore was brought to court in 1894 in London by an Englishwoman named Jenny Mighell against her former fiancé the Sultan of Johore for breach of promise of marriage. As non-elite unmarried white women, the protagonists in these legal cases represented British imperial anxieties about intimate relations between male subjects and European women. In both cases, the male defendants were eventually acquitted with public apologies by the British ruling elite for ruining their reputations. Public reactions during courtroom trials pointed towards the development of public opinion in the colony that coalesced around the mercantile class and political elite – male European and Asian subjects alike.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been submitted for a journal review.