The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders: Inaugurating a Hospitable World Order in Mid-Victorian Britain

Abstract

This essay examines the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, in London, as a case study on nationalist mythmaking driven by anxieties over immigration. At this institution’s 1856 inaugural ceremony, Prince Albert encouraged Britons to behave like globally conscientious citizens vis-à-vis destitute migrants: the lascars or Asian seamen whose exploited labour fuelled east-west shipping from the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Discriminatory legislation barred them from permanent residency in Britain, forcing them into poverty despite their right to lawful settlement as British subjects. To expedite their repatriation, the Home’s missionary founders used pageantry and newsprint to promote patriotic narratives about Christian hospitality toward strangers. Their anti-immigrant philanthropy benefited an Indian Ocean recruitment system dependent on lascars’ redeployment, an indentured servitude that Evangelicals compared to transatlantic slavery. Consequently, global abolitionism functioned as a rhetorical device for distinguishing citizens from noncitizens in racialized terms before these categories were legally codified.