Those working within the sub-field of the modern history of childhood have rarely taken the dead child as their starting point. However, in a secularising, post-Enlightenment world, elites pursuing “progress” contemporaneously, and very publicly, reinterpreted death in relation to redefinitions of childhood as evidence of the divine. Dead children featured prominently within public modern mourning practices until, late in the nineteenth century scientific explorations of child death drove societies to occlude the presence of dead children. As infant mortality rates fell, perceptions of children as a dangerous, unstable presence, and a threat to the nation grew. New spaces emerged to receive and conceal dead children. New literary and visual cultures recast living children’s relationship with death. And in the early twentieth century accidental deaths in commercial space, in reformatories, and within the home inspired powerful debates over the future of childhood and society. This article surveys recent literature, raises key themes, and introduces the articles featured in this special issue on the relatively underresearched theme of child death.
Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.
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