Webs of Association: Examining the Overseas Chinese Social Landscape of Early Cooktown

Abstract

Many studies of overseas Chinese have regarded ethnic or cultural identity as being the overarching principle structuring how overseas Chinese communities organised and defined themselves and how they were perceived and treated by outsiders. Overseas Chinese communities have been regarded as homogenous, inward-looking and impermeable. However, recent research, particularly in the realm of social and family history, points to more complex and diverse relationships. This paper, which is based on an historical archaeology doctoral thesis, proposes a different model based on social agency and network theory. Using the case study of Cooktown in Far North Queensland, where a large and thriving overseas Chinese community existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it shows how individual people, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, exercised their agency to create their own social worlds. These worlds consisted of networks or webs of association through which people obtained their material needs, accrued and exerted social power and continually defined their social identity. Ethnicity was only one among a range of influences on the nature of these networks; others included kinship, class, gender, political allegiance and business alliances. The networks fragmented ethnic groups as well as crossed ethnic boundaries, as Cooktown©s rugged frontier environment fostered some very close connections of mutual support between Chinese and non-Chinese. Collectively these networks built a dynamic, multi-layered and nuanced social landscape