Title: Nursing in the East of Empire: British colonial nursing in Malaya and China, 1890-1960

Abstract: Malaya and Singapore employed the largest proportion of British colonial nurses in the British Empire, and during the 1930s, Shanghai and Hong Kong hosted the second largest concentration of these nurses. This paper will investigate how British nurses came to work in Asia, for religious, economic, political and social reasons. In order to give a flavor of the working relationships between British and Asian nurses, three time periods will be focused on: the initial encounters of British colonial nurses with Asia at the turn of the twentieth century; World War Two; and decolonization and independence of Malaysia and Singapore in the 1950s when British nurses were required for training, but were increasingly subordinate to Asian nurses.