A critical history of anthropology of the Semang "negritos" of Peninsula Malaya: the racialisation of an aborigine group through discourses, illustrations and photography by travellers and ethnographers, 1820-1920 My research centres on the anthropological material produced on a group known by some as the Semang, but more generally placed under the larger heading of "negritos" or "little negroes" in Asia. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholars and colonial officers came to the Malay Peninsula and sought to determine the relationship between the Semang and Malays, the Semang and others in the Malay Archipelago designated as "Asiatic negroes" such as Andaman Islanders and Papuans, and the Semang and racial groups found in Africa. In doing so, these European travellers and ethnographers shaped the wider theories of ethnography, but also conducted their studies in the very specific colonial circumstances of what came to be known as British Malaya. My main research question is why were they classified as negrito at different stages of European influence and by different scholars and colonial actors? What were the assumptions that went into the racialisation of this group and how were they reinforced and sustained? In answering these questions, I aim to look to the roles of "native" Malay informants, of the increasing interest in discovering and developing the unknown inland areas of Peninsula Malaya, and the interaction between discources of savagery, slavery and visuality in the images produced of the Semang. I hope to build on the body of scholarship on connections between anthropology, photography, and colonialism which characterises ethnography of "othered" peoples as colonial knowledge resulting from colonial encounters between Europeans and aboriginal tribes. I also seek to scrutinize the influence of local conditions and power structures on the production of this ethnographic knowledge, by looking at how relations between Malay ruling classes and aboriginal tribes influenced European perceptions of these latter groups. More generally, the thesis will attempt to answer how African-ness and negritude were defined and how and why was it applied to the Semang and others in Southeast Asia, which will elucidate the links between ethnographic studies within Southeast Asia and between Southeast Asia and Africa.