Early Colonial Era
English common law has the rationale of natural-born citizenship, following the principle of jus soli, in the theory that people born within the dominion of the crown, which included self-governing dominions and colonies, would have a "natural allegiance" to the crown as a "debt of gratitude" to the crown for protecting them through infancy. As the dominion of the British empire expanded, British subjects included not only persons within the United Kingdom but also those throughout the British Empire.
By this definition, anyone born in Hong Kong after it became a British colony in 1842 was a British subject. Then, under the Naturalisation of Aliens Act 1847 expanded what had been covered in the Naturalisation Act 1844, which applied only to people within the United Kingdom, to all its dominions and colonies. The Act made provisions for naturalisation as well as allowing acquiring British subject status by marriage between a foreign woman and a British subject man.
Read more about this topic: British Nationality Law And Hong Kong
Famous quotes containing the words early, colonial and/or era:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
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“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
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“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)