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:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
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—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)