ABSTRACT
The poor European and Eurasian population in India are in very special need of the 'moral police' which religion supplies. The reality of the problems they faced as well as the external construction of a 'Eurasian problem' to be solved through technical training for new areas of employment, education aimed at character reformation, and poverty-alleviating philanthropy were inseparable from changing and increasingly racialised attitudes towards them by colonial Britons. The construction of the 'Eurasian problem' as one of charity, placed particular emphasis on population control. Underlying the perception of a 'Eurasian problem' to be fixed by character reformation and charity were a shifting and complex set of ideas concerning race, heredity, environment, class, and culture. Seeing the mixed race group through the prism of charity and the 'Eurasian problem' often meant taking anecdotal evidence of inconstancy in work habits and alcoholism as representative of the group more generally.
