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This thesis adopts the approach of 'collective biography' and follows the journey of Luso-Asian migrants, also known as Macanese, from Portuguese Macau to British Hong Kong in exploring a century of Macanese activity in colonial Hong Kong. It focuses on the transformations of the Macanese community and the diverse and creative ways middle-class Macanese individuals strove to recreate their social positions by merging aspects of Macau, Hong Kong, as well as selective 'Portuguese' and 'British' cultural markers. Through a series of individual Macanese narratives, this thesis reveals colonial Hong Kong as a transnational world of possibilities, manipulations, decisions and freedoms. The three themes that thread through this thesis, migration from one 'empire' to another, 'race' as a contested narrative and the colony as a 'transnational' arena aim to reveal the normative realities of colonial life as an experience beyond colonialism and reconsiders the use and manipulations of 'race,' 'class' and 'identity' as individual and communal responses to life challenges. Chapter one examines connections between Macau and Hong Kong and considers the role of 'class' in establishing the social positions of the Macanese. Chapter two focuses on the experiences of Macanese individuals in the workplace and highlights the limitations of using 'race' to understand the restricted career advancement of Macanese men. The third chapter analyses associational life in Hong Kong, particularly emphasising how middle-class Macanese established themselves as respectable 'bourgeois' men in the setting of the colonial port-city. Chapter four explores the emergence of Hong Kong-born Anglophile Macanese individuals and examines the ways the Macanese used the English-language press and political roles to fight for the under-privileged in Hong Kong. The final chapter sheds light on the cultural nationalistic discourses that emerged in inter-war Hong Kong. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to address more overarching questions on the nature of human society, multicultural communities and global interconnectedness through the themes of continuity, collaboration, associational life, urbanism and print culture.

The use of laser doping in the solar cell industry has recently led to the commercialisation of several high efficiency solar cell structures which were historically too costly to produce in an industrial setting. Used in conjunction with industrial-grade silicon wafers, commercial cells with selective emitters and rear surface passivation schemes are now approaching or exceeding 20% efficiency, offering a competitive edge over conventional screen-printed cells with a homogeneous front emitter and a full aluminium rear back surface field. In this thesis, the use of laser doping is proposed as a means to fabricate more complex solar cell structures such as interdigitated back contact (IBC) solar cells or cells with a rear surface floating junction. Both of these structures have been difficult to commercialise due to the need for several masking steps and high temperature diffusions and oxidations which are both costly and not compatible with new low-cost silicon material emerging onto the market. Specifically the use of laser doping to form a contact to an underlying region through a diffused layer of the opposite polarity to the laser doping is investigated. The method is found to be able to be performed without introducing significant recombination, and also to be able to electrically isolate regions of the device or structure on either side of the laser doping from each other. The technique is applied to the edge isolation of solar cells and is found to provide superior edge passivation to a standard cleaving method of edge isolation. The method is applied to form p-type interdigitated back contact (IBC) solar cells with full emitter coverage and only one furnace diffusion step. Advanced bulk passivation techniques are considered and developed for such structures which traditionally require high-quality float zone silicon substrates with long minority carrier diffusion lengths. Whilst the proof-of-concept IBC cell structures fabricated on commercial Czochralski-grown material yielded only a modest efficiency of 14.6%, modelling suggests that the efficiency potential of such a simple structure exceeds 22%. Further work is required to improve the robustness of the fabrication process and suggestions for efficiency improvements in the future are presented.