Going native: racial transgression in the British world, 1880-1939

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That Europeans were able to transform colonised people was a vital element in the rationale for empire; that they too were transformed is a phenomenon less well known. In part, this reflects the lasting force of colonial historiographies. Yet those with sufficient resources frequently disregarded those same social norms to which others were so strenuously encouraged to conform. In India, wealthy nabobs enjoyed the affectations of the East; in Kenya the wealthy aristocrat who disdained European society to live in splendid isolation amidst the African bush became a familiar figure. Social status, wealth, nationality and gender were all determinant factors in the performance of white identity and in the distinction of those forms of 'going native' deemed acceptable from those that were not.Whilst there has been a great deal of work in recent years on cultures of empire and on the social composition of colonial communities, to date no serious scholarly work has taken the idea of 'going native' as its organising theme. On the contrary, while the figure of the white man 'gone native' continues to loom large in the mythology of empire, the history of racial transgression remains under-researched. Yet the deviation of imperial Britons from their prescribed identities and roles occurred across the British Empire and in diverse ways: Britons forged intimate (though not exclusively sexual) relations with 'native races'; they learned 'native' languages (and forgot their own); they eschewed white society and took seriously indigenous ethics, values and belief systems. That racial boundaries were critical to the credibility of colonial regimes is not to say that they were only seldom breached.While historians have increasingly come to recognise the porous nature of racial boundaries they have focused preponderant attention on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - when empire was ascendant but incomplete and when state structures enjoyed still limited reach. According to what has now become an entrenched historical narrative, by the later nineteenth century racial attitudes had hardened considerably. Britons, it is agreed, became conscious of their whiteness - and of the difference of racial 'Others' - as never before. This research will complicate that view by showing the extent to which British colonials did not conform to prevailing colonial ideologies. By documenting the ways in which British men and women 'went native', the project will challenge the erroneous assumption that Britons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries failed to find value in the cultures and the peoples over whom their nation claimed to rule. The proposed research will examine three principal themes under the overarching topic of 'going native': friendship, love and sex; habitus and the day to day; religion and belief. Each theme opens up new possibilities for exploring how individuals were able to borrow from, appropriate and adapt local cultures in the reformation of their own subjectivities and social roles. Together, they provide the organisational means for analysing how ideas around race and nation, so critical to the rationale for colonial domination, were contested, rationalised and redefined. Examining the ways by which colonial authorities sought to manage transgression, meanwhile, will extend upon recent research into the production of racial categories and the mechanics of social control. Throughout, the ambition is to hold in tension the controlling power of colonial regimes with the ability of individuals to manage or evade them.