Self-indulgence is a way of life, perhaps more so for the younger set of millennials but nevertheless, a western tradition for sure. When the hack happened I was getting some pictures ready but afterwards I decided, well, fuck it, you want self-indulgent posts about yourself? Here's a series of case studies on what is essentially the origins of weeabooism (not the comic or 4chan). tl;dr: You liking exotic people is nothing new, especially you English speakers.
Going Native
Going Native – A Study of the Phenomenon in the British Empire, 1600 - 1800
“To be born British is to win the lottery of life.” – Cecil Rhodes, c. 1880s
While Cecil Rhodes’ British Empire was a vast, expansive, and wealthy international dominion on which the sun literally did not set, the Empire had far more humble beginnings than his bombastic quote might suggest. In fact, during the first few centuries of British overseas ventures, the 17th through the early 19th Centuries to be exact, Britain did not possess the means or the reputation to be considered the premier colonial power, and Britons did not view themselves as winners in “the lottery of life”. As a matter of fact, for much of its imperial history, Britons escaped the misery of their rigid society in Europe and went native in potentially substantial numbers – a true count could never be ascertained due to poor record keeping, especially in the early years.[1]
Going native consisted of abandoning one’s previous religion, national allegiance to a certain degree but not always, and usually involved, especially in later time periods, acceptance of a foreign culture, and intermarriage into the native society.[2] While “going native” is not an exclusively British idea at all – the Portuguese had a history of going native since landing in India in the late 1400s and early 1500s and the Dutch Burgher society in Sri Lanka survives until today – neither of these nations maintained an empire as vast and powerful as the British for as long as the British had, at least from the outside appearance.[3]
For most of the early years of the Age of Discovery, as well as the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries, Britain was a modest power, an occasional bit player in Asia on both the continent and the subcontinent, and most importantly, socially remained a restrictive, class-based society that gave little potential to upwards social mobility within its national boundaries.[4] The landed and titled gentry remained separate from much of the lower classes, and commissions in the army were purchased instead of earned, giving most of the population little chance of advancement in the army and also in society. The East India Company in India offered better prospects, at least from the outset. The Indian Army had a meritocratic system which, in theory, allowed for anyone to advance from private soldiers to a colonelcy or even a generalship. The attraction was immense, and thousands went overseas on trading and military ventures, with a portion of them disappearing off the record and into nativedom. [5] Although most East India Company men in India adapted some sort of “Indian-ness” in either preferences or manners, to go native in practice was almost irreversible if done within one’s own volition.[6] Just as Britain relied on Sepoy soldiers, recruited from India, to man most of the private ranks within the Indian Army, there were many courts and princes needing foreign gunsmiths or blacksmiths or some other sorts of skilled tradesman. Trained soldiers were desired as well as to bring the training standards of European armies to the native armies[7]. If one fit the profile, one could easily make a decent living as a native nobleman; if not, one could still seek out mercenary work or some less relevant and less talked-about jobs on the subcontinent.
We know of these men, many of humble origins, through second-hand accounts and the occasional first-hand epistolary documentation of their transformation from an Englishman into someone resembling a native. A marked problem remains as few of these men ever came back into British society to tell their tales. The epistolary records of the educated or semi-educated serve as the best primary sources, but literacy was a luxury that the lower classes did not enjoy, so while some case studies paint a well-rounded picture of their native experiences through their correspondences, more went silent and disappeared from record.[8] Often they converted to Islam or even Hinduism, married into the local gentry, and subsequently left only an Anglo-Indian semi-middle class to later take over the clerk positions within the company, if they proved to be lucky. [9] Some sent their Anglo-Indian children to school in England, a decision based mostly on the color of their skin, but for the most part, these children disappeared with only a surname to carry on a European legacy.[10]
A journey to India, and then somehow into the service of a non-European ruler, was difficult, to say the least. The attrition rate for company recruits on the voyage over was comparable to African slave ships in the first part of the 18th Century, and even into the 19th Century, sometimes thirty or forty percent of the passengers would have perished before the ship docked in Madras or Calcutta.[11] Upon arrival, however, with a company contract to fulfill, one would either have to desert – and risk corporal punishment if caught – or be captured during a battle.[12] Certainly both have been ancient options in the case of the European going native. The Spanish went native en masse during their expeditions out of their enclaves of Ceuta in North Africa shortly after the Reconquista, and so did the English during their brief tenure as the rulers of Tangiers in the early 1600s, although not in such great numbers.[13] Both transformations came from a combination of capture during wars and voluntary desertions. However, in North Africa there was also the curious and certainly somewhat unexpected given the circumstances, case of corsairs taking merchant seamen or even coastal villagefolk in Ireland and southern England into slavery in Barbary, modern Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco.[14] Indeed, the actions of corsairs taking Englishmen on the high seas and making them “Musselmen” were told widely from the 1600s on, and the sheer number of the narratives could give the impression that the most prominent Englishmen who went native were under the yoke or coercion of the corsairs.[15]
Surprisingly, however, the first well documented case of an Englishman gone native occurred not in Barbary, but in Japan, in an experience that involved both elements of captivity and an ultimate willingness to stay native once acclimated to the country, and even more surprisingly, this case came before the bulk of the corsair abductions in the early 1600s, in an age when Englishmen going native was unheard of. Even later, the trademark cases of Englishmen going native did not come from the Barbary states, but rather, the New World in the case of Sir William Johnson and in Hyderabad in the case of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, representing a wide range of classes and occupations and time periods, with the main commonality being that their actions were all well-documented. One of the earliest, and best documented English cases via epistolary records, was the case of William Adams. William Adams was a Kentish man from Gillingham, and by 1598, he found himself as a pilot on a Dutch ship in a convoy headed towards the Far East.[16] The voyage was ill-planned, and worst of all, during the voyage, the envoy attacked Portuguese possessions in the Atlantic, with little success.[17] By the time the fleet reached Japan in 1600, only twenty four men on the last remaining ship were alive, and none were in good health, having been wracked with scurvy and dysentery.[18]Furthermore, they were met with cordiality until the Portuguese Jesuits arrived, demanding their execution. The Protestant-Catholic rift was still evident, and the Portuguese, actually now part of the Spanish empire after the Iberian Union of 1580, were eager to remove any Protestant influence from Japan, preferably with the same sort of brutality and absolutism of the Spanish Inquisition.[19]
Treated as pirates and threatened with crucifixion, some of the crew joined the Jesuits, but the more significant event came nine days after the battered ship landed on the shores of Japan.[20] Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, decided to receive Adams at his court in Osaka. The meeting was not merely a gesture of goodwill – Tokugawa had long since needed an European shipwright to construct western-style ships for his navy, but his offer to the Portuguese-Spanish delegation was turned down years before.[21] Now, faced with a sworn enemy of the Portuguese and Spanish, Tokugawa saw his opportunity. However, the language barrier as well as the incredulity of Adams’ voyage through the Strait of Magellan and across the pacific made Tokugawa suspicious, and instead of granting Adams trading privileges as was requested, he promptly threw Adams in prison, the beginning of his captivity in Japan.[22]
Tokugawa did not keep Adams in prison for long, but instead placed him under house arrest for six additional weeks while Tokugawa decided to detain the foreigners indefinitely, needing their expertise to build ships and train pilots.[23] After his release, Adams petitioned to be allowed to return to England, but the plea was completely ignored. Furthermore, the surviving ship from the voyage soon sank, making all surviving crewmembers, including Adams, prisoners of the shogun. It was after this incident that Tokugawa requested Adams to build a ship in earnest, one of European design that could sail to the Philippines or Mexico. Indeed, Adams and his shipmates completed the ship – a miniature version of their battered ship from the Netherlands – and impressed Tokugawa greatly.[24] From this point on, Adams, without any real prospect of going home due to Tokugawa’s orders and the lack of a proper vessel, began learning Japanese and became increasingly influential in the court of Tokugawa.[25] He turned down an offer to go home in 1605 from the Jesuits, partly because he certainly had no trust of the Catholics who at the time were known to execute Protestant seamen as pirates, in spite of guarantees of safe passage, and partly because his influence in the Japanese court far exceeded anything he could attain back home in Gillingham.[26] Tokugawa gave the surviving crew stipends and some used the money to start a Sino-Japanese trading venture. Adams, however, became the court’s interpreter, and while he occasionally still requested a journey home, Tokugawa adamantly refused every attempt.[27]
Instead, he gave large tracts of property to Adams, property that included serfs, making Adams a lord in semi-captivity. Later, he was made a bannerman, a retainer in the court of the shogun, and practically a samurai – all other bannermen in Tokugawa’s court were samurai.[28] Being a bannerman and a samurai, he finally abandoned western dress and adopted native garb. He also began carrying samurai swords, adopted a Japanese name – Anjin Sama – and used the Japanese calendar.[29] He also married a Japanese woman and had children, despite being married at home in England as well. The aforementioned events were undated in letters later written by Adams, but it could be safely said that the transformation was completed within ten years of Adams’ landing. The shogun, upon bestowing Adams his Japanese name, declared that William Adams the pilot was no more and the man was reborn as Anjin Sama, although Adams left provisions in his will over a decade later to provide for his English family as well as the Japanese one.[30] Meanwhile, a skirmish broke out in 1609 between the Portuguese and the Japanese in Nagasaki and resulted in much bloodshed as well as the loss of the Portuguese ship. The incident greatly reduced the influence of the Portuguese in Japan, and raised Adams’ standing as the sole interpreter for Tokugawa, despite the fact that he was still virtually a prisoner under Tokugawa’s watch.[31]
By 1611, the Dutch finally began making progress towards setting up a factory in Japan, an effort aided by Adams. At the same time, a Spanish delegation arrived, demanding the expulsion of the Dutch and Adams. However, as Tokugawa trusted Adams far more than the Spanish, Adams’ advice on expelling the Spanish delegation was taken and the Spaniards were promptly dispatched home.[32] Yet at the same time, Adams learned of an English presence in the East Indies, and like many Barbary captives after him, his desire to see his countrymen piqued, he sent a letter to the nearest English factory, proposing the establishment of an English factory in Japan.[33]
Word was promptly passed to King James I and an expedition was launched – Adams evidently kept both an allegiance to Tokugawa as well as England and Protestantism, even after eleven years under a vague sort of captivity in Japan and appearing almost fully native in dress and social standing. The English ship arrived in 1613, captained by John Saris. However, Saris found Adams’ manners and dress strange, and his opinions succinct and frank.[34] Saris did not carry a cargo of easily saleable goods, and he had to present lavish presents to Adams to secure a visit to the shogun’s court. When Saris attempted to deliver the letter from James I to the shogun, it was a violation of Japanese protocol that distressed both Adams and Tokugawa’s secretary, as the custom dictated that only the secretary could pass such letters to the shogun.[35] Although Tokugawa himself did not press the issue of the faux pas, it was clear that a cultural gap between Adams and Saris existed, with Adams every bit familiar with Japanese customs and Saris quite the opposite.
Tokugawa finally allowed Adams to leave his court and return to England, but his relationship with Saris broke down dramatically.[36] As Saris thought Adams to be haughty and disdainful, Adams took every single snide remark Saris made upon Japan as a personal insult. Furthermore, Adams could not liquidate his assets and had very little actual cash to use in England. Ultimately, he refused Saris’ offer for a voyage back to England, preferring to stay in Japan as the factor for the East India Company.[37]
Adams, despite not being named as the head of the factory due to the growing jealousy and later outright hatred from Saris, helped to establish the English as a trading power rivaling the Dutch and the Spanish in Japan.[38] Meanwhile, he was also appointed as the court cartographer and began planning a voyage to discover the North-East Passage. Although the plan never came to fruition, he did undertake several journeys to Siam and Okinawa.[39] Meanwhile, the English factory suffered greatly financially, as the Japanese had no need to purchase any of the English goods and trade was more of a trickle than a torrent.[40] The representatives at the English factory began to suspect that Adams was helping the Dutch more than the English, under the paranoia that resulted from a time of domestic disturbance in Japan following the expulsion of all Catholics from the country, under orders from Tokugawa.[41]
When Tokugawa died in 1616, his successor, Hidetada, was even more intent on expelling all Christians from his realm, and the English with significant help from Adams had to convince the new shogun that they were not papists, but Protestants.[42] Adams had now spent sixteen years in Japan and was treated as a Japanese nobleman in the shogun’s court, and his influence in person certainly allowed the English to stay in business – until Hidetada abruptly forced the closure of all subfactories in Osaka, Kyoto, and Sakai, effectively snuffing out the majority of the English trade in Japan. Somehow, despite the severe curtailing of English privileges, Adams’ noble status was renewed and he was exempt from all orders curtailing English trade – i.e. Adams was treated like a native Japanese merchant, not an English one, at least in the shogun’s court.[43]
However, the English soon found themselves unable to operate at a profit without the influence of Adams. A series of bad business decisions and Dutch interference with the trade while Adams was on his personal voyages to Siam virtually bankrupted the factory. Furthermore, when Adams died in 1620, it spelled the end of the protection granted to the English factory, and the factory closed in 1623. [44]
Adams’ story was certainly an anomaly, especially so early in the imperial history of England. However, it showed many characteristics that were also present in other Britons who went native. They frequently became liaisons, adopting the local culture, customs, and even receiving ranks within the local hierarchy, but never entirely abandoning some manner of Englishness and felt comfortable within both cultures, however diverse. This phenomenon existed mostly in the upper echelon of Britons who went native – not necessarily by status at home (although very helpful), but usefulness to the court the Briton found himself in, like the shipbuilding skills and cartography of Adams. Furthermore, the more “exotic” the Briton proved to be in the foreign land, the more likely it was for him to receive attention, hence the numerous of anonymous deserters and captives who went native in Barbary and India, but detailed records about Adams, the only British samurai, William Johnson, the only
Native American Agent with a baronetcy, or James Kirkpatrick, the resident in the scandal-ridden court of the largely Persian and Muslim Hyderabad, survive because contemporary “xenophilia” – the seemingly almost inevitable attraction to foreign cultures - as well as modern interest in such rare cases kept these stories alive even until today. In contrast to these case studies, most ordinary men who went native had little impact and their stories were seldom told, especially when the numbers of Britons going native increased in an area. Homesickness was common, especially in cases where the Briton was held captive, but the urge to profit from both sides prevailed in many cases, and the power wielded by these favored Britons-gone-native gave them a great incentive to remain overseas, in another culture, and act as an agent or advisor on both sides.[45]
It’s not difficult to draw comparisons between being captured in war as a soldier in one of the Mysore campaigns in the post-Plassey (1757) world on the subcontinent and being captured on the high seas by an Algerian corsair, although merchantmen in the 17th Century were largely impromptu, unarmed ventures, as opposed to the massive amounts of military men going native in virtually every other case. The corsairs threatened English shipping and even the coast since the 1620s, and as this was before Britain “ruled the waves”, the only recourse was to ransom the slaves out with cold, hard cash, sent by a diplomatic envoy.[46] The Mediterranean world was the closest truly “foreign” world the common Briton would have known, with its foreign religion, the nominal Turkish control blown out of proportion by hearsay and half-truths and mixed with a dose of Orientalist fantasy and even the average, mostly illiterate villager in Lancashire or Surrey can have some sort of idea what captivity under the “Turkish whip” would be like. This is when we find the earliest accounts of Barbary prisoners partially going native and coming back to tell the tale.
As this was a time before journalistic integrity, most of the captive stories were a combination of true experiences and the editor’s imagination. Many of the captured slaves, especially the younger ones, spoke better Arabic than English and were basically illiterate to begin with. Joseph Pitts was seized at age fifteen and spent fifteen years – 1678 to 1693 – as a slave in North Africa until he was ransomed. Upon return, his narrative was sympathetic towards Islam and even included a confession that he almost wished to “remain a [Muslim]”.[47] He also wrote of three Englishmen who did indeed choose to stay as Muslims in Algiers, after succumbing to the temptations of the exotic world they found themselves in. However, this was an isolated case, and alongside Thomas Pellow, seized at 11 and spent 16 years in Morocco, two of the only narratives with anything positive to say about Islam.[48] Most narratives from the era spoke ill of the Moors and even the converted slaves claim that it was done under duress.[49] Captives such as Elizabeth Marsh and William Okeley held onto Christianity with the most steadfast devotion and wrote sensationalist stories of abuse at the hands of their captors, and most North African narratives reflect that sentiment. The sample is, unfortunately, skewed, as the Britons mentioned by Pitts who stayed never wrote narratives or memoires, but their existence, as well as the comfort in Islam that Pitts and Pellow discovered, indicates that perhaps a conscious decision to go native, especially at a young age, was considered almost not too terrifying of an ordeal and more, perhaps many assimilated into North African culture, shed their northern skins and never came home. Perhaps it was the promise of “going home” that allowed these North African captives to retain part of their faith and identity instead of succumbing to the native culture.
The earliest cases of these quasi-“gone-native” narratives do not display a great deal of initial willingness to convert to the native status. However, in North America, there were cases of British settlers who voluntarily joined or at least adapted to the Native American cultures, marrying into tribes and setting themselves up in comfortable positions on the outskirts of “civilization”. Hence, some prominent Native American leaders actually have a decent amount of white lineage. Alexander McGillivray, the leader of the Creek nation during and after the American Revolution, was only 1/8th Creek, his father being Scottish and his mother being a quarter Creek and three quarters French.[50] A generation later, his nephew William Weatherford, better known as Red Eagle, led the Creek Wars against the United States despite being only marginally Creek as well.[51] It would be hard to categorize these men as Europeans going native. We have little unembellished documentation to ascertain their motives. Racism in the nascent United States certainly existed and their part-French parentage might have placed them in a disadvantaged position at first, but both McGillivray and Weatherford later became accepted into Southern society, perhaps in part due to the phenomenon of xenophilia that prevailed in both the New World and Old. Also, these men could easily be viewed as being “born native” instead of having the need to “go native”. Certainly the French, with their extensive fur-trading operations in New France that extended into modern Louisiana and north to Quebec and Ontario, were more prone to go native, as their colonies in North America were trading posts and not settlement colonies like the British colonies, and a whole class of Voyageurs, largely of Métis descent by the mid 1800s, emerged. The same was not the case in the Thirteen Colonies, as insecurities against the natives prevented the same kind of integration one would see in New France.[52] Nevertheless, there was the case of Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet, whose rags to riches story in upstate New York perhaps is the archetype for someone achieving the American Dream before the concept was ever verbalized.
Born in County Meath in 1715, Johnson was a Catholic Irishman with poor prospects in Ireland, but his maternal uncle was Admiral Peter Warren of the Royal Navy, an Anglican convert.[53] Johnson quickly converted to Anglicanism and took over much of his uncle’s properties near the Mohawk River.[54] Although he gradually fell out of favor with his uncle, he gained a substantial personal wealth as well as knowledge of the Mohawk culture and language. By 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession, he was made into a colonel and was able to enlist the Mohawks to raid French encampments.[55] By then, he was an honorary chief of the Mohawk tribe, dressed in Mohawk clothing, and even paid bounties for scalps.[56] He later was appointed as the Indian Agent of the New York colony, commissioned as a Major General, and fought the French in the Seven Years’ War, earning a baronetcy for his actions for his rout of the French at Lake George and became independent of the colonial government.[57] He also accompanied General Prideaux’s capture of Fort Niagara and General Amherst’s capture of Montreal, being rewarded with 100,000 acres of land in the process.[58] Johnson became the symbol of a white man who went native, but maintained enough of a British identity to be socially acceptable. He fathered one legitimate heir with a European woman who inherited his baronetcy, and later became the brother-in-law of Native American leader Joseph Brant, fathering eight children, all of whom he recognized, with Joseph’s sister Molly[59].
Yet this kind of social acceptance was dying, partly due to religious reasons, partly due to the traumatic loss of the Thirteen Colonies. Certainly, the egregious manner with which Johnson went native would be deemed unacceptable in India under Cornwallis or his successors, for the Indian experience of British soldiers – very few European civilians were in India, especially compared to the number of soldiers – who chose to go native, renegade, whether under their own volition or under coercion, was drastically more traumatizing and uncertain, and set the tone for the Victorian ideals regarding “going native” that would last for much of the next century.
On one hand, India was the ideal place to go native. The Portuguese and the Dutch both went native rapidly, and even today one can easily see the remnants of both cultures intermixed with the local Hindu and Muslim cultures. The Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka, while not exactly thriving amidst the turmoil that overtook the country since independence, still proudly hold onto their heritage and a certain degree of Dutchness, even if they bear little physical resemblance to the Dutch merchants that came and went hundreds of years ago.[60] As was the case in most colonies with no set settlement goal in mind, much of the British population – sepoys excluded – were single, young, somewhat impressionable, and had the misfortune sometimes of running into some spectacularly harsh commanders[61]. A company factor could be sent, at least during the mid 18th Century, to a remote factory and would be the only European around. It was almost impossible not to at least imbibe some of the native culture and sentiments when one’s stationed in India.[62] The lack of European women also prompted many to take up Indian mistresses, creating an Anglo-Indian class that sometimes identified with one or the other, depending on convenience.[63] As a matter of fact, this was cited as the primary reason why so many Britons on the subcontinent went native, when the relationships tip over the boundaries of mere sexual encounters and into long term relationships.[64] On the other hand, most of these relationships remained illegitimate and under the table, hence without any degree of permanence, as going native on the subcontinent and enter legitimate marriages on the subcontinent proved tricky at best. Usually a religious conversion would be required to marry and most Britons, noting the potentially emasculating effects of circumcision, were not up to making such a permanent commitment.[65] Most company soldiers were campaigning during the 18th Century, as Britain struggled at times to establish a permanent presence in India against the French. The fragmented state of the subcontinent meant that native powers played off the Anglo-French rivalry.
Mysore was especially a problematic case for the British. A long time ally of the French, the house of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan became a thorn in the side of the British in India, even after victories at Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764 secured Bengal for the British.[66] When Mysore attacked the British ally of Hyderabad in 1766, the company sent troops to intervene, starting a series of Anglo-Mysore Wars that was to take thousands of British soldiers captive within the fortress at Seringapatam. In 1780, the British square was broken at the battle of Pollilur, causing over 2,000 British captives to be taken in one fell swoop.[67] Although most of the soldiers were sepoys, a sizable European prisoner population was now in the hands of the Mysore court.
Mysore first attempted to integrate artisans and other skilled laborers they needed at court, like weavers, blacksmiths, and engineers. The rest of the enlisted men were sent to repair fortifications, sometimes forcibly circumcised, and for the most part, beaten both physically and emotionally.[68] The British officers generally received better treatment, but as prisoners they certainly had no freedom and few luxuries. Some chose voluntarily to convert and join the Mysore army in training, effectively going native and becoming, if not a member of the Mysore court per se, at least renegades and for sale to the highest bidder.[69] As the French were tied up in the American Revolution and later their own revolution, they were unable to provide ammunition or troops to Tipu Sultan, which only resulted in more prisoner abuse or in some cases, outright executions. For many it was certainly an unpleasant choice to make, whether to stay British or go native and potentially never be British again. For the soldiers on the ground, the situation did not resemble the Orientalist images painted by Sir William Jones and his contemporaries. Instead, it was closer to the Black Hole of Calcutta. Defections certainly happened, and were mentioned in the captive narratives of the time, but with the victories of the future duke of Wellington[70] in the third war in 1789, it became much clearer that the British had the upper hand in battle, and while some deserters were pardoned and absorbed right back into the company armies, many who went native were instead killed during the siege of Seringapatam, whether by friendly fire or execution from Tipu Sultan, Finally Wellesley succeeded in the fourth war in 1799, killing Tipu Sultan, but by then over a hundred prisoners had already converted and went native.
The official response was to suspend their pay, but that was of little use. Some merely joined mercenary bands in other princely states. Some enjoyed the freedom a renegade lifestyle without the floggings or constant campaigning, and continued to do so after the Anglo-Mysore Wars, leading many British commanders to comment on the reliability of sepoys as opposed to European soldiers. Of course, in many cases, the European soldier happened to be Irish, and no matter the circumstances surrounding his enlistment, the lack of allegiance to the Anglican Church and Britain as a whole in the late 18th Century certainly contributed to the perceived prevalence of Irishmen deserting the British cause, becoming wild geese and seeking mercenary work.[71] The strange story of General George Thomas, a Tipperary native, exemplifies the situation.
Certainly an inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Thomas erected an independent principality for himself in 1798 in north India, and even minted coins that can still be found today[72]. His principality lasted less than a year, when his troops mutinied for lack of pay, and he ventured back to the British to avoid the angry, unpaid mercenaries and sepoys. His desertion from the Royal Navy before 1793 notwithstanding, he ended up dictating his autobiography in old age and left one of the only accounts of an Irishman going native and coming back to tell the tale.[73] Surely other less outrageous but equally intriguing examples exist. The Catholic Irish in India, many with little hope for money to go home, certainly contributed to the growth of the “Anglo”-Indian population, another population the British elite that gradually took over India segregated after the turn of the 19th Century. General Thomas’ son, Jan Thomas, chose to pass as a Delhi poet in Urdu and became rather well known, which, considering his father’s ability to speak Persian and Urdu, seemed only natural.[74]
Despite the amount of military and civilian persons going native in India, the act was never held in high regard. The permeation of Indian influences into British culture and even the British language was widespread and accepted, even if the attitude towards such an influx became less friendly as the company consolidated its assets and land holdings after the Anglo-Mysore and Anglo-Maratha Wars.[75] On one hand this is nothing new – the vaguely xenophobic attitudes towards Islam and Hinduism had existed since the first arrival of the British and in the case of Islam, even before that. Even the scholar Sir William Jones remained as a member of the Anglican Church, despite his enthusiasm for studying Sanskrit and all things Hindu.[76] However, there was the curious case of the strange Irish General known only “Hindoo Stuart”, a name he picked up for himself only a year after arriving in Calcutta in the 1780s as a teenager. He certainly went native, but instead of living a quiet life in some provincial town in the foothills of the Himalayas, he decided to evangelize, a rather difficult task considering that Hinduism is as much a cultural identity and social system as it is a religion.[77] Lining up against him, however, were the newly evangelical Christians who arrived shortly after the takeover of Bengal. Charles Grant, a company director, even attempted to disseminate Christian pamphlets with several missionaries he invited from England. This act only incurred more wrath and resistance within the Hindu community, but Grant saw them as “poor benighted heathens” unlike Jones or Warren Hastings, both students at least if not complete advocates of Hinduism.[78] Stuart quickly responded with a pamphlet and a war of print broke out in Calcutta, but ultimately, public opinion favored Grant, and evangelical Christianity established itself for the first time since the Portuguese left.
Furthermore, Lord Cornwallis, governor-general from 1786 to 1793 and fresh from the defeat at Yorktown at the hands of Americans, attempted at implementing a hard-line approach at anything native. His first target was the Anglo-Indian community – after all, was it not the descendants of Britons, the native middle class who defeated him at Yorktown? Cornwallis quickly banned company employment for any Anglo-Indians, denying them of a comfortable middle class job, as if a deliberate attempt at controlling a settled colonial class was enacted.[79] In the same year, he banned the traveling of Anglo-Indian orphans to Britain for an education, and in the next ten years, the Anglo-Indian community was gradually corseted into the role of “pipers, drummers, bandsmen, and farriers”. They could not own land, and the most lucrative work was out of their reach by 1795. Cornwallis swiftly destroyed the burgeoning Anglo-Indian middle class with his policies, forcing the Anglo-Indians to either hope that they would pass for complete Anglo-Saxon or be left to slide further down the social hierarchy. Some did pass, however, like the Napoleonic War era Prime Minister Lord Liverpool who was of partial Anglo-Indian descent, but many others lacked the means and were cast aside as more Indian than British.[80]
Cornwallis effectively ended the social acceptance of the concept of going native, and this newfound British arrogance in foreign affairs can be seen in the first Macartney embassy to China in 1793, when the envoy was ejected for his refusal to kowtow. This attitude and rebuff was repeated in 1816 by William Amherst, later Earl Amherst, and these incidents coupled with opium set the tone for Sino-British relations for the 19th Century[81]. Cornwallis’ successor, Richard Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington, older brother to the future Duke of Wellington and the governor-general from 1798 to 1805, certainly cemented the sentiment that Hinduism and Islam were inferior to the British culture that was starting to permeate into Indian society, not only because of the military victories his brother Arthur was able to secure against the Mysore, but also the haughty Anglo-Irish attitudes he acquired at home, now applied to a people even more foreign than the Irish. His taking of the throne, so to speak, in India in 1798 was a further sea change in the attitudes of the imperial government against all that was not Christian and English.
Colonel Arthur Wellesley made his impression early by defeating the Mysore at their own fortress while leading a mixed army of company and regular soldiers – mostly sepoys but also his own division, the 33rd Division of Foot – in addition to the Hyderabadi contingent that was called in support of the British.[82] This marked one of the first times a British commander took active control of an army of a princely state. The future duke promptly routed Tipu Sultan and ultimately took Seringapatam, becoming governor of the city as well as Mysore. By 1802, Mornington was ready to take on the Maratha Confederation once again, as the previous attempt at pacifying the Marathas and making them into a client state in the 1770s and 1780 failed, ending with only a peace treaty and little more. With imperial ambitions renewed, the now Major-General Wellesley defeated the Maratha armies at Assaye as well as Argaon to secure further territorial gains for the company. By 1804, the efforts of the Wellesley brothers had extended the company territory over virtually the entire subcontinent, an unthinkable feat only twenty years before.[83]
During Mornington’s seven year reign, he also had a scandal on his hands: the last well documented case of a high-ranking company official going native in earnest, and it was one of his appointees, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, resident at the Hyderabad court since 1797. It should have come as no surprise, as in 1797, virtually all high ranking British officials at the Hyderabadi court had serious, monogamous relationships with Indian noblewomen. The commander-in-chief, Colonel James Dalrymple, was married to the daughter of the Nawab of Masulipatam on the Coromandel Coast. William Linnaeus Gardner, another high ranking soldier in the Hyderabadi court, was married to the daughter of the Nawab of Cambay in Gujarat. Both marriages were holdovers from the Shore-Cornwallis regimes, and Mornington made no apparent move to forbid these liaisons outright.[84]
Kirkpatrick certainly was a bright, polyglot diplomat, having been born in India, educated in England, and of a curious origin tracing back to colonial South Carolina.[85] As one of the few people who truly understood the rites and rituals of the Hyderabadi court, he dove right into the processions, attempting to outmaneuver his French counterpart, a Messr. Raymond, who during the intrigues in Hyderabad in 1798 was found poisoned, leaving only a serious British presence at the court as French support faded under the inept governance of Raymond’s successor.[86]
While the future Duke of Wellington was on campaign, we get a glimpse of the waning days of the truly native soldiers-of-fortune, mostly American, Irish, or German, in the Maratha court but could be, and were, easily hired by the Hyderabadi army.[87] William Gardner, as mentioned earlier, was a nephew of the Baron Gardner of Uttoexter.[88] In contrast, almost every other renegade gone native was a picture of poverty and ruggedness. The Chevalier Dundrenec changed sides no fewer than seven times in fifteen years, while a German Jew, Gottlieb Koine, fathered an Urdu poet of some renown with a Mughal woman. Almost all of the mercenaries were prone to wandering from court to court, looking for their next fortune, and the more seasoned adventurers traveled on elephant, spoke Persian, and kept a seraglio.[89] There was also a sizeable Anglo-Indian contingent at this point, after Cornwallis’ laws outlawed them from the company army proper, they instead found work as soldiers of fortune instead. Amongst these was the future banking magnate, William Palmer, son of the resident at Pune, General William Palmer.[90]
Kirkpatrick successfully made allies in the Hyderabadi court and allowed the future duke to take command of those troops.[91] He also fell in love with a Hyderabadi noblewoman, Khair un-Nissa, and by 1800 such flagrant opposition to the earl’s racist policy on not creating an Anglo-Indian class was verboten. Kirkpatrick was warned by post from Calcutta to end the relationship, but by then Kirkpatrick had already started dressing in Hyderabadi dress and was contemplating marriage.[92] Furthermore, by late 1800, the girl was pregnant, and while Kirkpatrick attempted to cover up the relationship, word began reaching Mornington anyway. Kirkpatrick promptly converted to Islam, and by 1801 he was married, and while his British advisors at the court were sympathetic, neither the Hyderabadi elites nor the British officials in Calcutta approved of the match, the pregnancy, or the child.[93] When she became pregnant again only thirteen months later, Mornington started a full-scale investigation upon the matter, attempting to make Kirkpatrick an example in the veins of his new policies. Although charges were officially cleared after a “thorough investigation”, Kirkpatrick and Mornington were never on anything beyond the mostly basically cordial terms again, and with Mornington in charge, Kirkpatrick’s life at the Hyderabadi court was made miserable, in spite of the fact that he had virtually gone completely native, only cavorting with other Hyderabadi or sympathetic Englishmen and maintaining a great deal of independence and autonomy from Calcutta.[94] Mornington constantly conspired to convince Kirkpatrick’s compatriots, friends, and even his brother to convince him to resign his post, all while placing pressure upon the Hyderabadi court, now firmly a British client state ironically in part due to the efforts of Kirkpatrick, to also condemn the union. He held out until Mornington was recalled in 1804, and Cornwallis reinstated as governor-general. The wars under Mornington, however successful, were too costly, and while the profits certainly looked promising, the reality was that one cannot conquer India without money, and the coffers were running empty.[95]
But Kirkpatrick was also on the way out. He was ill – no Englishman can become truly immune to the native diseases that run rampant in their colonies, and less than half a year after Mornington was recalled, Kirkpatrick left Hyderabad, never to see his wife or children again, as he died the following year in Bengal.[96] His children were sent to England to be educated and raised as Englishmen, and with that, a chapter in the narrative of Englishmen going native ends.[97] Even though Mornington started a college in Fort William to train writers and factors, his de-Indianization policies had both an immediate and lasting effect on local policy that was highly damaging to all the work done by Kirkpatrick to repair Anglo-Native relations. Kirkpatrick’s successor, Thomas Sydenham, fired virtually the entire staff that served under Kirkpatrick and threw Kirkpatrick’s widow out of the residency. The incoming governor-generals, as well as the popular sentiments after the Napoleonic Wars, preferred to view India not as a mysterious emporium of culture and knowledge, but a backwater badly in need of civilization. On the cusp of the Regency and Victorian eras, one loses track of the tradition of voluntary or involuntary converts, renegades, deserters, and the rest. Industrialization and the demise of the company further puts the idea of going native in the realm of some anachronistic, needless ancient text, and with the passing of the governor-generals that truly altered British Indian policy at the turn of the Century, from 1780 to 1805, even before the final defeat of Napoleon, Britain had taken its long-awaited spot at the head of the table in international relations.
This was not to say that Anglo-Indian relationships ceased. Certainly, the male-to-female ratio in Calcutta, even at the end of Mornington’s reign and beyond, was so far skewed so that Anglo-Indian relations were a guarantee. Calcutta remained very much a frontier town in addition to its capacity as a regional capital for years to come, and a certain degree of lawlessness and debauchery was unavoidable.[98] However, going native was never just about sex, companionship, or money. To go native was almost a rebirth of sorts, to transform oneself into another distinct culture, social structure, and everything that came with them. The motives at first certainly differed, from love to finances to coercion or simply the potential, if not reality, of advancement in society, but the commitment to go native was invariably something grand and in some ways irreversible.[99] Many North African captives who went native to some degree never adequately fit back into British society. People like Johnson could only exist on the fringes of the empire, and despite his baronetcy and honors, his role was largely confined to the forests of New York instead of the streets of Westminster. The Briton who goes native essentially sheds one’s old identity and gains a new one, and this level of integration became virtually nonexistent in literature after the Kirkpatrick affair. Certainly there were isolated accounts of Britons joining the natives, in the Afghan debacle of 1842 for example, but their numbers dwindled significantly, and the average Briton became entrenched in a sense of well-being that was not to be eclipsed by the exotic and mysterious cultures of abroad. After two hundred years, the Briton had become jaded about Asia.
The loss of the American colonies, followed by the military success in the conquest of India and the eradication of a truly native middle class with the suppression of the status of the Anglo-Indians as well as the ostracizing of any British officials that engaged in the act of fraternizing too closely with the native classes only proved to the colonial authorities that a hard line, anti-integration, anti-nativist, and aggressive policy was to be the preferred way of governance in India, a trend that became prevalent in new British acquisitions, either on the subcontinent, i.e. Sind or Hunza, or in the Far East in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, down to Australia and New Zealand, all of which began in earnest after the transformation of the British view on their India policy. Asia’s woes under the Imperial yoke of the British seemed to have stemmed at least in part from America and in part because of the dominating position the British found themselves in by the early 19th Century in the world. By the end of the century, the sun would not set on the British Empire. The notion of empire, in this case, seems to denote some sort of detachment to the closeness of relations Kirkpatrick or Thomas or any one of the aforementioned Briton had to their posts, or captors, for that matter. Such cases would cease to capture the imaginations of the average Briton and the colonial administrators, whether in London or Calcutta, took it upon themselves to view themselves not as unwitting or incidental players in the imperial game, still invariably attached to the local traditions that might overrun the essential “Britishness” of an individual. Instead, the failure of the American policy and the success of the India policy made Britain confident that “Britishness” was exactly what was needed to be injected into their colonies, whether segregated or integrated, that would be the hallmark of imperial grandeur.
In any case, as imperialist ambitions grew within the empire, we no longer see any remaining notes of Britons going native. Instead, it would be up to the natives to mimic the Britons in their attempt to carve out unique identities from under the British yoke.
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[1] Linda Colley. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600 - 1850. New York: Pantheon, 2002, 10
[2] William Dalrymple. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. New York: Penguin, 2002, 6-7
[3] Marco Ramerini. “History of the Dutch in Ceylon (Sri Lanka): The Burghers in Ceylon.” WWW Virtual Library - Sri Lanka. 1998. http://www.lankalibrary.com/geo/dutch.htm (accessed 9 29, 2009).
[4] Colley, Captives, 256
[5] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 21-22
[6]Ibid., 23
[7]Dalrymple, White Mughals, 24
[8] Colley, Captives, 12-13
[9] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 39
[10] Ibid., 40
[11] Colley, Captives, 251
[12] Colley, Captives, 314
[13] Ibid., 39
[14] Ibid., 50
[15] Ibid., 63
[16] William Corr. Adams the Pilot: The Life and Times of Captain William Adams. Sandgate, Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1995, 23
[17] Ibid., 25
[18] Giles Milton. Samurai William: the Englishman who Opened Japan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 83
[19] Ibid., 90
[20] Corr, Adams the Pilot, 38
[21] Milton, Samurai William, 98-99
[22] Ibid., 101
[23] Ibid., 102-103
[24] Ibid., 110-111
[25] Ibid., 113
[26] Corr, Adams the Pilot, 70
[27] Ibid., 157-158
[28] Milton, Samurai William, 119
[29] Ibid., 120
[30] Ibid., 121-122
[31] Milton, Samurai William, 125
[32] Corr, Adams the Pilot, 160
[33] Ibid., 115
[34] Milton, Samurai William, 165
[35] Ibid., 172-173
[36] Milton, Samurai Adams, 178-180
[37] Ibid., 181
[38] Corr, Adams the Pilot, 161
[39] Ibid., 163
[40] Ibid., 123
[41] Milton, Samurai Adams, 224
[42] Milton, Samurai Adams, 225
[43] Ibid., 259-263
[44] Ibid., 315
[45] Colley, Captives, 118
[46] Colley, Captives¸75
[47] Ibid., 118
[48] Ibid., 95-96
[49] Ibid., 109
[50] Carolyn Thomas Foreman. “Alexander McGillivray, Emperor of the Creeks.” Chronicles of Oklahoma, March 1929: 106
[51] James H. O’Donnell. “McIntosh and Weatherfield, Creek Indian Leaders.” Journal of Southern History 55, no. 4 (November 1989)
[52] Colley, Captives, 161
[53] Fintan O’Toole. White Savage : William Johnson and the Invention of America . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 19
[54] James Thomas Flexner. Mohawk Baronet. New York: Harper’s, 1959.
[55] Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, 55
[56] Ibid., 63
[57] Ibid., 159
[58] Ibid., 215
[59] O’Toole, White Savage, 174
[60] Ramerini, The Burghers in Ceylon
[61] Colley, Captives, 328-329
[62] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 18-23
[63] Ibid., 26
[64] Ibid., 27-28
[65] Colley, Captives, 289
[66] Ibid., 274
[67] Ibid., 276-277
[68] Ibid., 282-283
[69] Colley, Captives, 286-287
[70] I’ve differentiated Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess of Wellesley and Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, by referring to the former as the Earl of Mornington, his hereditary courtesy title before 1799, and the latter as the future Duke of Wellington or merely Colonel or Major-General Arthur Wellesley. This was done for clarification’s sake, even if Mornington was created the Marquess of Wellesley a year after taking office in India. The younger Wellesley did not acquire his first title, as Viscount Wellington, until 1809, so the nomenclature of “Wellington” would not apply until 1809 officially. Hence, I’ve differentiated the two brothers as Mornington and Wellesley.
[71] Colley, Captives, 323
[72] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 25
[73] Colley, Captives, 325
[74] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 25
[75] Colley, Captives, 344-345
[76] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 22-23
[77] Ibid., 33-34
[78] Ibid., 36-39
[79] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 39
[80] Ibid., 40
[81] George Pottinger. Sir Henry Pottinger: First Governor of Hong Kong. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997, 65
[82] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 152-153
[83] Ibid., 284-285
[84] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 142-145
[85] Ibid., 49-51
[86] Ibid., 109
[87] Colley, Captives, 319
[88] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 111
[89] Ibid., 112-113
[90] Ibid., 114
[91] Ibid., 114-115
[92] Ibid., 170
[93] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 214-217
[94] Ibid., 233-235
[95] Ibid., 288-289
[96] Ibid., 299
[97] Dalrymple, White Mughals, 300-301
[98] Ibid., 320
[99] Colley, Captives, 360