ABSTRACT
In recent years, the historiography of the British presence in India has grown to include an impressive set of literature on marginal communities, including soldiers, prostitutes, orphans, vagrants, and ‘loafers’.1 This work has been significant in drawing out some of the social complexities of colonial settlement and expansion, particularly during the era of ‘high imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century. In this, it is strongly suggestive of the processes through which orientalist discourses on and of the Indian ‘other’ were produced through reference to social, economic, and cultural structures in the British metropole. Non-elite British communities were also orientalized within complex webs of power that both reinforced the social – and eventually racial – exclusivity that both underlay colonial governance and took empire back home.2
