Orientalism or Meridionism? British identity formation through travel writing on India and Italy, 1760-1850

This thesis compares two bodies of travel writing; the accounts of ‘middling types’ of British travellers to Italy and to India from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Rather than treat British engagement with these two travel destinations separately, as has tended to be the case, I consider the ways in which British travel to Italy and India contributed to and justified an emerging sense of British identity, which reflected the growing cultural and political authority of the middle-classes. Travellers’ discourse on India has been, broadly, considered as part of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism; the creation of an East-West binary of racial inferiority and superiority. However, the ‘superiority’ of the West is apparently disrupted by another division configured by travellers during the same period, that of a European North-South binary. Manfred Pfister has termed this binary ‘Meridionism’, noting that ‘there is an intra-European “Meridionism” as well as a global Orientalism.’ Rather than think about Orientalism and Meridionism separately or as two parallel but distinct processes, this thesis examines the relationship between Orientalism and Meridionism. I explore the ways in which Orientalism and Meridionism interact to and reinforce each other and, in the process, configure a sense of British identity based around bourgeois ‘virtue’