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Sir Richard Francis Burton’s personal investment in African colonialism, his subscription to certain medical and racial doctrines, and his hostility towards African natives are all interwoven within his travel writing. This chapter traces the arc of Burton’s engagement with the tropical climate and its effects on the white body, from Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), to The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) and Wanderings in West Africa (1863). In earlier work, he uses vivid sensory details and detailed first-person descriptions of illness in order to bolster his own heroic persona and also to de-authorise his companions. In later travel writing, Burton creates hygienic maps of West Africa in order to allow space for on-going white settlement at higher elevations. By focusing on concepts of environmental pathology in mid-century travel writing to Africa, one may witness how writers such as Burton attempt to depict and then delimit dangers to the white body.

Chapter 2 investigates the corporeal Orientalism envisioned by Swinburne and Beardsley, two Pre-Raphaelite sympathisers who envisioned the East as a sexual dimension inhabited by Oriental female figures such as Scheherazade, Dunyazad, Salome and Bersabe – namely, hur al-ayn – evoking the sensual and pornographic content of the Arabian Nights. Both Swinburne and Beardsley exalted Sir Richard F. Burton and his uncensored translation of the Arabian Nights, which aimed to reveal the erotic customs of the Muslims. On the one hand, Swinburne’s cognitive grammar reveals the use of binary world-builders (West and East) attesting to the superiority of the East, as exemplified by his poems dedicated to Burton and The Masque of Queen Bersabe. On the other hand, Beardsley’s conceptual metaphor East is sexual freedom is projected on to his grotesque pen-and-ink illustrations of Salome and Ali Baba and on to his Oriental poems (‘The Ballad of a Barber’ (1896) and Under the Hill) by blending together the sacred and the profane, the Middle East and the Far East. His radical mode of repatterning old Oriental schemas into new ones is aimed at desacralising the Orient and, in a way, at (de)Orientalising Western and Eastern schemas.

The final chapter locates the careers of two prominent hunters-turned-conservationists—Jim Corbett and Richard Burton—within the essential paradox of hunting and conservation in colonial India. In the case of both, as this chapter demonstrates, any simple binary of the colonizer–colonized model is inadequate to explain their prolific hunting in the first half of their lives as well as their passionate commitment to the cause of conservation in the second half. The chapter examines how, in their dual roles as hunter and conservationist, killer and protector, ruler and saviour, both men encompassed the quintessential split image of the British Raj. Particularly in their role as slayers of man-eating predators, Corbett and Burton offer an extremely nuanced and complex image that revises any straightforward impression of colonial hunters in India dominating their natural environment in imitation of the imperial domination of India’s politics. Despite such caveats, this chapter argues that Corbett and Burton remained staunch loyalists to the British Raj, and cautions that the wider history of conservation thinking should pay due attention to the critical and historical analysis of individuals like Corbett and Burton, whose individual approaches to conservation issues were drawn from lived experience, just as much as from broader colonial attitudes.

The chapter reviews existing debates on the rise of the Anthropological Society. It questions anthropologist George W. Stocking’s almost complete exclusion of explorer Richard F. Burton from the narrative. Burton’s influence on the ways and means of the Anthropological Society of London was paramount. The chapter also criticizes Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s suggestion that the ASL was just an instrument of Confederate propaganda in London during the Civil War. The ASL’s apex was reached one year after the Confederate defeat, precluding such a characterization. Last, the chapter suggests that the most obvious criterion to delineate the ASL from it’s rival ESL (Ethnological Society of London) is sociological. The ESL was more aristocratic and the ASL included predominantly individuals from the technical professions and imperial bureaucracies who found in empire a mean of enrichment social rise.

This piece analyses the genealogical and discursive hybridity of the approaches to sexual knowledge taken in the ‘sexological’ work of the traveller/scholar Sir Richard Burton (1821–90). It focuses on the erotic, ethnographic, and exotic features of his presentation of sexuality in The book of one thousand nights and a night (1885–8), locating it within his general involvement with such discourses, within histories of homoerotic subcultures and ‘obscene’ publication, and within histories of science, empire, and ethnography. It argues that Burton’s treatment of sexuality combined powerful tropes established over two centuries of orientalist practice with mid-nineteenth-century cultural concerns, and with emerging innovative trends of the 1880s. Close reading of the text suggests that its many-sided and inconsistent approaches to sexual matters express unresolved negotiations between long-standing sexualized conventions of exoticism, contemporary raced, classed, and gendered cultural practices, and new ‘scientific’ or ‘modern’ thinking.

This chapter focuses on the period from the early 1840s to James MacQueen’s death in 1870. It follows MacQueen’s geographical theories and commercial proposals as they flowed beyond the Niger basin. The concerns are his acceptance within the British geographical establishment, after he was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1845, and subsequent career as a Victorian ‘critical’ (or ‘armchair’) geographer; the use of his ideas by the Southern US proslavery ideologue and politician, John C. Calhoun; his relationship to the missionary-explorer David Livingstone; and his involvement in the Nile controversy, when he took the side of Richard Burton against John Hanning Speke. Thus, the chapter simultaneously brings the narrative to a close while also revealing the continuing entanglements of slavery, geographical knowledge, exploration, race and empire that were evident throughout MacQueen’s career.

The 20th century ushered in a reform of Shakespearean staging that emphasized minimal scenery, rapid movement, and everything that the 19th-century stage was not. William Poel was an early reformer, as was Harley Granville-Barker. The new Hamlets included Sarah Bernhard, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Robert Burton, Nicol Williamson, and many others. Interpretation, responding to cataclysmic events that included the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, feminism, and street protest, moved toward a revisionist of the play as disillusioned, bitter, fatalistic, and violent.

This chapter explores the realm of the popular imagination, focusing on the often wildly exaggerated and exoticized image of Tantra in Victorian novels and Indian popular literature. It examines the rich confluence of Orientalist constructions, colonial paranoia, and poetic license that fed into the literary portrayals, both Eastern and Western, of the seedy Indian underworld in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tantra might be said to lie at the deepest core of this world, as “India's darkest heart.” The genre of the novel played a crucial role in the rise of nationalism, both in Europe and in the colonies, throughout the modern period. One of the most important figures in the construction of Tantra in the literary imagination—and in the modern imagining of Tantra in Western popular culture as a whole—was Sir Richard Francis Burton. This chapter also considers Tantra in the works of British women writers, as well as the works of the Bengali poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

The brief epilogue to this volume offers some concluding thoughts on the process by which the Arabian Nights was absorbed into British literature and culture. It then identifies the emergence of a new vision of these tales in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, which celebrated the transformation of the magical metropolis into a dynamic space of magic and mystery that supposedly far excelled its Eastern counterparts. The increasing permeability of national boundaries, coupled with an increasingly global commodity culture in late-Victorian London, intensified fantasies of the modern city as a place of adventure, with a now internalised, potent Oriental presence. In many ways, this centre of commerce, industry and science became that fantastic, unpredictable and ever-alluring space of a new Arabian Nights.

This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the invention of the homo/hetero binary. To this end, this chapter reads across a range of sexological writing encompassing Richard Burton’s climate-based Sotadic Zone, Havelock Ellis’s observation of a “special proclivity” for homosexuality in the “hotter regions of the globe,” and Victor Segalen’s claim that there is “not much Arctic Eroticism” to explore climate as the aspect of the permeable, humoral body with the longest afterlife. It argues that an examination of what Iwan Bloch calls “Anthropologia Sexualis” will highlight the meanings of the shift from the humoral body to a germ theory of the body for the construction of sexuality. Reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) as a text that roots homosexuality in the competing epidemiological regimes of anthropologia sexualis’s humoralism and scientia sexualis’s germ theory, this chapter reads Mann’s novella as providing a key switch point for understanding the divestment of sexuality in humoralism. Moreover, this chapter suggests that Mann's text provides rich models for theorizing sexuality as simultaneously climatic and microbial.

The Pitt Rivers Museum was established at Oxford University in 1883 as a result of the gift of the ethnographical and archaeological collection belonging to Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers. He had begun his collection some thirty years earlier in order to illustrate what he referred to as the ‘principle of continuity’; and he was concerned to find a place for it within an academic setting in order to promote the study of anthropology, a subject in which he had become involved as a serious amateur since the early 1860s. His collection, which numbered approximately 14,000 items at the time of its presentation to Oxford, ranged from boomerangs to bows and arrows, housing types (based on models), and clothing and ornamentation. Many of the items were obtained from returning travellers and explorers, among them Richard Burton, the Africanist, and Edward Belcher, the Arctic explorer. The system had a specifically ethnological purpose, one that Pitt-Rivers hoped would be realized at Oxford.

The big paydays resumed when Trumbo agreed to write scripts for Dino de Laurentiis, the Mirisch brothers, and Martin Ransohoff. The first came to nothing, but the second was for Hawaii and the third was for The Sandpiper. The latter two resulted in credit disputes, and Trumbo ended up sharing credit with Daniel Taradash and Michael Wilson, respectively.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.

This chapter unpacks the socio-cultural world buried in Amy Woodforde-Finden’s ‘Kashmiri Song’ (1902), and its century-long cultural projections. The fervour it generated stemmed from delight in ‘Kashmiri romance’ dating back to Lalla Rookh, its erotic, interracial implications and their resonance with Richard Burton’s ‘Indo-Persian’ translations (Kama Sutra) and contemporary Anglo-Indian/women’s fiction, and, crucially, rumours surrounding its creation by a woman composer and a woman poet (the pseudonymous ‘Laurence Hope’), who each ‘knew’ India ‘intimately’. The singer’s ambiguous subject position (widely heard as autobiographical) is shown to allow for transgressive explorations of imperial fantasies (fuelled by its companion, ‘Less than the Dust’) at the Raj’s height and beyond. Ultimately, the changing resonance of ‘Kashmiri Song’, culminating in a postcolonial re-voicing by Agha Shahid Ali, opens up Indo-British history to its internal others (Muslims, exiles, women, lesbians), illuminating its significance for understanding the continuing reverberations of colonialism.

Chapter 2 looks at how travelers drew and described imperial landscapes, arguing that the picturesque was an aesthetic paradigm that concealed the monotony, hardship, and otherness of foreign lands. It analyses the complex interaction of aesthetic theory and perception, and highlights the propagandistic qualities of the picturesque that emerge in contrasts between the work of amateur and professional artists. By privileging certain sites, the picturesque ironically made much of the empire seem boring as even the most impressive views were rarely as spectacular in person as they were in paintings and engravings. Moreover, the visual familiarity of iconic sites meant fewer opportunities to explore the unexplored. Even in India, with its remarkable array of historical and religious sites, the British described much of the terrain as monotonous. In other locations, such as South Africa and Australia, where there were no ruins to enjoy, there was even less that was deemed noteworthy.

Sudhir Kakar agrees that there is a rupture between the private and the public in India, citing as an example izzat or honour of the family. He explains why homosexuality is seen as a deviation in India and yet transvestites are so easily accepted in Indian society. In his book, Intimate Relations, Kakar claims that sex is both loved and feared in India, where sexuality and morality have always been traditionally fused together. Kakar also discusses the distinction between the Oedipus complex and the Ganesha complex. He further talks about how the sexual and the erotic are intertwined in Bhakti poetry and expresses his views about Muslims and Hindus in India, mystical ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, mysticism, his novel Ecstasy where he tackles the historical relationship between Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, and whether Rabindranath Tagore’s methodology can be applied to Indian sexuality. He also talks about his translation of the Kamasutra and the flaws in Richard Burton’s translation.

This chapter examines the political deployment in the late nineteenth century of two radically different ways of relating to ancient homosexuality. The first saw ancient Greek sexuality as providing a model for emulation and a pattern for living a rich and fulfilling life. In contrast, the other saw ancient texts not as providing a philosophy of modern living, but merely the repository of data for the scientific study of homosexual behaviour. Advocates for both positions sought to elevate the position of contemporary homosexuals. However, in doing so, they operated with divergent ideas about the status of sexuality, the aims of homosexual emancipation, and the role of classical scholarship in the modern world. This chapter examines the tensions, conflicts, and the moments of resistance facilitated by these two alternative positions.

This chapter examines the resurgence of Puritanism in contemporary India, first by discussing erotic religious imagery in the context of Hinduism and the early history of Hindu eroticism and asceticism. It comments on Sir Richard Francis Burton’s English translation of the Kamasutra and the book’s role in the sexual consciousness of contemporary Indians. It also considers Hindu attitudes to sexuality.

This chapter describes the explosion of large-scale maps and the multiplication of increasingly scientific surveys that followed the intensifying involvement of Britain in the East. It demonstrates the existence of British sub-empires using their expertise as a legitimizing elements. The competition between the different components of the British Empire from the Mediterranean to the Indian ocean testifies to the existence of various networks presiding over the construction of the region.This chapter also shows that local populations were not passive bystanders in the construction of spatial knowledge on the region. The interplay between self-styled European dominance and indigenous resistance or collaboration was multifaceted. One section demonstrates how local countermaps played their part in the spatial definitions of places in the East.