'Bourgeois Gypsies'? Nineteenth-Century European Geopolitics and the Rhetoric of Mobility

What is the difference between a tourist and a cosmopolite? An expatriate and an immigrant? An exile and a refugee? In response to contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment and growing xenophobia, scholars are beginning to ask how we talk about human movement across borders and why. My paper traces many of the labels we still use to categorize travelers—and, more importantly, the connotations these labels imply—to nineteenth-century British imperialism. I analyze the hierarchy of travel identities these terms codify, and how this language has historically allowed English- speakers to distinguish among mobile persons who occupy the same spaces and perform the same functions. In literary and historical travel texts from the height of British Empire, as well as in modern discourse about those texts, I examine how synonymous travel terms become raced and classed, and how those meanings reverberate in our language over time. Through such language, I argue, narrative can reinforce or challenge imperial hierarchies still prevalent in our contemporary international moment.