Transculturation and Islamicate “English” daughters in Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts, Which happened in Barbary in the Year 1756

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article assesses the transcultural subject formation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British girls and women who navigated between abjection, accommodation, and assimilation while held captive in the Maghreb, the westernmost region of the classical Islamic world, for months, years, or even a lifetime. It does so by considering them in relation to the daughters of renegades – Christian European converts – who were born in the Maghreb and into the Muslim faith but who continued to be identified as English. Dwelling on the first narrative of an Englishwoman’s travels and captivity in Morocco, Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts, Which happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, not published until 1769, it argues that the direction of transculturation for both categories of “English” daughters tended towards the Islamicate rather than the other way around even as their gendered negotiations rendered their relationship to their national identities malleable.