Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship, and Identity in War and Peace

Abstract

B 1870 and 1945 some three dozen widows from the Tyne port of South Shields applied for and received naturalization as British subjects—most of them during the First World War. What distinguished these three dozen women from the nearly eight hundred local men naturalized in the same period? With only two exceptions, the women had all been born and raised in Britain, most within a few miles of the town they lived in. Between 1870 and 1948 countless British women forfeited their nationality through marriage to foreign nationals, yet only a fraction ever retrieved it. In the same years thousands of foreign-born men acquired British nationality, many of them with only tenuous claims to reside anywhere in Britain. The predicament of the alien widows exposes the gendered exclusions and amputations inherent in ongoing processes of state formation and nation building; the disruptive effects of total war on the transnational networks and relationships sustaining custom and culture in working class Tyneside; and the discrepancies and collusions between local and national definitions of belonging. Scholars generally link nationality to objective bases such as “some prior unity