I am a cultural historian of the long eighteenth century with special interests in the histories of dislocation, emotions and the self in the context of the British Empire in India. My project considers how geographical mobility, and consequently dislocation (temporal, social and emotional), affected the construction and expression of the self in the age of the East India Company (EIC) nabob. Whilst most scholarship analysing identity and the self considers historical subjects as geographically static, this project examines how those who were displaced within and between imperial sites such as Britain and India navigated and expressed their relationship with the self. The project’s historical subjects are the EIC officials labelled “nabobs”, and their families, who ‘lived lives that internalized India’ (Nechtman, 2010). By considering families, the project ponders how the effects of dislocation across generations affected the imperial family’s “habitus” and collective senses of identity and belonging over time. The project also explores the lives of those native to the Indian subcontinent who were dislocated by these families, including domestic servants, nursery maids (ayahs) and interracial children. Ayahs often facilitated the mobility of white imperial families and thus had to contend with international displacement and emotional dislocation.