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The study is an imperial history that examines the many angles in which a hegemonic power could use folklore studies, a nineteenth-century intersection of professionalised science and the scientification of culture-an academic borderspace-as a mechanism to impose a borderland identity onto another people under the social and political oppression of others. For the case study, the thesis focuses on how Britain's relationship with Poland, which was then partitioned and colonised by Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and Russia, shifted between paternalistic to outright negative. To illustrate the multifaceted process involved in the external creation of a 'borderland', the study analyses the relationship between Britain and Poland through the British engagement with Polish culture in folklore scholarship. Folklore studies, as a field that typified the blend of science and culture present in the nineteenth century, acts as the cornerstone; the study utilises British sources about Polish folklore to investigate the building of an ethnic identity through the cultural reframing of Linnaean taxonomy and evolutionary theory. Through literary and source analysis, the work parallels Britain's infliction of Otherness onto Polish culture with the Polish struggle against the popular image in order to demonstrate the British reimagining of Poland as a past/present, East/West borderland. The study shows how, throughout the century, British folklorists and writers adapted methods and writing styles from the natural sciences to strengthen Poland's borderland identity, which acts as an example of how nineteenth-century imperial powers legitimised their presentations of non-Western cultures as Other through folklore scholarship.