Theses - History
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Item Embargo Scrapbooking cultures in twentieth-century BritainWatton, Cherish; Watton, Cherish [0000-0003-2053-5072]This thesis offers the first study of scrapbooking in Britain during the twentieth century. By adding newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards, and ephemera into their scrapbooks, Britons fashioned unique records of the world in which they lived. During the twentieth century, scrapbooking remained a popular activity, indebted to earlier Victorian traditions, but fuelled by new forms of mass media and leisure. Moving a primarily nineteenth-century scrapbooking literature firmly into the twentieth century, I use the themes of war, monarchy, rural life, and pornography, to illustrate the different ways in which historical actors engaged with the scrapbook genre. I argue that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new types of scrapbooking: Britons scrapbooked creatively, expanding the range of individual and communal purposes which scrapbooks could serve. Scrapbookers transformed their volumes into personal narratives, histories, surveys, and archives. I open my thesis by using cultural and commercial commentaries to reconstruct the broader cultural climate in which historical actors made their scrapbooks. I show how these commercial and cultural discourses commodified scrapbooking as a valuable form of personal expression. In subsequent chapters on war, the Royal Family, and pornography, I reveal how scrapbooking was a novel self-making practice, uniquely reliant on print media and ephemera. Rooted in the visual and the tactile, scrapbookers overcame the conventions associated with other forms of life writing, embracing the genre’s imaginative and fantastical potential. I also demonstrate how scrapbooks are unusually well-placed sites for exploring the enduring influence of conservative values. I devise the term ‘intimate conservatism’ to explore this type of scrapbooking in non-partisan settings. Scrapbooking was not only a personal practice, but a widespread communal activity too. In chapters on war and rural life, I chart how scrapbooks evolved to function as community histories and surveys, reorientating histories of archiving and sociology away from the pursuits of professionals to those of ordinary people. Drawing on scrapbooks, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, minutes, and oral histories, this thesis uncovers the rich social and cultural history of scrapbooking in twentieth-century Britain.Item Embargo Academic Mobility and Identity Construction at the Late Medieval Universities of Paris and OrléansBarucci, TeresaThe present thesis explores the relation between academic mobility and identity construction at the universities of Paris and Orléans from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. Because of their prestigious reputation, the universities of Paris and Orléans were among the preferred destinations for academic mobility in late medieval Europe; Orléans had acted as the *de facto* Faculty of Law of Paris since the 1219 ban on the teaching of Civil Law in the French capital. Therefore, their communities were very diverse. The scholars held different political loyalties, spoke different languages, and had different cultural backgrounds. Differences predicated on geographical origin were constantly engaged with, and were undoubtedly the most visible and significant markers of identity in the university. On the one hand, the thesis analyses the construction, the expression, and the practical significance of forms of social identity based on geographical origin in the scholarly communities of Paris and Orléans. The argument is developed through three chapters, which reckon with the institutional, the personal and collective, and the practical dimension of identity. My sources come from archives in France, Italy, and Germany, are written in medieval Latin and the European vernaculars, and include texts produced by the scholars themselves or by the central and local administration and authorities, as well as material culture in the form of manuscript illumination. On the other hand, the thesis contributes to the current academic debates surrounding the development of secular and socio-political forms of collective identity in pre-modern Europe. Indeed, I propose an original trans-regional, comparative, and bottom-up approach to the question. First, adopting the perspective of the diverse communities of Paris and Orléans makes the research inherently trans-regional and comparative. Second, this is a bottom-up analysis, based on the tangible evidence of identity construction among the thousands of scholars passing through the two universities. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the identities articulated by the scholars were not – as often described in the historiography – 'national', but rather flexible, cross-cutting, and geographical, political, linguistic, and cultural in nature.Item Controlled Access Minorites, military service, and the legacies of post-war reconstruction in the British Isles, 1918-1939Grace, FearghalThis thesis aims to create a greater understanding of democratic citizenship in post-First World War Britain as it relates to minority status in the period 1918-1939. Arguing that histories of interwar politics have been slow to recognise the role and experiences of Britain’s minority communities in shaping notions of citizenship during the first decades of British mass democracy, the thesis focuses on the role of military service in the formation of minority rights agendas. Scholarship on the political culture of the period has interrogated the nature of British democracy between the wars, but the position of minorities in these debates is less clear. While New Imperial histories have considered the legacies of claim-making on the part of non-white colonial subjects in this period, rarely has analysis been set in the context of post-war reconstruction, memory of wartime pledges, and the impact of military service on both the self-history and identity of minorities, and how they were perceived by others. After the First World War, British Governments faced an expectant mass citizenry, and a growing field of civic participation in the form of associations, clubs, and pressure groups: testament to the new politics of the post-war age. On this field, minority agendas were founded and articulated, while dominant notions of citizenship, what it meant to belong, were contested and reshaped. Contributing to a history of minorities, and interwar political culture more broadly, the thesis considers the formation of minority-focused ex-service organisations by Jewish and Irish veterans of the Great War.Item Embargo The Long Road to the Bank of Ghana, 1825-1966Adjepong-Boateng, KofiThis thesis investigates the emergence of a modern currency system in the Gold Coast and Ghana. It analyses financial events from 1825, the year when the ‘Trade Ounce’, a unit in commerce on the Guinea Coast during the Atlantic slave trade, ceased to be widely used in the Gold Coast and other parts of West Africa, to 1966, by which time a central bank had been established and was operating in Ghana. It covers the establishment of the first indigenous bank in the Gold Coast and the debate associated with the attempt by Gold Coast and Ghanaian nationalists to convert the institution into a modern central bank. The context of the analysis is the history of the concept of central banking as it evolved in Britain and its empire; different models of central banking are also considered, including one that was promoted by Bank of England (‘BoE’). This model was promoted against the wishes of Gold Coast nationalists of different political persuasions and against advice dating back to the introduction of a central bank in India and Ceylon from such theorists as John Maynard Keynes and Richard S. Sayers, that a more actively developmental central banking model should be adopted by territories with less sophisticated financial markets. Conversely, the study analyses the failed attempt by the African nationalists who took control of the Gold Coast administration to create a central bank that did not follow the model promoted by BoE but featured commercial banking operations recommended by such unconventional economists as Thomas Balogh. The thesis draws on a wide range of primary sources, including internal Bank of England correspondence, archival material held at the Bank of Ghana and Ghana Commercial Bank archives and at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department’s collections in Accra, Kumasi, and Cape Coast and the National Archives at Kew Gardens in London. Also consulted were several collections of private papers including those of Balogh, Arthur Lewis, Oliver Sprague, Andrew Brimmer, Nicholas Kaldor, and Paul Warburg. The analysis was helped by studying newspaper and press articles, British Parliamentary and Colonial Office records and consulting records held at the Balme Library and the Institute of African Studies, both at the University of Ghana. It places these primary sources in the context of a wide secondary literature on the wider use of coinage in West Africa, the development of the concept of central banking and the establishment of the West African Currency Board.Item Open Access A comparative study of massacres during the wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641-53Volmer, IngaThis dissertation is a comparative study of massacres and atrocities perpetrated in England, Ireland, and Scotland between 1641 and 1653. In this period the three Stuart kingdoms were embroiled in a series of wars that had a destabilizing and traumatizing effect on society. By concentrating on massacres and atrocities committed by the warring parties, and their impact on society, this study will not only make a significant contribution to determining the true impact of the British wars on the three kingdoms, but will provide an important insight into the character of these wars. The fifteen case studies which form the foundation of this study will be analysed within a framework of the four specific contexts in which atrocities were most likely to take place, namely following sieges, following assaults on strongholds, in the aftermath of battles, and as premeditated massacres in other settings. These categories will provide the basis for the comparison, and constitute the four main chapters of this dissertation. The thrust of the thoughts and arguments advanced in the course of the study are developed in the concluding chapter. Even though many factors contributed to the occurrence of mass killing and massacres, it will be argued that it was mainly the religious hatred towards rival confessions and the ethnic animosity felt towards the Irish by the English and Scottish people that were the major stimuli behind the massacres, in England just as much as on the Celtic fringes of the Stuart realms. As such the Wars of the Three Kingdoms are firmly embedded within the wider context of European wars of religion and conquest of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Item Open Access The Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Africa Inland Mission and Decolonization in Malaya and Kenya, 1940-1966Ashbridge, BenjaminThis thesis connects and compares the evolving activities of the China Inland Mission Overseas Missionary Fellowship (CIMOMF) and the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) in China, Malaya and Kenya from 1940-1966. These two so-called ‘faith missions’ saw significant shifts in their missiological policies during these decades as they navigated the nationalist and developmentalist movements which were both reshaping the nature of the globe and local decolonization processes. From the 1940s onwards CIMOMF and AIM stances began to exhibit corresponding transitions away from a previously single-issue mentality of evangelism-only in favour of more socially conscious and institutionally minded approach. In the 1950s, despite clear parallels between the Malayan and Kenyan Emergencies, these missions exhibited different courses of action in the two locales, as their direct circumstances and experiences prompted context-specific missiological programmes. By the 1960s CIMOMF and AIM policies once again converged, as conservative evangelical missions came together to combat the new threats of the cold-war era. These three decades saw the emergence of conservative evangelical missions as a coherent and unified ‘third force’ aiming to play a role in shaping the global governance of the post-war world. It will be seen that these two missionary bodies, operating in disparate contexts, were part of the same ‘fundamentalist network’. Through this system of transnational connections information and attitudes were transmitted, and cohesive responses were coordinated. As such the policies of the CIMOMF and AIM are analysed here through a framework of ‘comparative connections’. In doing so it shall make clear overarching priorities for global evangelicalism during the shifting of the world order through decolonization, whilst providing answers to what contextual circumstances and indigenous influences impacted AIM and OMF policy, as these missionaries attempted to reconcile both transnational and contextually contingent influences.Item Controlled Access The Conservative Power and the debate on constitutional guardianship in the United States and France, 1776-1815Brown, AngusThis dissertation presents the first complete account of a theory of constitutional guardianship, referred to as the ‘conservative power’ (pouvoir conservateur) by its proponents, which played a central role in both American and French Revolutionary constitution-making from 1776-1815. Focusing primarily on the writings of Thomas Paine, James Madison, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Condorcet, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, it demonstrates that the conservative power represented the first historically significant attempt to create an institution to maintain the hierarchical relationship between the ‘constituent’ and ‘constituted’ powers. In so doing, it traces the origins of this theory to an elected constitutional guardian called the Council of Censors, created in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, partly inspired by Paine, and demonstrates its considerable influence on French Revolutionary constitutionalism. In France, the Council of Censors inspired the new doctrine of the pouvoir conservateur, first articulated by Brissot and Armand Guy de Kersaint, which played an influential role in the French constitutional debates of 1789-1791 and shaped both the Girondin and Montagnard constitutional plans of 1793. After the Terror, the idea of a conservative power was revived by Sieyès in his proposal for a Constitutional Jury in 1795, which adapted it to the conditions of post-Thermidorian French politics. In turn, Sieyès’ proposal inspired the creation of the Conservative Senate in the French Constitution of 1799 and Constant’s doctrine of the pouvoir neutre. Drawing on this revised historical account, the dissertation concludes by re-evaluating theories of constitutional guardianship advanced by Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, amongst others, and by challenging the hegemony of the constitutional court in contemporary constitutional thinking. In its place, it advocates the adoption of a more expansive vision of the powers required to maintain the constitutional integrity of a democratic state.Item Open Access Francophone literary perceptions of Celtic space in Britain, 1100-1300Bailey, LauraThe twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period characterised by Anglo-Norman political intervention, expansion, and settlement in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In this thesis, I argue that Francophone literary texts, previously neglected by historians, offer a new lens through which to explore the relationship between England and its neighbours in Britain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although select French texts such as Gaimar’s *Estoire des Engleis* and *L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal* have garnered attention from historians, my thesis delves deeper into ‘fictional’ narratives, applying an ecocritical approach to closely examine the representation of the landscapes of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the texts. This provides a window both into contemporary Francophone knowledge of Celtic spaces, and into how they existed within the thought world of the Francophone elite. The first section of this thesis, ‘Geographical knowledge and localisation’, examines how the narratives of *Fouke le Fitz Waryn*, the *Roman de Fergus*, and the *lais of Desiré* and *Melion* are embedded in local geographies, demonstrating precise knowledge of place names and topography. In ‘Wilderness and adventure’, I explore how the practical realities of Celtic geographies might interact with their imaginative resonance as spaces for adventures and encounters with the unknown in the *lai of Desiré*, the *Gesta Herewardi*, *Fouke le Fitz Waryn*, *Les Merveilles de Rigomer*, and *Sone de Nansay*. Finally, in ‘Alternative visions of space’, I examine how the *Roman de la Manekine* and the *Roman de Horn* present Celtic spaces in a different manner to those explored in the two previous sections, offering reimaginings of Ireland and Scotland that serve authorial aims and reflect the places and times of composition of the texts. My thesis clearly demonstrates the value of Francophone literary texts as windows into the mental world of the Francophone elite, and their knowledge, ideas, and anxieties. By concentrating on themes of landscape and geography, I use the language of the Francophone elite to explore how they thought about the Celtic spaces of Britain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a practical, political, and imaginative sense.Item Embargo The Ford Foundation and the Reinvention of American Liberalism, 1968-2000Collings-Wells, Samuel; Collings-Wells, Samuel [0000-0002-1868-0345]This dissertation examines how the Ford Foundation reinvented American liberalism after 1968. As the largest philanthropic organization in the United States, Ford played a hitherto under-appreciated role in reshaping liberal policy toward poverty, crime, and racial inequality. This dissertation shows how the Ford Foundation, responding to growing concerns about a conservative ‘white backlash’, embarked on a self-conscious effort to reinvent liberal policymaking toward crime and urban poverty. Through funding a network of think tanks, community groups, and financial intermediaries, the Ford Foundation pioneered a new liberal strategy to fight poverty and crime, made up of two key components: Firstly, a commitment to ‘broken windows’ policing - an aggressive strategy of law- enforcement that argued the police should focus their attention on low-level ‘disorder’. And secondly, an embrace of public-private partnerships to revive distressed communities through a process of community development. While most histories of post-1960s liberalism have focused on Congress or the Presidency, this dissertation argues that in order to understand the evolution of American liberalism after 1968, we must shift our attention to the nonprofit sector of philanthropic foundations and community groups.Item Embargo Psychoanalysis, management and labour in the British workplace, 1942-c.1970Whorrall-Campbell, GraceThis dissertation examines the creation of a field of workplace psy-expertise in mid-twentieth century Britain, through four case studies and centring on two organisations: the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and Roffey Park rehabilitation centre. While existing research on psychoanalysis has taken childhood and the family as sites of study, this thesis reveals the working world of adults as a parallel site where psy-science was mobilised in service of democracy. The first chapter traces the development of psychological job selection techniques first used in the British Armed Forces and then in the Civil Service and private industry. The second chapter explores a rehabilitation centre in West Sussex for patients suffering from ‘industrial neurosis’, which operated alongside a training institute schooling managers, doctors and trade unionists. In the third chapter, I follow researchers into the factory of a bearings manufacturer, reading their study alongside the vibrant and surreal company magazine. The fourth chapter examines psychoanalytic and ethnographic research into two psychiatric hospitals and one general hospital, where psychoanalysts grappled with interpreting feminised care work. These psy-experts attempted to transform psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a social science with commercial appeal for business consumers. However, I argue that psy-experts did not succeed in psychologising the workplace. Conventional ways of thinking about labour remained resilient, and psy-experts found they had to adapt their theories when collaborating with non-psychological interlocutors in government, trade unions and private industry. Moreover, I cast doubt on interpretations of psy-science as ushering in a modern, self- actualising and individualistic self, by excavating workplace psychiatry’s deep investment in the social. This thesis also offers a new framework for understanding Britain’s mid-century political economy, using workplace psychiatry to demonstrate the strength of public-private collaboration in the era of the social democratic state. Not only does this thesis illuminate the central role of capital in this period, but it also widens the horizons of labour and business history to incorporate the interpersonal, the surreal and the libidinal.Item Embargo Sexual Knowledge and Learning in Apartheid South Africa, c. 1950-1990Richardson, LauraPost-apartheid South Africa was one of the first countries in Africa to integrate comprehensive sexuality education into its school curriculum. However, a very different policy landscape existed prior to democratic transition in 1994. The apartheid regime imposed a stringent racial hierarchy that extended to educational institutions, influencing the dissemination of sex education. Access to school-based sex education was severely limited and often skewed by race, with significant disparities in educational content and quality. Nevertheless, sexual knowledge and learning persisted in alternative forms and contexts. Importantly, both adults and children encountered sexual information and messaging through religious organisations, welfare initiatives, family planning campaigns, and popular media. Family and community networks, including networks of peers, also played a crucial role in shaping sexual knowledge. This thesis provides the first detailed historical account of sex education in apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a range of official and popular sources, including government, church, and welfare records, ethnographic material, advice literature, as well as magazines and agony aunt columns, it focuses on several broadly chronological ‘moments’ or themes in the provision of sex education under apartheid. These include the rise of family life education for white and African communities, the development of state-run family planning initiatives and propaganda, debates over the inclusion of sexuality education in schools, and the growth of sexually candid commercial and resistance media. Together, these themes show how debates around sex education evolved within the context of a national struggle for racial and gender liberation. They also illuminate how sex education formed part of everyday life, with local communities retaining some degree of autonomy over the production and regulation of sexual knowledge.Item Embargo Energy and Ideas of Progress in France and Britain, 1865-1924Silseth, TobiasFrom the British debate on the depletion of coal in 1865 to the First World Power Conference held in London in 1924, scientists, engineers, industrialists, and politicians produced new interpretations of the past, present, and future in terms of the mobilisation of energy resources. This thesis identifies an emerging ‘energy developmentalism’, which called for maximising energy use to maintain or improve a nation’s place in international competition. Energy developmentalism was not a marginal worldview confined to ‘energeticists’, but a coherent set of claims, measurements, and arguments that informed energy governance on an international scale. Rather than focusing on a single resource, energy developmentalism applied a unified schema to all energy sources, including those like solar and tidal energy that were still mostly theoretical. Drawing on sources from across Europe, while staying grounded in political changes in Britain and France, makes it possible to understand how a general formula for transforming raw materials with maximum efficiency was applied differently depending on specific political contexts. This period saw the articulation of problems like the depletion of resources, the difference between renewable and nonrenewable energy, the intermittency of renewables, the overreliance on a single source of energy, and the centrality of energy to modern economies – problems that are often associated with later periods. Scientific measurements of efficiency, horsepower, and kilowatts became operators in political debates centred on questions of national standing and progress. Even as oil became increasingly important in the world economy, the delegates at the First World Power Conference transformed a vision of a renewable energy future into one of a general expansion of energy consumption as the basis of progress. In so doing, they downplayed the continued importance of fossil fuels and equated ‘conservation’ with the fullest possible use of all energy sources, renewable or not.Item Open Access Changing Conceptions of Geopolitical Success: The Treaty of Paris as a Watershed in Anglo-French Understandings of the International SystemYardley, SaulThis thesis explores the differences between the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and previous international settlements, arguing that they are due to changes in the understanding of the international order. By looking at the decline in religious language, concern over the welfare of those impacted by the war, an increased emphasis on the state, and finally the extent of the ceded territory, this thesis argues that these political changes occurred symbiotically alongside wider changes in 18th century society. By looking at the prominence of ideas transferred throughout society and the drawing of parallels between the thought of the *philosophes* and their impact on strategy and the economy, the differences are placed into a broader context to show the growing importance of geopolitical concerns in the minds of European policymakers. The extent of the French territory ceded to the British is explained through the influence of the *philosophes* and the physiocrats on the French Prime Minister. An increase in the interest of those impacted by war is seen throughout official proclamations, government memoranda, private letters, and the writings of the *philosophes*. This same concept is used to explain the wish of 18th century figures to be perceived as erudite and desirous for peace. The final chapter looks at the development of the state, particularly the increase in the rule of law and reliance on philosophical concepts such as the “Law of Nations”, sovereignty, and “Natural Law” in the construction of strategy, the development of the state, and the design of the terms of the Treaty of Paris. The argument comes together to demonstrate that the Treaty of Paris was influenced by wider ideas in British and French society, whilst being signed at a critical moment in the development of international order.Item Controlled Access Richard Thurnwald and the Transimperial Fate of German Colonial Ethnology, 1896-1926Stoll, Viktor; Stoll, Viktor [0000-0001-9423-4331]This dissertation examines the transnational development of early twentieth century international social anthropology in the context of imperial rivalries, colonial governance, and liberal internationalism. In doing so, this project explores the internationalization of a "Lost Generation" of German ethnologists, exemplified by the renowned scholar Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954), from *fin de siècle* antecedents in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia to field research projects for Anglo-Australian mandate administrations in New Guinea during the interwar period. German ethnologists were at the forefront of a broader alignment of applied anthropology and colonialism in the West before World War One. After the brutal suppression of the Herero Rebellion in Southwest Africa (c. 1906), Germany faced rising international scrutiny over her capacity to economically develop her colonies while simultaneously executing the *mission civilisatrice* – the inherent contradiction within the concept of “Sacred Trusteeship” that I term the “Mandate Dilemma”. To head off this threat to its imperial legitimacy, Germany adopted a contemporarily unique policy of "scientific colonialism" which combined ethnological expertise with rational governance in pursuit of Sacred Trusteeship – an intellectual approach that I term “Mandate Governmentality” – to secure its right-to-rule against the imperial ambitions of its Great Power rivals. This convergence of necessities spurred a scientific revolution of a unique form of German colonial ethnology – of a distinct “Mandate *Ethnologie*”. Following the loss of their colonial laboratories in 1919, “imperial piggybacking” German ethnologists found ready employment throughout the Anglophone world as a “reservoir of knowledge” in a postwar liberal internationalist system that promoted indigenous self-determination. This "Lost Generation" of German Mandate Ethnologists became integral in guiding the implementation and expansion of Mandate Governmentality in interwar Anglo-Australian sub-imperialism that were subjected to the oversight of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. This dissertation ultimately challenges the standing historiographical paradigm that British colonial administrations were innovative in their approach to colonial governance. It instead proposes that Anglo-Australian formal and informal imperial intervention in the colonized periphery after 1919, exemplified in New Guinea, was the adoption of a uniquely German power-knowledge construct of Mandate Governmentality and Mandate *Ethnologie*.Item Embargo Industrial Health Foods and Culture during Britain’s Era of Anxiety and Fatigue (1870-1918)Steinitz, LesleyThis thesis explores how and why Health Foods – novel industrial foods that purportedly made more-or-less healthy adults healthier – became popular and culturally significant in Britain at the *fin de siècle*. I focus on several of the most advertised and, by implication, popular Health Foods, specifically meat extracts (Bovril), so-called pure cocoas (Cadbury’s and Sandow’s), products containing coca or kola, especially Dr Tibbles’ Vi-Cocoa, and milk powders (Plasmon and Sanatogen). All of these were legitimised using new scientific knowledge, but the claims that underpinned them did not emerge only from the orthodox science of nutrition; scientific and medical practitioners also used other kinds of scientific knowledge to justify products containing compounds that most nutrition practitioners believed did not require supplementation or that they considered were not foods at all. However, knowledge was deployed selectively; interdisciplinary inconsistencies do not appear to have mattered, and although scientific legitimacy seems to have been necessary, Health Foods’ popularity also rested on their social and cultural framing which ostensibly was unrelated to their scientific properties. This framing was achieved through the collective efforts of manufacturers, politicians, scientists, commentators, and consumers. Accordingly, eating Health Foods became positioned as respectable and frugal, and came to signify pleasure and know-how. These banal products came to offer a sense of community and national identity, alongside enhanced physical or nervous energy, strength, and stamina. They purportedly enabled women to fulfil their duty of care, and men to be productive workers, because they responded to widespread anxieties about modernity and decline. However, they were not equivalents or universal panaceas for all. Each one became understood as enabling particular kinds of people to enact particular roles and behaviours that eaters considered desirable in specific social and gender contexts, and so also afford us insights into the various ways of being that were desirable at the *fin de siècle*.Item Open Access Love and marriage in Labour and Conservative party cultures, 1918-1970Lowe, EleanorThis thesis looks at the importance of marital relationships for men and women engaging in electoral politics and political activism in twentieth-century Britain. It argues that marital status is an underappreciated category of analysis, particularly for women, in understanding access to political worlds post-suffrage. It provides a unique perspective that the majority of politically active women were married, and they were often married to another political activist. Particularly in local government, it shows that many husbands and wives stood for their local councils and ran their local parties together. The thesis asserts that the importance of family and relationships did not disappear with the arrival of mass democracy. Instead, they needed to be accommodated into new forms of political party cultures. The thesis charts a change over the course of the twentieth century, from a wide acceptance of ‘seat inheritance’ between husbands and wives, to a turn against such overt political dynasticism later in the period. However, the proportion of married women in elected politics grew over the period. While seat inheritance declined, politically supportive marriages went from strength to strength. This thesis provides new insights into the motivations and realities of living a political life. Politics was the cornerstone of their relationship for numerous couples and they lived lives that were organised around political work. It emphasises the importance of grassroot political organisations as sites of sociability, where many would meet their future spouse and within this, argues that political parties adopted active processes for incorporating the political involvement of husbands and wives. For many, these understandings of love and politics were difficult to untangle. This thesis asserts the social functions of marriage in the history of the Labour and Conservative party, but also provides an intimate analysis of how it felt to be political in twentieth-century Britain.Item Embargo The use of French as a written language of instruction in twelfth-century England, with particular reference to the codicological evidenceMijanovic, PetraAnglo-Norman England made use of three languages: Latin, English, and French. Its literary culture was heir to the bilingual written tradition of late Anglo-Saxon England, which produced and copied literature in Latin as well as in the (spoken) vernacular, Old English. From at least the beginning of the twelfth century, French also began to be recorded in writing. Scholars have remarked that England was precocious in its use of written French, both as a site for the composition of new texts and as a place of production for manuscripts. Although the current survival of books cannot be used to determine medieval equivalents, it is significant that approximately two-thirds of the surviving twelfth-century manuscript witnesses to French were copied in England. Within this corpus a sizeable group of twelve manuscripts comprises texts that belong to genres with a precedent for use in instruction: the computus, the lapidary, and proverbs. To understand the historical significance of this evidence, this dissertation examines the role of French from its particular perspective as a language of written instruction in twelfth-century England, to investigate the extent to which it represents a continuation of the use of the vernacular for such purposes in late Anglo-Saxon England, or a response to new developments in the twelfth century. In order to undertake a historical study of the surviving evidence, it is necessary to consider written French in the context in which it was used and encountered by medieval readers, namely, its manuscript context. This approach is consistent with the methodology of the ‘history of the book’, which aims to discover and describe how, why and by whom texts were produced, read, and circulated in a given period. Chapter one lays out the reasons for employing this methodology to study this evidence from a historical perspective and gives an outline of the fields of scholarship that are relevant to the history of written French in England. The remaining chapters examine the manuscript witnesses by textual genre. Chapter two focuses on the computistical material, represented by a single text, the Comput of Philippe de Thaon. Its survival in six manuscript witnesses dated to various points in the twelfth century is unusual, and allows for codicological comparison across time. Chapter three treats the lapidary, which survives in three manuscripts, of which two are witnesses to the same text. Chapter four considers the proverbs in French, i.e. texts composed exclusively of proverbs, in three manuscripts. An examination of the manuscript evidence clarifies the potential intended readership of these texts in twelfth-century England, which points to a clerical and monastic context for their production and use, rather than to Anglo-Norman aristocratic lay society with which texts in French have often been associated. It suggests that written French may have played an instructional role in England in the period before the emergence of the first French grammars and didactic manuals in the thirteenth century, and that its development drew in part upon the precedents established by the late Anglo-Saxon use of the written vernacular.Item Embargo Male Prophets in Early Modern England, 1559-1662Robson, EmilyThis thesis examines the phenomenon of male prophecy in England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. It focusses on Protestant expressions of prophecy, especially those which existed within the godly and dissenting communities. Grace Sujin Pak has recently highlighted the multivalency of early modern prophecy in a broad European context; her monograph identifies a broadening split between prophecy as scriptural exegesis and direct divine inspiration over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This thesis builds upon and develops Pak’s work by exploring this split within an English context. On the one hand, it charts the efforts of Protestant churchmen to reduce prophecy to scriptural exegesis and a facet of ministerial office. On the other, it explores the extraordinary prophecy of laymen against a backdrop of ecclesiastical hostility. A key aim is to uncover the various contexts in which the boundaries between these two forms of prophecy became blurred. This thesis also sits at the crossroads of histories of gender and religion. Using both manuscript and printed sources, it shows how models of manhood intertwined with biblical patterns to create unique prophetic identities. This thesis will argue that gendered stereotypes had the potential to both complement and undermine the reputations of male prophets. Their credibility was therefore in the eyes of the beholder. Other factors, such as age and social status, also shaped how men were viewed. Methodologically, this thesis focusses on representations of male prophecy. Understanding individual experience forms a secondary objective. Bringing gender history into dialogue with religious history enriches both fields. In a religious context, it shows how wider theological debates were shaped by different models of manhood. From a gendered perspective, it argues that religious categories, as well as social and cultural factors, shaped how men were viewed in early modern society.Item Embargo The European Community’s Relations with the Soviet Union (1973-1991)Ewert, ClaudeThe dissertation gives an unprecedented historical account of EC-USSR relations, thereby focusing on the perspective of Brussels. From 1958 to 1972, the European Economic Community (EEC) permitted its member states to handle trade with the USSR on a bilateral basis. In 1973, this changed, and the European Commission would oversee trade, forcing Moscow, which had until then refrained from even unofficially acknowledging the European integration project, to the negotiation table. These negotiations would drag on, often without any results. By the late 1970s, the Commission under the presidency of Roy Jenkins would target surplus production in the EC (mostly dairy productions) to sell at a subsidised price to the USSR. Relations started to improve, and meetings between EC and Soviet officials became more recurrent. However, an EC committed to becoming a political player in global affairs could not ignore the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or Moscow pressurising the Polish government into imposing martial law in the country. For the first time, the EC decided to sanction the USSR, albeit minimally, causing EC-USSR relations to be put on hold. When Gorbachev came to power, his policies changed the decade-old opposition from Moscow to the EC, and by the late 1980s, an EC-USSR trade deal had been signed. In the final years of the USSR, Brussels granted Gorbachev financial aid, hoping it would help Gorbachev’s reforms and prevent the USSR from collapsing. The dissertation asks explicitly how the European Commission handled EC-USSR relations. How an ever more political community of European states reacted to significant geopolitical events will enlighten the reader on the first steps of an attempt at EC external relations. A more minor research question is whether we should question the notion of détente as stemming largely from the Helsinki Accords.Item Embargo The Linguistic Economies of Labouring Families in England and New South Wales during the Early Nineteenth CenturyAdams, CaitlinThis thesis conceives and reveals a hitherto unconceptualized aspect of plebeian life: linguistic economies. It defines and demonstrates linguistic economies as an historical phenomenon, and a conceptual tool for historical analysis. Employing this concept, the thesis analyses how labouring families used, exchanged, and adapted language in England and New South Wales (NSW) in the early nineteenth century. It compares petitions for pardon from England and NSW, in which prisoners and their advocates petitioned the king, home secretary, or governor of NSW for relief from criminal sentences. Interrogating these sources, as well as convict love tokens, this thesis shows that plebeians’ linguistic economies were relational and participatory. It reveals how labouring people used language to reflect and shape social relationships, contribute to imperial expansion, and sometimes even change their own fates. It illuminates the range of rhetorical strategies used in petitions from both locations, how these worked, and how patterns of use changed according to petitioners’ social status and location. By situating labouring language in its social, geographic, and relational contexts, this thesis transforms the historiographical landscape. By arguing that labouring people’s linguistic economies were embedded in, and contingent on, their circumstances, this thesis challenges current depictions of plebeian agency as largely unfettered and self-fashioning. It also reconciles the methodologically estranged notions of representation and reality, demonstrating how plebeians’ strategic texts reveal their lived experiences of family relationships and social networks. By embedding labouring writing in its context, this thesis probes the content, characteristics, limits, and power of plebeian language.