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  • ItemEmbargo
    Petitioning and Political Culture in Late Company Madras, 1830-1860
    Connors, Scott; Connors, Scott [0000-0001-7988-8724]
    This dissertation studies the development of reformist political culture in South India during the last decades of East India Company rule in the mid-nineteenth century. Through an analysis of a wide-ranging body of South Indian sources, including mass petitions (some signed by as many as 70,000 individuals), pamphlets, speeches, polemical writings, and the transactions of public meetings, it reveals a vigorous political culture existed in the understudied presidency of Madras. Incorporating archival material from British and Indian archives, this dissertation dissects the life-cycles, that is the origins and short and long-term effects, of mid-century colonial mass petitions. It does so by analysing the correspondence and deliberations that preceded a petition’s release, the processes by which it was circulated for signature, and the consequent resolutions and debates that followed its reception by colonial authorities. I argue that the petition, in its most public and political iteration, was seized by reformers who anticipated, and sought to direct, the dramatic structural changes that transformed the embattled Company before its demise in 1858. This dissertation applies a close reading of six petitionary campaigns that demanded, in turn, education reform, religious protections, political representation, the restoration of annexed Rajas, the reconstitution of the presidency system, and, perhaps most dramatically, the abolition of the Company itself. Instead of identifying these campaigns as precursors to the nationalist politics of the late nineteenth century, I argue that they marked a distinct phase of colonial politics that sought to mould the colonial state and its policies. By approaching the history of anti-Company politics from the contexts of southern India and Britain, this dissertation proposes a multi-sited account of the transition to Crown rule that reincorporates the Madras presidency as a venue of radical political innovation.
  • ItemOpen Access
    British Attitudes to the German Economic Miracle, 1948 to circa 1971
    Chamberlain, Colin
    This doctoral dissertation examines British attitudes to the German ‘economic miracle’ in the years 1948 to circa 1971 principally through the eyes of politicians, officials, businessmen and informed commentators. Britain had poor productivity, balance of payments difficulties, inflation and, more than anything else, growing industrial disruption. The question is asked as to what extent Britain compared itself to Germany, the most dynamic of the European economies? Did the British think there were lessons which might have been learned particularly in the all-important area of industrial relations which went from bad to worse in Britain but in Germany were described by one British economist as ‘almost idyllic’? Post-war economies were about the efficient mass production of goods, at which the Germans were widely considered to excel but the British much less so than before. The British cursed their debts, their problems with sterling’s international role and their global military commitments but the underlying problem judging by contemporary voices was the failure of Britain to organise itself in the workplace and achieve the level of exports it needed to compete. This dissertation looks at contemporary British perceptions of the German economy, its industrial relations, and some of the irritations which arose in British-German economic relations for what they say about Britain. There were in the period a surprising number of these irritations, each made worse for Britain by Germany’s growing economic strength. Britain was obliged to write-off German debts to help the German economy at a time when it felt weighed down with its own debts. Germany’s huge export success in Europe embarrassed Britain at a time when its traditional Commonwealth trade was stalling. Germany’s build-up of huge reserves produced a so-called ‘financial disequilibrium’ making worse Britain’s struggles with its inflation, balance of payments, ‘stop-go’ policies and industrial relations. The costs of Britain’s garrison in Germany was an unwelcome burden on the balance of payments for which Britain clamoured for reimbursement. When Britain, in a change of tack, decided its future lay in Europe, it was convinced that ‘Germany held the key’, only after years of negotiation to be disappointed when it found Germany provided little worthwhile help.
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    The political economy of English textile manufacturers in an era of national and global change, 1688-1722;
    Bromley, Hugo
    This is a history of the people involved in the production and distribution of British wool and silk cloth, what they thought a good economy was, how that intersected with their understanding of what their country was, and how they interacted with and reshaped the global economy through those combined understandings. Each one of these aspects is inseparable from both the others and its own context: respectively methods of production, economic development, national structures and government, and global trade and consumption. After 1688, English political economy was shaped by the experiences of economic actors, who justified their positions primarily in terms of employment. The thesis explores how English textile manufacturers understood the global economy, and how their appeals to the state for support combined with the state’s increasing need for revenue to shape English and later British political economy. It does so over five chapters, considering first clothiers’ access the ‘open archive’ in London, and the role of textile manufacturers in the decline of English overseas trading companies. The second chapter assesses role of the textile industry, particularly in South West England, in shaping England’s economic border and customs policy, including towards Ireland. After discussing the state’s efforts to regulate relationships between workers and masters, the thesis discusses how clothiers attempted to shape the state’s pursuit of national markets to reflect the experience of overseas trade, before concluding with a global history of the Calico Acts. These studies reveal how England’s clothiers were able to engage with and change global systems through a political economy that prized economic experience over theoretical understanding. It is to explore how a clothier writing a pamphlet in the shadow of Gloucester cathedral, or a young weaver throwing a brick through an East India merchant’s window was taking part in a global process that transformed transnational exchanges to shape their own local economy. As the weaver settled down to her loom in the evening, she had just taken part in another creative process – the formation of Britain’s system of political economy.
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    Neutrality in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1899-1914
    Sterenborg, Pieter
    By 1914, Belgium and the Netherlands had maintained a foreign policy of neutrality for nearly a century. For these two similarly sized, neighbouring countries in northwest Europe, it was not an occasional stance, but a long-term position that persisted in times of peace. Belgium had been neutralised at the time of its independence; the Netherlands had opted for it voluntarily. This thesis investigates how neutrality was constructed and employed by Belgium and the Netherlands and how the policy was debated in official circles as well as the public sphere, focusing on the period from 1899 to the start of the First World War. It aims to connect the concept of neutrality, hardly ever considered outside the realm of diplomatic history, to processes of nationalism and national identity formation. For Belgium and the Netherlands, neutrality was more than a security policy. Being neutral, vowing not to take part in conflict, also impacted heavily on how the Belgians and the Dutch perceived themselves in Europe and the world at large. Neutrality was never universally supported in either country. During these years, opponents viewed it as humiliating to their nation and they frequently advocated for abandoning it. Merging neutrality with nationalism through its construction as a mission to foster peace in Europe was essential when it came to strengthening the policy’s domestic popularity. It fulfilled a widespread desire for a national purpose and for a sense of agency in international affairs. This forms a crucial part of the explanation for the policy’s longevity. Both the Belgians and the Dutch thus turned their neutrality from a position of weakness into one of strength.
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    Iconoclasm, Protestant Aesthetics, and the Meaning of Making in Early Modern England, 1550–1600
    Kallevik Nielsen, Simen
    This thesis is about making in post-Reformation England. Roughly covering the period between 1550 and 1600, it explores the English cultural contexts of Protestant and Calvinist discourses in the sixteenth century. But equally, it is a thesis about the *meaning* of making. Scholarship abounds on the procedures and dynamics of “meaning-making” in a specific field, department, or discipline. Yet, there has been a consistent lack of attention paid to the reverse form of this designation; what does it mean to make? How does it produce meaning within social, cultural, and intellectual contexts? Making, this thesis argues, has too easily been taken for granted. Culturally and intellectually expansive, rich, and complex in implication, making, as action and phenomenon, permeates the lifeworld of historical experience. In so far as creative production, conceptual engineering, and material fashioning all remain a staple of multiple spheres of meaning, the focus and identity of this thesis resides at the tangencies between intellectual and cultural history, as well as the history of art. In particular, these are fields of singular interdisciplinary relevance with regard to research into early modernity. Furthermore, they have all in different ways concerned themselves with visual and material culture, not least how problems of aesthetics, philosophy, literature, and religion are entrenched in and expressed in material contexts. Sixteenth-century Europe remain a *nexus classicus* of such intellectual and historical ambulation; it was arguably the setting for the most distressing social and religious ordeal on the continent since the Black Death. Reformation England was no exception, as our exploration of figures like William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, John Jewel and William Perkins will demonstrate. By teasing out tensions in the post-Reformation debates surrounding the act of artistic making in a religious framework, the thesis provides a framework for how these play out in four different contexts: Chapter 1 addresses the influence and reception of Genesis and the Second Commandment on art-making in the Reformation and its surrounding discourse; the English Calvinists of the Elizabethan period, such as John Jewel and Gervase Babington are central here. Chapter 2 moves from a discussion of divine creativity to that of human imagination and cultural production. Comparing Protestant and Catholic-Humanist examples, the chapter goes into particular detail on William Perkins’ work on the imagination. In the third chapter the thesis explores the Eucharist as a nucleus of creative tension and confessional conflict. A discussion of the writings of William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer extends into a study of Calvin’s eucharistic thought. This is followed by a contextualization of the critical discourse of theatre and the Mass in Protestant polemics, and the chapter ends with an approach to Richard Hooker, placing his sacramental writing in an aesthetic reformist debate. The fourth and final chapter engages with iconoclasm as part of a Protestant aesthetic – a complex and paradoxical phenomenon blending breaking and making. Here, I will attempt to unpack some of the creative implications inherent in the destruction of art. Namely, that the act of tearing things down somehow makes them new again; from the fires of demolition another form of object is forged, another kind of aesthetic. This negativity, this re-forming of the sign, of making, produces an “absent” art of its own. This thesis interrogates these intellectual inflections of making in post-Reformation England. Through close reading of theological texts as well as use of visual material, the thesis highlights and asserts how several of the contested themes and conflicts of reform are crystallised in the imagery of making. By reasserting the critical role of “making” as constitutive to the image-question, as well as a precondition for the hostile narratives of iconoclasm and idolatry, the thesis provides additional understanding of the way making concentrated and drove key concerns of visual politics in the Reformation. In addition, it further illuminates how the history of the later sixteenth century represents a charged landscape of cultural cohesion – a landscape in which art, theology, and aesthetics come to define each other mutually. Such reciprocal dynamics demonstrate not just that the frameworks of art and intellectual history are useful as part of a shared structure for exploring making, but also why making deserves attention as a topic of far-reaching historical relevance.
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    Political Communication Practices of the Transylvanian Saxon Towns, c. 1467–1526
    Coulter, Matthew; Coulter, Matthew [0000-0003-0764-8267]
    This thesis focuses on the diplomatic strategies employed by the three main Transylvanian Saxon towns of Sibiu, Brașov, and Bistrița during the second half of the reign of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (r. 1458–90) and the era of the Jagiellonian kings Vladislaus II (r. 1490–1516) and Louis II (r. 1516–26). Over this period these German-speaking towns, located on the eastern frontier of the Kingdom of Hungary, consolidated their control over their respective territorial hinterlands and – primarily under the leadership of Sibiu – coalesced into the *Universitas Saxonum*, a single estate enjoying the same privileges and subject directly to the king. While incorporating the considerable body of historiography focusing on the Saxons’ legal and socio-economic development in this era, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the significant everyday effort which the Saxon leading strata devoted to pursuing their political objectives and entrenching their privileged legal status. It presents Saxon diplomacy as a balancing act spread across three distinct but interconnected theatres, and intends to show how the seemingly distinct elements of this amounted to a cohesive programme of political representation characterized by conscious calculation and the need to remain responsive to new developments. The thesis is split into three sections of two chapters each. Section I provides a comprehensive overview of the main themes and trends which characterized the Saxon councils’ communicative activity in three primary theatres: the Hungarian royal court and Voivodate of Transylvania (chapter 1) and the transcarpathian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (chapter 2). Section II discusses the personnel through which the Saxons’ political programmes were articulated, beginning with the members of the civic elites in each town who undertook their most important missions to the Hungarian royal court (chapter 3), before turning to the non-elite personnel whom the councils hired as messengers and legal representatives (chapter 4). Section III then looks at the multifaceted use in Saxon diplomacy of petitions and other written documents (chapter 5) and of gifts (chapter 6).
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890
    Westover, Tara
    This dissertation has as its subject the Anglo-American cooperative response to ‘the family question’, which this project defines as the set of intellectual and practical puzzles deriving from the family’s social and moral dualism. The first chapter examines the family question as framed by eighteenth-century moral philosophy. It considers Smith, Hume, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Subsequent chapters examine four distinct movements in the Anglo-American tradition, each of which engaged with the family to answer questions about morality, sociability and the role of the new social sciences. These movements include Owenite socialism, Oneida Perfectionism, Mormonism and Modern Times. It is the contention of this dissertation that to these movements the family embodied a complex set of social, moral and scientific questions that had, in fact, been central to thinkers in the British Enlightenment—questions about sociability, perfectibility and the role of social science. Secondary literature has overlooked this rich dialogue, and consequently each of these movements has been labelled myopic in its account of human nature and reductive in its approach to social theory. Secondary accounts oversimplify their ideas about the family in order to reinforce conventional stereotypes about the intellectual boundaries of each movement: Owenite socialists are relegated to the sphere of economic egalitarianism, Oneida Perfectionists and Mormons to that of spiritual fanaticism, and Modern Times is consigned to political anarchism. This dissertation claims, however, that despite the radical nature of their solutions, these movements found no simple or one-sided solution to the family question. Their ambitions were not single-minded, limited to economic, spiritual or political radicalism; rather, in their efforts to provide a coherent account of the family’s moral and social role they engaged with a multitude of moral, social and scientific theories, from economics and moral psychology to physiology and biological theories of racial improvement. It is the conclusion of this dissertation that what is historically and intellectually salient about these movements is not their unmitigated devotion to a single, monistic ideology, but rather their attempt to reconcile the family with two conflicting conceptions of social science: one in which human beings are the natural subjects of scientific principles and methodologies, constrained by the same laws and principles that regulate the immutable physical world, and one in which humanity transcends nature as an entity of limitless selfreflection and perfectibility.
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    Popular autoethnography in Britain, c. 1870 - 1940
    Parker, Harry
    This thesis explores attempts within the emerging social sciences to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. It reveals a lively, participatory tradition spanning the nascent disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, and human geography, in which British people, social scientists and otherwise, sought to know themselves as having a ‘culture’. In doing so, it challenges a conventional narration of this period: that in a high-Victorian, high-imperial era, ‘metropolitan perception’ prevailed; that this perception was marked by an inability to see Britain as a ‘social totality’, except as the evolutionary apex of a globally-exportable Civilisation; and that this situation was only rescued by the retrieval of an insular, national culture from the winds of imperial contraction in the 1930s. Instead, the thesis shows that we can detect autoethnographic thinking within the human sciences themselves, even during an era when those sciences were supposedly more prone to self-universalising than self-relativising. It proceeds via five case studies, beginning with late-nineteenth century folkloristics, the first endeavour within the human sciences to devote itself to homeland ethnography, before moving onto an examination of the *fin-de-siècle* photographic survey movement. It shows how contributors to both projects saw themselves as both participants and observers in the cultures they sought to make visible. A third case continues this theme, examining participatory, bio-sociological ‘regional surveys’ in the era of mass democracy. The fourth case examines the use of ethnographic fieldwork in geographical teaching; while a fifth turns to the practice of interwar sociological survey. This last chapter shows that the 1930s did witness a national ‘anthropological turn’, but it came at the expense of an older, perhaps more genuinely popular one. By reconstructing this earlier tradition, this thesis provides a more textured account of a culture in transition from global empire to island nation.
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    Michel Foucault and the Politics of Coalition, 1968-1980
    Ilott, Luke
    This dissertation reinterprets Michel Foucault as a thinker of political coalition. Because he valued difference and rejected totalising schemes, Foucault’s post-structuralist political thought is usually associated with particularity and social fragmentation. I show that this is a very partial framing. Across the 1970s, he searched for ways to knit localised campaigns into a joined-up politics at the general level. By drawing out the generalised systems of power which subtended modern societies, Foucault remade the political world to reveal that the dispersed and apparently unrelated campaigns of students, feminists, psychiatric patients and others were facing common targets. This argument rests on research into Foucault’s new archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing more than ninety boxes of reading notes, manuscript drafts and journals. These materials enable us to get behind his published writings, establishing what he was writing and reading privately as he crafted his lectures and books. I combine this archival research with a close reconstruction of Foucault’s intellectual and political contexts in the 1970s. I draw on Maoist newspapers, feminist journals, anti-psychiatric pamphlets, philosophical texts, news reports and other sources to establish the debates into which his work intervened. Taken together, these materials help us build up a picture of what Foucault was trying to do in his complex and ambiguous texts. The upshot is to reveal that the construction and maintenance of coalitions among France’s burgeoning new social movements was one of his abiding priorities throughout the 1970s. Across five chapters, I trace the emergence and transformation of Foucault’s coalitional project, beginning among left-populist attempts to construct a revolutionary ‘people’ in the aftermath of 1968 and culminating in his defence of a ‘generalised’ politics of social-movement coalitions in his late lectures on governmentality. This dissertation confirms the value of taking a contextualist, historical approach to post-structuralist thought.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Transport Choice and the Fragmentation of Mobility in Britain, 1959-1974
    Crisp, James
    This thesis studies the fragmentation of transport choice and people’s perceptions of the three main mechanical modes between 1959 and 1974. The dawn of mass car ownership, which precipitated the decline of bus and rail demand, reshaped the importance of each to different groups. The rise of the car spread unevenly across different locations according to class, age, and gender. Thus, as the car became an increasingly common choice for men, the bus became the staple of women and the old. This thesis will explore how the public perceived these changes, including how women and the elderly felt about rail closures and the former’s inferior position as the ‘woman driver’. But the difficulties facing successive governments of adapting transport policy to this fragmentation is also studied. The government’s urban transport problems were particularly acute in the nation’s provincial cities, where patterns of movement varied and became increasingly difficult to provide for as the car splintered demand. However, the railways often did not offer a readily available alternative to enough people to prevent Beeching’s closures. The expanding suburban and extra-urban locations of postwar Britain are also explored, to see how men and women perceived the car, bus, and railways according to the different social factors facing them. What is uncovered is that although transport choice was fragmented by location, class, gender, and age, people’s perceptions of the three main modes were more similar than different. They were perceived, principally, as ways to expand individual mobility and choice, regardless of their public or private provision. The central issue for public transport was its inferior performance compared to the car in this period, before congestion became a serious issue across Britain’s polycentric cities.
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    The Emergence of Eugenics as Science in Zurich, c. 1890
    Kilcher, Constantin
    This PhD thesis examines a previously unexplored episode in Zurich around 1890, when several elements converged that allowed for a set of social intuitions around the breeding of humans to cross the threshold into scientific respectability. This constituted a first, formative episode of early German eugenics, years before the terms ‘eugenics’ or ‘race hygiene’ were in use. The first chapter considers early eugenic practice as a form of knowledge production. During the research for this PhD, documentation of the first European eugenic castration cases of 1892 and 1895 was discovered, allowing me to analyse the two catastrophic experiences for the first time. The next four chapters explain how the events of the first could take place. The second chapter investigates the intellectual environment in Breslau around 1880, where the individuals who first formulated eugenic ideas in Zurich were educated. The intellectual environment of this group included the reading of popular evolutionary theorists like Haeckel, Sterne, and Büchner, as well as socialists like Kautsky and Cabet. The third chapter concerns the group’s move to Zurich around 1888 and their encounter with the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, known as the Burghölzli, where the two castrations took place. The chapter explores how the group, including writers Gerhart and Carl Hauptmann and Alfred Ploetz, connected with the hospital’s director Auguste Forel and began developing a particular notion of social risk from heredity. In Ploetz’s seminal publication *Fitness of Our Race* (1895), he condensed their disparate intuitions and ideas into the term *race hygiene*. The fourth chapter describes a crisis in psychiatry that coincided with a broader crisis in European societies. The overlayered crises created an environment in which extreme propositions were more likely to be deemed acceptable within the scientific community and beyond; they worked like catalysts for the development and validation of early eugenics. The fifth and final chapter examines the contribution of playwright Gerhart Hauptmann to the production of eugenic knowledge. Hauptmann’s scandalous first play *Before Dawn* (1889), which dealt with questions of racial degeneration through alcoholism and the need for careful sexual selection, helped bring these topics to prominence in the German public.
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    Fugitivity and Carceral Humanitarianism in the Ottoman Mediterranean, c. 1876-1916
    Polat, Hatice Ayse
    This thesis explores the evolution of Ottoman humanitarianism as a legal, moral, and political enterprise. It is a critical inquiry into the rhetoric of humanity: how it shapes law and the jurisdiction thereof. Building on the settlement of immigrants – *Muhajirs* – in the Ottoman Mediterranean between c. 1876 and 1916, I demonstrate how the provision of humanitarian refuge was a legal instrument of state- and empire-making. In doing so, I ask the following questions: How did an immigrant enter political society? How did humanitarian norms and practices police the boundaries and the margins of political society, and to what end? How did humanitarian and contractual notions of political society interact in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries? How has contractarianism shaped the modern humanitarian enterprise? I contend that the imperial humanitarianisms of the nineteenth century advanced the ‘standard of civilisation’ as the organising principle of contractual society, as this humanitarian maxim generated new kinds of gendered, classed, and racial exclusions. This research draws upon a socio-legal archive of fugitives – exiles, asylees, the stateless – comprising memoirs, petitions, consular archives, governmental correspondence, and legal texts and opinions. It unfolds in three sections, focusing on the legal constructions of the refugee settlement or *mesken*, the settler household, or *mahrem*, and the settler-citizen, or *muvatın*. In each section, I centre fugitive histories attesting to the aporias of the Ottoman humanitarian enterprise. I discuss how the material contradictions of Ottoman humanitarianism precipitated and sustained the gendered, classed, and racial conflicts within the settlement, the household, and the body politic. I then follow these conflicts, as they unfolded between the *Settler* and the *Native*, the *Master* and the *Slave*, and the *Citizen* and the *Enemy*, respectively. The first part of the thesis, ‘*Mesken*’, examines how the carceral formation of agrarian settlement transformed Caucasian settler communities, drawing a diachronic comparison between Caucasian exile in the Balkans and Syria. I argue that the success of the settlements came at the cost of expropriating and exploiting the most vulnerable among the refugee settlers. In the second part of the thesis, ‘*Mahrem*’, I look at the legal fabrications of the settler household, exploring the juridical justifications for the exploitation and exclusion between the landholding elites and their slaves and workers. In the dissertation’s third and final part, ‘*Muvatın*’, I draw upon the debates surrounding the Ottoman Immigration Resolution of 1902 to disclose the pariahs of this emerging order. I juxtapose the humanitarian and conditional inclusion of Muslim settlers within Ottoman political society with the parallel contractual exclusion of Armenian out-migrants from the body politic. In conclusion, I argue that the unequal incorporation of migrants into Ottoman modernity both construed and challenged the carceral ends of this humanitarian enterprise.
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    Progress and the People in German Political Thought after Kant, 1781-1831
    Higgins, Olivier
    This dissertation explores the German political philosophy that emerged from a generative encounter between two revolutions in the 1780s. The first of these was Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”, an epochal vindication of human reason that revealed the autonomous subject at the centre of the knowable world. The second was the nearby revolution in France, a period of political upheaval that enraptured the German political imagination, apparently reorienting legal and social orders around claims of popular sovereignty. My project examines how, in the aftermaths of both revolutions, German political philosophy adapted the politics of Kant’s rationalism to accommodate the collective subjectivity of the people (*Volk*, *Nation*). The result, spanning a generation and a half of idealist writings, was a powerful intellectual current that reimagined progress through the relationship between an abstract standard of justice (*Recht*) and the lives of popular subjects. Understanding this innovation requires closer attention to the foundations of Kant’s political thought. Kant’s own political philosophy had doubtless responded closely – and often sympathetically – to the events of the French Revolution throughout the 1790s. But Kant’s German readers soon revealed what his republican politics owed to earlier eighteenth-century contexts and concerns, including a model of incremental progress that had prioritized the “point of view” rulers and their “manner” of governing, over the spontaneous and organic agencies of their peoples. Following a first chapter on Kant’s political philosophy, three subsequent chapters examine novel visions of the popular subject through the post-Kantian imperatives of J. G. Fichte and J. B. Erhard, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Hardenberg and Friedrich Schlegel, and G. W. F. Hegel. A project of intellectual history, the dissertation contextualizes these writings within the major events of the French revolution. This period of post-Kantian political philosophy has long featured in historical narratives on the collapse of the enlightenment and the rise of German nationalism, amidst the pressures of Napoleonic invasion. Interrogating these narratives, my dissertation points instead to an intellectual imperative, predating the Napoleonic wars and irreducible to German particularism, of expanding Kant’s rationalist politics to new modes of collective political agency, including the *Nation*, the *Masse* and the *Volk als Staat*. It shows that the tradition of political thought between Kant and Hegel was above all an exploration of the popular subject and its historic potential to pursue the ends of reason.
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    A Global History of Australian Women's Liberation, 1968-1985
    Campbell, Rosa
    This dissertation offers a global history of the Australian women’s liberation movement. It begins in the 1950s and concludes in the mid-1980s, with most attention being given to the period 1968-1985. Throughout this period the Australian women’s liberation movement changed the fabric of Australian society, successfully agitating for gender justice and transforming both the nation and the lives of individuals. The research focusses on two key cities of Australian feminist organising; Sydney and Melbourne but it also considers the women’s peace camp at Pine Gap, near Mpartnwe/Alice Springs and a global feminist conference which took place in Australia’s capital, Canberra. Its findings are drawn through close attention to periodicals from across Australia, the US, Britain and the Pacific. It combines twenty-two oral history interviews with archival research to reveal the dynamic and extensive ways that the Australian women’s liberation movement was globally influenced. Historians have recognised that feminist movements have been globally informed, but the global turn in the history of feminism has largely focussed on the late 19th and 20th century up until the 1950s, neglecting the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s. A global approach is conducive to understanding the Australian women’s liberation movement. This global frame reveals the work of those who have been marginalised in histories of feminism, such as communist women, migrants, women of colour including those from the Global South, and First Nations women. Through employing a global perspective, this dissertation foregrounds their direct involvement in women’s movements, and their transformative contributions at the level of political thought. It dislodges white women as the central change makers in feminism and the Global North as the central site of feminist thought and action. This dissertation examines the significant impact of communist women on Australian women’s liberation. It reveals the importance of global communist networks on the movement for women’s health from the 1950s. It also suggests that the Australian women’s liberation movement was significantly informed by Vietnamese and Chinese communism. It traces this influence at the level of ideas and considers face-to-face visits. It contends that the lack of scholarship on communist women in the women’s liberation movement is due to paradigms established during the Cold War, which suggested that communist women were not authentic feminists. These paradigms continue to influence how the history of women’s liberation is written today. A further strand of research investigates the project of Australian state feminism. Australian women’s liberation is unusual for its willingness to work with the state after the election of the Whitlam government in 1972. A global perspective makes visible the shared realities faced by state feminists in both liberal democratic Australia and communist China and Vietnam; in all cases women’s agency was limited by pressures of state participation. Through close scrutiny of a global feminist conference held in Canberra in 1975, state feminism in Australia emerges as entangled with nationalism. This thesis takes seriously the jokes and humour present at this conference as they reveal the emancipatory limits and exclusions of Australian state feminism. This dissertation explores the Australian campaigns for reproductive justice, both for abortion rights and against forced sterilisation, and finds that the tools of global law were essential to these campaigns. Campaigners for abortion rights drew on official legal precedent from Britain and the United States to change Australian abortion law. Feminists also drew on the Bobigny Trial, which was key to the decriminalisation of abortion in France. Australian feminists translated the Bobigny Trial into English and invited the trial lawyer French-Tunisian Gisèle Halimi to visit. Australian feminists, including Aboriginal women, also drew on unofficial legal instruments. International people’s tribunals offered a global forum where women could testify about reproductive injustices and where the meaning of crime was transformed beyond the states definition. While the core business of global history has been to trace successful connections and exchanges, this investigation of global law makes it clear that failures and divergences must also be traced. The thesis turns to the network of global women’s peace camps of the 1980s, including Pine Gap, which took place in November 1983 near Mpartnwe/Alice Springs. Placing these camps into conversation with Pacific and Indigenous women’s anti-nuclear networks reveals how both space and time were remade at these feminist encampments. Space was remade through ideas of spiritual feminism which highlighted the shared experience of women across the world and the possibilities of global, cosmic transformation. Time too played a role at these peace camps. Here, women in the Global North understood First Nations women as ‘traditional’ and ‘spiritual’, as representing the past. Yet, this sense of time was explicitly upended by visits to Europe from First Nations women who who had experienced nuclear testing. They were understood to speak not from the past, but from the nuclear future. In sum, the thesis rejects a national framing for the Australian women’s liberation movement and demonstrates the significant influence of transnational border crossings of all kinds, including exchanges of texts, visits, travels and migration patterns, as well as global political events, particularly the Cold War, on this movement for gender justice.
  • ItemControlled Access
    Anglo-Saxon Descent, Antiquarian Scholarship, and Germanic Englishness, c. 1560 - c. 1620
    King, Ian
    In the sixteenth century, self-styled ‘antiquaries’ began to uncover, examine, and circulate manuscript sources from the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period of English history that had predated the Norman Conquest of 1066. These manuscripts had formerly been held in abbeys and religious houses across the country. However, after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s and early 1540s, this material increasingly came into the possession of private collectors. Some antiquarian scholars became proficient in the Anglo-Saxon language, now known as Old English, which more closely resembled Old Norse and Old High German than early modern English. Nevertheless, in the period assessed throughout this dissertation (c. 1560 – c. 1620), the Anglo-Saxons were increasingly seen as the first English people, and efforts were made to reassign the source of English ethnocultural and historical identity from the more patently native Britonnic populations to the transplanted Germanic groups that had migrated to Britain in the post-Roman fifth century. In modern scholarship, early modern interest in the Anglo-Saxon past has been primarily ascribed to Protestant polemicists who sought evidence that the ancient English church had operated outside of papal influence. This dissertation evaluates other, ‘secular’ engagements with the Anglo-Saxon past in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the historical interests of legally-minded scholars for whom the English common law was the principal factor that defined their cultural and national identities. The first part of this thesis explores the emergence in the 1560s of a conception of Englishness grounded in the Anglo-Saxon past, relative to the less discriminating sense of Romano-Britishness that characterised earlier and other contemporary perceptions of the national past. The second part traces the evolution of Anglo-Saxon scholarship throughout the late Elizabethan period of increased xenophobia and dynastic uncertainty. The final two chapters treat the deployment of these ideas of Germanic Englishness in political debates and legal treatises following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603. Ultimately, this thesis argues that antiquarian scholars configured their studies of English institutional history in terms of ethnic lineage, constructing implicit hierarchies of ethnic desirability wherein Germanic descent was the basis for English superiority relative to Roman, Celtic, and other Continental ethnicities.
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    Hydraulic philosophy in early modern European cities
    Martino, Davide; Martino, Davide [0000-0002-4578-7500]
    This PhD is a study of hydraulic philosophy—a proposed new name for the branch of early modern natural philosophy concerned with water. Both the production of hydraulic knowledge and its practical application happened in context; the thesis focuses on one of these contexts, early modern European cities. Three case-studies—Augsburg, Florence, and Amsterdam—are approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to scholarship written by urban historians, historians of science and technology, and art historians, the lens of environmental history has been precious to formulate the research questions and methods underpinning the dissertation. First, Augsburg, Florence, and Amsterdam are introduced as terraqueous sites, where human bodies interacted with bodies of water: the Lech and Wertach, the Arno, and the Amstel-Ij confluence. Chapter II explores the professional identity and trajectories of the hydraulic experts and practitioners who deployed their knowledge and skills in these three settings. Focusing on specific examples of hydraulic problems or interventions within each city, the following four chapters focus on four ways in which these experts and practitioners interacted with water. Their actions could have great political significance: the Medici (Grand-)Dukes harnessed hydraulics for propoganda aims, whilst municipal authorities in Amsterdam and Augsburg fought (sometimes literally) with their neighbours over borders marked by water. The overarching ambition of early modern hydraulic philosophers, to exert control over water, was represented in the statues of Neptune calming the waves which adorned contemporary fountains, and it was translated in practice with the digging of navigable canals or the reclamation of land. Indeed, the displacement of water was an important manifestation of attempts to control the hydraulic environment: water was drained where it was perceived to be in excess, and pumped where it was thought to be lacking. Measuring the volume, speed, and depth of water also formed part of early modern strategies (and fantasies) of control. Drawing together these four areas of hydraulic action, the dissertation concludes by defining hydraulic philosophy and investigating some of the sources of knowledge and expertise to which its practitioners turned.
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    The Economic Theories of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, 1923-1945
    Ahmad, Ali
    The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was established in 1923 originally as a German centre for Marxist economic research. Its odyssey traversed tumultuous historical periods, witnessing the downfall of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi regime, and beyond. The Frankfurt Institute itself underwent significant structural changes, notably a pivotal shift in directorship a few years after its founding, when the political economist Carl Grünberg decided to step down and the social philosopher Max Horkheimer took over. Despite the Institute’s substantial contributions to economic theory during both directorships, the remarkable work of its economists has been overshadowed by the pronounced and widespread focus on its philosophers and cultural critics. Not only was economic theory central to the work of the Institute until 1945 at the very least, but it formed the substructure of the renowned Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory. In this centennial tribute to the Institute’s founding in Frankfurt, this thesis embarks on a journey of exploration, shedding light on the under-researched economists of the Institute within the historical contexts in which they operated. By doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the Institute’s multidimensional legacy, enabling us to appreciate the significance of these underappreciated economists in shaping critical economic discourse during the twentieth century and offering a renewed perspective on the intricate interplay between economics, politics, history, and epistemology, which lay at the heart of the Institute’s endeavours.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Piety and Politics in the Kingship of Henry III
    Shacklock, Antonia
    Henry’s piety has received much attention from historians. They have particularly focused on the cult of Edward the Confessor, Henry’s relationship with and construction of Westminster Abbey, and his magnificent almsgiving. There has also been an appreciation that the political and the pious overlapped in a way our secular world does not fully appreciate. This thesis builds on this work. It examines Henry’s standard pious acts including saint veneration, pious patronage of religious orders and institutions, and his relationships with key religious figures throughout his reign. This thesis traces the evolution of Henry’s pious acts in support of his political actions, in times of peace and in times of challenge and conflict. Case studies, covering Henry’s response to military conflict, central dynastic moments, and the daily exercise of religious patronage, where evidence is available, reveal an underappreciated and complex set of pious practices which aimed at concrete results. This thesis considers general trends in Henry’s pious practices and specific responses to external events. It evaluates times when Henry’s authority was well established and considers how his practices altered in times of challenge, most notably the period of baronial revolt and rebellion. Despite his employment of sophisticated pious strategies, and his sensitive ceremonial and ritual response to events, these largely ultimately failed to achieve Henry’s objectives. Piety alone, however considered, was not enough to paper over his failures as a king. Indeed, the elevated sense of kingship revealed by a detailed consideration of Henry’s piety only further highlighted his political failings and the difference between his elevated expectations and those of his lay and ecclesiastical subjects. However, this more nuanced picture of his piety provides a new lens through which to consider how Henry saw his role as a king, and to understand the motivations behind his actions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Engagement in Nineteenth-Century England
    Kalenak, Maggan
    The intent of this dissertation is to fill a lacuna in the current social and cultural historiography of nineteenth-century England. It does so by expanding and nuancing the study of romantic culture from the current narrative of ‘courtship and marriage’ to include the crucial period of engagement. Making a suitable, compatible marriage was, for most individuals, the greatest determinant of lifestyle — financially, professionally, emotionally, socially, and sexually. This dissertation aims to recover the role of the engaged couple broadly, while bringing to the fore the experiences of middle-class engaged couples. It was in and among the middle-class that engagement developed as a ritualised life period — replete with unique behaviours, ceremony, and material culture — the reflection of a society increasingly focused on the primacy of individual couples and organised around the nuclear family and conjugal marriage ideals and values. Within this system, securing a spouse elevated social statuses of both men and women, afforded them social currency, status, and categorised them into a group identity shared among engaged individuals. Engagement was a period of transition and reorientation of the self, affecting one’s familial and social position as well as one’s self-concept. Emphasising material culture, emotional, and sensory history, this dissertation will look at the engaged individual and couple on both an individual and societal level through varied source materials including: personal correspondence, diaries, prescriptive literature, works of fiction, pornography, periodicals, sermons, botanical guides, and hairdressers’ pamphlets. Through the lens of engagement and the experiences of engaged individuals, this dissertation explores and enriches various historical concepts crucial to our understanding of social and cultural history, including gender history, family culture, intimacy, commercial culture, and identity.