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This thesis interrogates the temporal persistence of Roma camps to understand the mechanisms that lead to the protraction of their temporary condition. While persistent temporariness has been widely acknowledged as a common aspect of camp-like institutions, it has rarely been problematised. Examining the cases of Italy and France, this thesis unpacks this notion of persistent temporariness and investigates the factors contributing to its different forms. In so doing, the thesis re-thinks the concept of persistence as gradual change and offers a new theorisation of the camp as a site of contentious governance. The three empirical questions examined in the thesis are: 1) What are the factors that contribute to the persistence of the Italian Roma camps? 2) Can these factors also help with understanding of other cases of persistent temporariness? 3) What are the strategies developed to oppose the persistence of the Roma camps? These are addressed by way of a comparison of three institutional camps characterised by different types of enduring temporariness: today's Italian Roma camps, the historical French transit estates for Algerian migrants, and contemporary French integration villages for Roma migrants. Following an analysis of the Italian Roma camps, the thesis presents what I call an ‘asymmetrical comparison’ with the French cases, which aims to investigate how the factors implicated in the persistent temporariness of the Roma camps can help to explain the persistence of the transit estates and integration villages. In examining these cases, I have drawn attention to the concept of policy ambiguity and to the way it influences the strategies of the actors involved in the camp governance and, therefore, their different trajectories of persistent temporariness. Although, in Italy, ambiguity facilitated the persistence of the Roma camps, in recent years a new form of resistance has turned policy ambiguity into an opportunity for political mobilisation.

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This thesis is concerned with two books of narrative history, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents and Pompeii: The Living City, both written by me during the 2000s, the latter co-authored with Ray Laurence. Pompeii (2005) explores life in the Colonia Veneria Pompeiana, a provincial Italian city, in the middle of the first century CE, during the period prior to the eruption of Vesuvius in 69 CE. The World That Never Was (2009) offers an account of the Anarchist movement and its complex relationship with the police and intelligence services across an international diaspora during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871.

For many historians today, the consultation of archival documents is an indispensable aspect of the research underlying their work, yet little is still known of the relationship between the two before the emergence of the national archives as centres of scholarship during the nineteenth century. In the case of the Republic of Venice, an early modern government well known for its programme of official state historiography based around a privileged access to the records of its secret chancery, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how the use of this collection actually shaped the narratives and writing styles of those who were permitted to access it. Drawing upon the recent ‘archival turn’ in historical studies, this thesis is a re-examination of the historian’s craft in early modern Venice from the perspective of the physical collection of diplomatic and governmental papers with which a growing number were beginning to be confronted. After establishing that the historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were well aware of the methodological importance of the archive as a site of authentic and authoritative historical information, this study will consider the ways in which the archive of the Venetian secret chancery was increasingly organised as a historical monument to the recent and distant affairs of the Republic, before constructing a detailed account of how its historians accessed, consulted and extracted material from this constantly evolving archival institution. Concluding with a series of case studies which illustrate that the registers, indexes and research assistants of the chancery did indeed have a significant impact upon the narratives and historical identity of the city during this period, this thesis posits the idea that early modern record-keepers had a far more influential role in contemporary historiography than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Renaissance Venice was ruled by a closed aristocracy which reserved to itself most of the offices in the state. In spite ofthe importance of this group relatively few studies of noble families have ever been undertaken. Though it is impossible to use the available early sixteenth century sources to reconstruct comprehensive biographies of any patrician family or group of families, it is nevertheless possible to examine the various individuals and families in a more limited fashion as office holders. The Zen family occupied a central position in the sixteenth century patriciate. They were numerous, wealthy, and politically important, but by no means were they among the leading families in the state. Their careers are widely illustrative of the political activities of the many moderately prominent noble families. Though the Venetian patriciate had been originally distinguished through trade, changing economic and political conditions in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries made merchant ventures less attractive. But, in addition, an analysis of the careers of the Zen reveals another important reason for the abandonment of trade: the burden of office holding. Over half of the Zen were in office every year; the offices were evenly distributed among all the men in the family and the careers of individual patricians show that the offices themselves were both demanding and time consuming. Numerous petitions from office holders seeking to return to Venice to conduct urgent business testify to the pressure felt by men who could not continue to be both merchants and magis-. trates. As a result, though moat merchants were nobles at the beginning of the cinquecente, at the end of it few were. The pressure of office holding contributed greatly to this transformation and resulted in a noble caste which increasingly derived its income from rents and government salaries.

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