Traditionally, François Bigot has been considered an interesting subject for historical investigation not only because he was important, having presided over Canada's civil administration at the time of the Conquest, and was attainted in a large criminal proceeding at the Châtelet in Paris; but owing to the voluminous testimony accumulated by the court, there is more evidence at the historian's disposal than for his predecessors. There is, however, every reason to doubt the court's objectivity. Although the court believed Bigot was only too typical of colonial administrators, historians have tended to exaggerate the intendant's crimes and to represent him as some strange atypical monster who single-handedly corrupted the administrative corps of the colony. Not only is this interpretation unsatisfactory since it begs the question of how it was possible for this 'monster' to perpetrate his crimes unmolested for over two decades, but by turning him into something unusual, vitiated the value of the materials as evidence for a more generalized picture of colonial administration. The questions which arise, therefore, relate not only to the 'intendant' as an individual but to the administrative corps of the Marine as a whole, and they are related. Who was Bigot? Where did he acquire his attitudes to work and responsibility? How did he view his own activities? What did his friends and family think of him? Questions about his early career would have been much easier to answer had any good secondary works on the Marine existed. Fortunately, access to the Gradis Papers has made it possible not only to reconstruct a cogent picture of 18th century administrative practice but has also imparted much about his family and trade interests. This thesis attempts to illuminate pre-Conquest Canada by tackling her administrators as persons rather than official functionaries, with the result that Bigot's actions are made intelligible in the context of his times.

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Six different nations have claimed sovereignty over some or all of the current state of Texas. In the early nineteenth century, Spain ruled Texas. Then Mexico rebelled against Spain, and from 1821 to 1836 Texas was a Mexican province. In 1836, Texas Anglo settlers rebelled against Mexican rule and established a separate republic. The early Anglo settlers brought their form of civilization to a region that the Spanish had not been able to subdue for three centuries. They defeated a professional army and eventually overwhelmed Native American tribes who wished to maintain their way of life without inference from intruding Anglo settlers. This history fostered a people who consider themselves capable of doing anything—an exceptional population imbued with a fierce sense of nationalistic and local rooted in the mythic memoirs of the first Anglo settlers. The purpose of this study is to explore the origin and development of Texan exceptionalist beliefs. The “taming of the Texas wilderness,” the Alamo, the defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto, the formation of a republic that earned recognition by major foreign powers, Stephen F. Austin, Davy Crockett, William Travis, are all elements in the great Texas myth. From the letters and documents of the early settlers, the extensive papers of Stephen F. Austin, the war papers of the Texas Revolution, newspapers of the era, and other sources, it is apparent that the early Texas settler did not come to Texas for any altruistic purpose. Texas provided a second chance for many who had been previously unsuccessful and an opportunity to gain riches from the extensive land bounty granted by the Mexican government. This research provides additional depth to a neglected part of Texas history. Removing the mystique of the Texas legend reveals a far more colorful and complex period. These early Texans were a complex, divided, greedy, racist people who changed the course of the United States and established a legend that has withstood the test of time.

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This thesis studies in a comparative framework the impact of colonial experience on the religious and social thought of two modernists, Ahmad Kh an of India and Ahmad Hassan of Indonesia. At the religious level, both modernists were much concerned with the purification of Islam. They called upon the Muslims to return to the Qur' an and hadith, abandon taqlid and to undertake ijtihad. Ahmad Kh an, influenced by the natural sciences and rationalism of the West, was also inclined to interpret Islam in a naturalistic and rational manner. Ahmad Hassan, on the other hand, was very much preoccupied with the purification of Islam and the return to the Qur' an and hadith, and was little influenced by the Western impact through colonialism. At the social level, both modernists considered education to be the essential means to social betterment. But whereas Ahmad Kh an also believed in cooperation with the British, Ahmad Hassan was opposed to the Dutch. / This study concludes by showing that, given the Western colonial experience, Ahmad Kh an's socio-religious thought was rational, realistic, liberal and dynamic. While Ahmad Hassan too lived in a colonial society, his socio-religious thought was puritanical, defensive and ideological.

This thesis explores representations of Italian migrant women in textual renditions of the Italian presence in Britain written and produced by descendants of Italian migrants between 1982 and 2002. The thesis offers detailed critical readings of six texts focusing on the experiences of Italian migrant women in Britain and their identity formation, and is organised according to genre categories including: theatre, romantic fiction and culinary memoir. Through close textual analysis, paying particular attention to key themes of movement, space and place within the context of female migration; the study scrutinizes the identity formation of Italian migrant women by demonstrating how seemingly clear and univocal models of Italian identity can be reconfigured as fluid conceptualizations of identity. It is argued that Italian identity as it is represented in a British context can be considered as a construct constituted by the repetition of a series of stylized acts. It is precisely through the repetition of these acts that Italian migrant women create forms of sustenance and stability for themselves and their families within the host country. This study moves beyond monolithic images of Italian migrant women, broadening the number of perspectives from which they can be viewed, by examining the way in which they are represented as stretching the seemingly fixed boundary between the public and private sphere in an attempt to transgress spatial and identity boundaries.

This study sets out to examine the development of British colonial policy towards West Africa between the years 1938 and 1947. It is primarily a study of the so-called 'official mind' of British colonialism because, as the sources indicate, the nationalists were mainly excluded from the review process. It has been decided to begin the thesis with the Colonial Secretaryship of Malcolm MacDonald. With the assistance of the West Indian Crisis, which propelled the colonial issue into the political arena in Britain, and Hailey's 'African Survey', which set out the deficiencies of British rule in Africa, MacDonald was supplied with the political lever and the requisite guidelines for him to successfully initiate a review of colonial policy in 1938. In particular MacDonald wished to see resolved the potential contradictions which existed in Britain's colonial policy. As he put it, "Important decisions may have to be taken in order to prevent Native Authorities on the one hand and Legislative Councils on the other from developing along divergent lines with undesirable results". This theme dominated the British West African policy review until 1947, by which time constitutions designed to effect such a harmony had either been implemented or announced.

This study attempts to revive T.J. Dunbabin's multi-dimensional approach to the history of Early Iron Age Sicily in The Western Greeks (Oxford 1948). Dunbabin recognised that archaic Sicily had no real history, and that any historical account involved combining the very scant documentary record with the fuller and ever-growing body of archaeological evidence to produce a framework for writing social and economic history. These innovative methods ended with Dunbabin, however: today the field is dominated by scholars impeded artificially by disciplinary boundaries, which discourage the productive combination of historical and archaeological sources, leaving a number of important questions in a sort of academic no man's land. In the introduction an overview of the study of Sicily since Dunbabin is given, and Dunbabin's own weaknesses are explored: Dunbabin modelled Greek colonisation in Sicily on modern British colonisation; such a decision strait-jacketed his image of the past, causing him to draw conclusions unacceptable today. The increase in the quantity of archaeological evidence since Dunbabin means that it is no longer possible to make an in-depth study of the whole of Sicily in a single volume. Consequently, the focus has to be considerably more restricted than Dunbabin's; specific questions need to be selected. Megara Hyblaia and Selinous offer two particular advantages for studying the evolution of Greek settlement in Sicily: besides being Megarian, both are sufficiently well explored archaeologically to make historical investigation profitable, but they were founded a century apart on different sides of the island, in different environmental and socio-political contexts. The study itself is divided into two main parts, the first focusing on Megara Hyblaia and the second on Selinous; each of these two parts consists of five chapters, in which the same questions are asked of the evidence from the two sites, for comparative purposes. Chapters I and VI explore the background to settlement, with such subjects as the native world encountered by the settlers at the time of colonisation, pre- and proto-colonial activity, and the respective foundations of the colonies examined. Settlement development is the subject of chapters II and VII; the emphasis here is to monitor the successive stages of the physical growth of the colonies, and also to study the size and nature of the settlement itself. Chapters III and VIII deal with demography (particularly population size). The following chapters (IV and IX) use archaeological and written evidence to reconstruct socio-political history. Chapters V and X investigate environment and economy. In the closing chapter, after a review of the conclusions reached, the question of why Selinous evolved so differently from it mother-city is addressed. The thesis ends with brief consideration of the (Megarian) Sicilian contribution to the study of the polis.

The large rise in the number of asylum seekers coming to Britain in the 1990s and since then has made asylum policy and associated matters an increasingly important issue for the government. On the one hand, the government has wished to deter asylum seekers but on the other, it recognises the importance of integrating those who are given permission to settle. Issues surrounding asylum seekers have become highly political as the media, local authorities and local people have all become involved in trying to influence the content and delivery of asylum policy. This thesis focuses on the effect of the current dispersal policy on asylum seeker and refugee integration. In this piece of research, an asylum seeker is an individual who reaches the UK through his/her own means and submits a request for asylum to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) at the Home Office. Asylum seekers who are granted permission to reside in the UK are defined as refugees in this thesis, whether they be Convention refugees or individuals possessing Humanitarian Protection (HP) or Discretionary Leave (DL). This study uses the approach to integration developed by Ager and Strang (2004a) and in particular their four main components of asylum seeker and refugee integration. My major hypothesis is that dispersal exercises a negative impact on the four dimensions of integration studied because this policy sends asylum seekers to localities where there are no settled co-ethnics, hostile host-community members, limited employment opportunities and inadequate dwellings. In order to test this hypothesis, I compare the significantly different integration opportunities encountered by asylum seekers and refugees in two contrasting dispersal cities, Newcastle and Birmingham. Given the national, ethnic and socio-economic heterogeneity of the group under study, I also adopt a case study approach and focus on the experiences of Kurds from Iraq. Significantly, asylum seekers and refugees possess different rights and for this reason, their experiences of dispersal and integration are analyzed separately. I chose semi-structured interviewing with asylum seekers and refugees because this method reflects my structured research strategy as well as my commitment to remain alert to unexpected findings. Furthermore, this technique helps the researcher appreciate the standpoint of the group studied, an important objective in my study. The in-depth nature of the qualitative data produced also assists with the understanding of the complex processes tied to the effect of the dispersal policy on integration. A non-probability sampling technique, snowball sampling, customarily used when a population is elusive, was employed to select the sample of asylum seekers and refugees. Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with national policy-makers and local service providers as well as Kurdish community workers and businessmen. These interviews helped the researcher understand the standpoints of central and local government, the voluntary and private sector as well as the perspective of influential Iraqi Kurds. The findings suggest that asylum seekers and refugees' experiences of dispersal and their process of integrating into UK society are not necessarily contradictory phenomena. In fact, in some instances, the dispersal policy has introduced members of this group to better integration opportunities than they would otherwise have encountered in their voluntarily chosen, traditional areas of concentration, in London and the South East of England. The conclusions also highlight several gaps in Ager and Strang's (2004a) integration framework, namely the absence of an intra-national spatial dimension, the failure to incorporate the ambivalent, non-linear effect of the passage of time and finally, the lack of reference to the idea that success in one sub-area of integration can reduce progress in another.