My dissertation, Making Imperial Futures: Concepts of Empire in the Anglo-Spanish Sphere, 1763-71, engages the grand narrative of exploration at the point at which that very concept was reaching the point of exhaustion and argues that the rough completion of European cartographical knowledge of the world had a profound impact on the evolution of the imperial experience. I examine the evolving concept of empire within a context of cross-imperial knowledge and rivalry, Enlightenment ideals and the changing ways in which Europeans related to the concept of a progressive future. Furthermore, I challenge the historiographically dominant notion that the British and Spanish experiences of empire are best categorized and isolated as distinct historical subjects. The first section shows that British successes in the Seven Years’ War energised the British imperial imagination, generating a broad-based debate on how best to exploit the situation and opening up the opportunity to put more than one approach into action when Britain and Spain went to war in 1762. But the Peace of Paris brought discord, and a perceived need for the government to discipline the imperial imagination and to establish an approved pathway for the future of empire in the Atlantic world. The second part looks at how the Spanish government applied state power in direct pursuit of the pan-Atlantic imperial project. In particular, it re-examines the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish empire in 1767 and makes the argument that the expulsion was a response to the perceived Jesuit threat to pan-Atlantic imperial norms. My third section suggests that the experimental burst of modern, state-centric imperialism that began in the wake of the Seven Years’ War suffered a reversal during the Falklands Crisis of 1770-1, during the general historical moment in which Europeans finished constructing their shared cartographical conception of the world. Although the growth of state power and impetus was temporarily reversed to some extent in the 1770s, this period helps prefigure the more extensive shift from empires primarily based on exploration and tenuous consolidation to empires that depended on dense, active exploitation to lend validity to their ontological claims.

My dissertation involves a critique of the concept of life or seimei as it emerged in modern use during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Specifically, I have outlined the conditions of possibility for thinking seimei at particular moments in the development of the modern, market-centered Japanese nation-state in historical and literary terms such that I can begin to use these conditions to think its impossibilities. In short, I argue that a central condition of possibility for thinking life in its modern, historical form is a process of individuation that takes hold of and shapes bodies at an ontological level. By critiquing life and its ontology of individuation, I unearth the traces of an impossible “apriori collectivism” - that is, a collectivism not merely reducible to a congregation of individuals, but originally collective – buried under the calls for individual freedom, self-help, and industrialization that were at the heart of the Meiji era’s modernization project. I track this apriori collectivism in a lineage relating (through non-relation) the mutual aid societies or mujin-kô of the Edo period to the life insurance industry of the Meiji 10s and 20s. I then use this material history of life as backdrop to my study of the literary trends in the latter decades of the Meiji era, and end with a consideration of the political and aesthetic implications seimei has for thought by taking up a study of Iwano Hômei’s Shinpiteki hanjûshugi (Mystical Demi-animalism).

This thesis shows that the doctrine of Active Defence has been the overriding concern of the PLA since 1950 and not any form of People’s War. Active Defence is based on three basic principles: no provocation of other nations; no bases anywhere on foreign soil; and no seizure of territory. The PLA’s articulated doctrine in the 1950s was to ‘Protect the North and Defend the South’. In the 1960s this changed to ‘Lure the Enemy Deep into the Country’ in order to crush him with ‘People’s War’. In the 1970s, this became ‘Prepare to Fight Early and Fight Big’. By using examples of the PLA in battle this thesis shows how the doctrine changed in light of failures in battle. The post-Mao reorganisation of the PLA to rectify these faults turned it into a modern military force, building on this legacy by transforming itself into a hardened and networked military. The PLA has now reached a stage of its history where it can fully implement its operational art that took root in the theories espoused in the 1920s and 1930s through the Soviet model, and tried to be implemented in the 1950s and 1960s only to be thwarted by the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Liberation Army’s operational art, this thesis demonstrates, has now come of age.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter One traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter one traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter one traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

This thesis takes a fresh look at the legal practices observed at the Sŏnch’ŏn trial, the main trial of the Korean Conspiracy Case. On 28 June 1912, 132 suspects were brought forth on charges of alleged assassination of the first Governor-General of colonial Korea, Masatake Terauchi. It is argued that if the immediate local interests of the new administration invariably affected the entire case, what determined the nature of the suspects’ treatment before and during the trial was a set of formal and informal legal practices that were transported to the colony amidst legal reforms. By analysis the trial from an empire-wide perspective, this study looks at how specific legal practices from the metropole were exacerbated in Korea through legal loopholes and the agency of legal actors and how such informal and disavowed legal practices both defined the legal system of the colony and helped sustain the Japanese colonial venture.

This thesis takes a fresh look at the legal practices observed at the Sŏnch’ŏn trial, the main trial of the Korean Conspiracy Case. On 28 June 1912, 132 suspects were brought forth on charges of alleged assassination of the first Governor-General of colonial Korea, Masatake Terauchi. It is argued that if the immediate local interests of the new administration invariably affected the entire case, what determined the nature of the suspects’ treatment before and during the trial was a set of formal and informal legal practices that were transported to the colony amidst legal reforms. By analysis the trial from an empire-wide perspective, this study looks at how specific legal practices from the metropole were exacerbated in Korea through legal loopholes and the agency of legal actors and how such informal and disavowed legal practices both defined the legal system of the colony and helped sustain the Japanese colonial venture.

Territorial disputes between Japan and South Korea (Dokdo/Takeshima) and Japan, Taiwan, and China (the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands) are characteristic of post-war East Asian diplomacy. This thesis explores these ongoing territorial disputes, problematizing Realist arguments by which these disputes are analyzed as matters of territorial or resource nationalism, or as the result of legal complications or security concerns. Instead, it is argued that we should look to ideologies of nationalism to understand seemingly extreme emotional reactions over these 'rocks' which threaten to destabilize Northeast Asia. These islands are treated as 'sublime' symbols of the nation and irredentist arguments which support the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese positions read history through a lens of essentialized notions of 'a people' or 'a nation', and in the process help define both.