Despite the plethora of research on migration, little is known about behaviours and experiences of older working age migrants. This thesis focuses on Polish migrants aged 45-65, who have arrived in the UK since 2004 looking for work and better opportunities. The purpose of the study is to explore links between age and migration by investigating older migrants who are still economically active. Thirty five interviews were carried out across the UK using an oral history qualitative approach. These migrants were particularly affected by redundancy during the transitional period from socialism to capitalism in Poland; they then found it almost impossible to find other work because of their age. The decision to migrate may have been influenced by an early exposure to Western influences; however, it was the impact of unemployment and debt that led to a re-evaluation of their lives. Although they may be at different family stages, these older migrants' shared background and perception of their lack of value has shaped their migration experience. They represent parents, grandparents, sons, daughters, married couples, widows and single persons; this age group gives a more complete and nuanced picture of family life and relationships. The emotional costs are high when families are separated through migration, especially when elderly parents are involved. Despite the wide age range, family experiences are often very similar, with preferences for staying at home and watching Polish television. However, the opportunity of employment in the UK has given them an economic and social value no longer available to them in their homeland. As so much of their life course has been invested in Poland, many see no need to learn English; it is not a priority as they have virtual social interactions with family and friends in Poland and continue to inhabit a Polish-speaking world. This age group are also more likely to be pioneer migrants, accessing new destinations.

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Late eighteenth-century Britain was dominated by two features of economic life that were a major departure from previous eras, the economic growth of the Industrial Revolution and almost constant warfare conducted on a previously unprecedented scale. One consequence of this was the rapid expansion, diversification and development of the professions. Sociologists and economists have often argued that economic development and modernisation leads to increasing rates of social mobility. However, historians of the army and professions in the eighteenth-century claim the upper levels of the army were usually isolated from mobility as the highest ranks were dominated by sons of the aristocracy and landed elite. Some claim social status was more important for career success in the late eighteenth-century army compared to its earlier counterpart, which if true may have led to declining rates of social mobility for the upper levels of the army. This PhD thesis investigates the limits of social mobility during this period by examining the social origins and career patterns of the highest professional rank in the army, generals. This study finds that generals were not isolated from social mobility. Modernisation did lead to increasing rates of social mobility among generals. However, mobility was limited in some respects. The rates of social mobility for generals were much lower than ordinary officers. In addition, most moves up the social hierarchy were fairly shallow. Generals usually came from relatively high levels of society and hence they were generally only moving from a high social position to a slightly higher one.

Koṅku is the name of a distinctive geographic and social region in the west central corner of Madras State in India. The area encompasses much of the present Coimbatore District, plus parts of Salem, Madurai and Tiruchirappalli. It is roughly 8,500 square miles in extent and has a present population of about 5,000,000. Koṅku ia comprised of a single, broad upland plain. The area is dry and, in addition, rainfall varies greatly in quantity from year to year. The region is roughly bounded in each of the four directions by high hills, while the plain is cut into sections by three important tributaries of the Cauvery river. The peasant inhabitants can name these distinctive physical features. They further describe the area in terms of its sacred geography. Konku has seven sacred hills dedicated to Morukan and seven riverside temples built in the name of Civa. The region is further identified with a long epic or ballad which recounts the folk history of the area in some detail.

Over the last twenty years, the analysis of social networks has become an increasingly significant tool for sociologists, anthropologists and historians alike. Network analysis has not yet, however, been adopted extensively by historians of ducal Normandy or the Anglo-Norman realm. Although there has been some useful work on specific families or political groups, these have tended to artificially isolate networks from one another and from their broader social milieux. It has become clear that these problems can only be addressed by both inter and intra network analysis over a broader time frame, and that those networks themselves must also be conceived in broad terms. This thesis therefore considers three aristocratic kin-groups of significant contemporary and subsequent importance; the Clares, Giffards, and Tosnys, and includes both their cadet branches and their in-laws. All three groups are examined in terms of their kinship structures, their roles as lords and vassals, and their relationships to the church. While much of the material is Anglo-Norman, the chronological range extends from c.940 to c.1200. The aim has been to produce a fuller picture of how all three great family enterprises were constituted, developed, interacted with one another and were embedded within society, and to acknowledge that no man, and indeed, no kin-group, is an island entire of itself.

From early 1950s to the early 1970s Britain is said to have experienced an ‘age of affluence’. Whilst material conditions for many households improved in these decades, this detailed examination of budget management processes shows that for many working-class households, these gains were the product of hard work and careful money management. Using oral history methodology, this thesis explores lived experiences of the household economy to illuminate these qualifications to ‘affluence’. In so doing, this thesis advances analysis which considers the relationship between the macro-level economic conditions of affluence and the everyday economic realities of households in the post-war period. The thesis examines the operation of the household economy and shows how working-class households utilised domestic labour, budgeting, paid work, credit and thrift to make ends meet, as well as to achieve ‘affluence’. Further, by exploring these areas of the household economy, this thesis shows that gendered ideology continued to preserve power and material inequalities between men and women. Although considerable change did occur, particularly involvement in the paid labour market, domestic responsibilities continued to be an important focus of women’s identities and the effective performance of these duties by women remained central to the success of the household. This thesis represents a fresh focus on how the exploration of everyday life, including the salience of ideological continuities in shaping experience, can qualify and refine our understanding of twentieth century economic and social change, and contributes to socio-historical understandings of ‘affluence’ and its intersections with the household, gender, and class.

This dissertation is about social mobilizations in rural Kyrgyzstan from 2010-2015. Following a constructivist approach, I aim to answer a puzzling question in regard to multiple but rarely sustainable protests in this global periphery: Under what conditions can provisional episodes of mobilization be transformed into sustained mobilization? In particularly, I consider Eric Hirsch’s insight that the commitment of participants of mobilization to the cause is formed within collective instances, i.e. ‘group processes’, and I employ it in the Kyrgyzstani context of generalized distrust and discredited corrupt politics. I explore the conditions in which participants of episodes of mobilization create trust in organizers and into the cause of mobilization. I investigate these conditions in two case studies: one concerns a fragmented labour force at a state-owned gas and oil company in which, in the course of four years, workers succeeded to empower themselves as a collective actor within the group processes of collective learning and collective decision-making. The second tells a story about a fragmented rural community that goes against mining operations but sees the decline of an initially successful mobilization within group processes of monitoring. These findings point to the presence of a specific ‘pre-condition’ for any lasting mobilization: trust between organizers and participants of episodes of mobilization must be established in the process of monitoring the commitment to collective interests. With this insight I contribute to the literature on social movements and mobilizations that tends to take commitment and trust as pre-established resources. Furthermore, this work intervenes in the ongoing discussion on social change in the former Soviet Union. First, my observations of the difficult formation of protest groups lead, surprisingly, to the conclusion that the weak state produces a weak society. Second, due to the fragmented and localized nature of these mobilizations, social and political change in Kyrgyzstan is most likely to occur at the local level.

The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations throughout Indonesia has resulted in a range of environmental and social consequences, including dispossessing rural people of their land. But these people are not accepting the infringements passively. As oil palm plantations have expanded and spread, so have instances of oil palm-related protest and resistance. In almost all accounts of oil palm, however, women and gender relations are overlooked. This thesis examines the role of women and gender relations in oil palm expansion and resistance in Indonesia today. Using a combination of secondary literature (specifically, the fields of agrarian political economy, feminist political ecology and contentious politics) and primary data, this thesis provides both a new case study and a new way - through the lens of gender - of understanding oil palm expansion and resistance in Indonesia. At the heart of this research study are the voices, opinions and experiences of 42 women who participated in one protest against dispossession in Sambas district, Indonesia. Emphasizing the role of these women in their households, communities and in this protest, as well as the gender relations that shape and are shaped by the women’s participation at all of these levels, this study offers new analysis of who is impacted by oil palm expansion, who resists it and in what ways. The Sambas case study demonstrates how gender relations shape all stages and facets of a protest, from womenʼs decisions to participate in protest (by informing their motivations and political opportunities) to womenʼs protest activities and how women experience protest outcomes. It also reveals how at all stages of mobilization, gender relations are not fixed. Rather, gender relations themselves may also be shaped by and through womenʼs participation in protest. This study has far-reaching implications not only for the future of oil palm expansion and resistance, but on women’s participation in protest, in politics in general and on gender relations.

The critical essay gained immense popularity in the sixties and seventies in the Maghrib as a way to depict national realities that had failed to live up to nationalist ideals. Their authors often shared similar attributes: young highly educated intellectuals, committed toward modernity and who steered clear of politics. Such was the case of Abdallah Laroui (born 1933) and Hichem Djaït (born 1935), two celebrated Maghribi thinkers of the post-1967 generation in Arab thought. Despite their different ideological positions, they share a similar trajectory and both wrote about the need for another Arab renaissance, in Laroui's La crise des intellectuels arabes (1974) and Djaït's La personnalité arabo-islamique (1974). The turn to critical writing is routinely dismissed for being secondary, for having a restricted audience and little political impact, yet it highlights well the Maghribi postcolonial intellectual's competing demands: to conform to an ideal representation of intellectual "commitment" through critical speech, and to secure national recognition and integration. As such, this thesis confronts the often-neglected impact of nationalism on intellectual conducts after independence around the impact of their disillusionment, and forces us to rethink critically notions of engagement, the role of intellectuals and postcolonial cultural productions that are current in Middle East studies, and problematically envisaged by postcolonial studies. These texts have been approached as dynamic objects responding to a set of questions in their time, to account for the materiality of thought production, mobilising David Scott's concept of the "problem-space of intellectual production" (1999). This thesis looks at Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït's intellectual projects from 1965 to 1978, to study the genesis and aftermaths of their critical moment, focusing on their published writings (critical essays and academic studies), press and journal articles, interviews, and fictional texts from a later period, in Arabic and French. Their writings will be read alongside several cultural journals, newspapers and memoirs dealing with this period of the Maghrib's history to account for the processes of circulation and reception by relevant audiences.