The conduct of British soldiers in wars of decolonisation has never been of greater historiographical relevance. In legal proceedings ending in 2013 a group of elderly ethnic Kikuyu won the right to sue the British Government for compensation claiming they had been subjected to torture during the Mau Mau Emergency. As a result the Foreign Office was forced to admit the existence of a secret archive at Hanslope Park containing documents relating not only to Kenya but other end-of-Empire conflicts. These have shed new light on the sometimes brutal nature of British counterinsurgency practice and given impetus to the scholarly debates surrounding it. Using this new material alongside existing government files and the first-hand accounts of contemporaries this thesis investigates alleged incidents of wrongdoing by British soldiers - the eponymous Tommy Atkins - in four post-war conflicts: Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden. It introduces as a key explanation the issue of demarcation. Despite exhortations from senior officers soldiers proved reluctant to separate operations from recreation; military families found themselves in harm's way accompanying husbands into dangerous theatres; and soldiers' duties often overlapped with those of civilian police. It will be argued that the blurring of these boundaries provided soft targets for insurgents whose attacks led to vengeful reprisals from British soldiers. Other reasons for illegal violence will be sought including the motivation of individual soldiers, the institutional culture of certain units and the British Army as a whole, and whether or not there was a racial component. Reactions of governments in London and the colonies as well as political parties, the media and wider public opinion will also feature prominently. 'Tommy Atkins' wrath' features eleven in-depth case studies from four conflicts, widespread discussion of theatre and unit-specific factors which influenced soldiers' likelihood to commit wrongdoing, comparisons with other colonial powers and analysis of the current state of historiography on the subject.

In this thesis I argue that colonial and imperial culture constructed a series of binary oppositions between coloniser/colonised, west/east, white/black, which are still operating today, and that the former term in these oppositions, associated with rationality and reason, has been privileged over the latter, correspondingly associated with irrationality and unreason. This is something that many postcolonial and anti-imperial writers set out to challenge, and this thesis critically examines the ways in which they do this, and the extent to which their attempts prove successful. However, throughout, I also argue that many of the writers studied either fail to move beyond the binary thinking which characterises colonial/imperial ideologies, 0 r that they unwittingly reinforce the dichotomies set up, by failing to consider the issues of class and gender which cross-cut and often reinforce colonial/imperial ideology. Chapter One examines postcolonial theory in detail, while Chapter Two provides a reading of two of Rushdie's novels, in relation to the issue of imagining the nation in the postcolonial era. Chapter Three deals with the ideology of purity, in relation to William Boyd's The Blue Afternoon, and with the stories of Charles Chesnutt, which also implicitly challenge the fixed divisions between black and white, thus undermining concepts of racial purity, whilst also providing an alternative episteme to that of the dominant white culture. The texts of both writers are set in modernist America, and both provide a critique of the dominant white discourse, or ' centre ' . This is also true of W. E. B. DuBois, whose work is discussed in Chapter Four, and who can be said to demand an equal status for the black subject, and for the black world-view or episteme, undervalued in racist America. In Chapter Five, I critically examine the writings of two women of colour in the US, arguing that while many of the writers studied fail to fully engage with the specific position of women in the colonial/imperial context, Alice Walker and Gloria Anzaldua redress the balance somewhat by focusing upon patriarchy, as well as racism and class issues. Indeed, I argue throughout that these issues cannot be considered separately, but need to be thought through together, in order to understand the complexities of colonial/imperial ideology, and thus to challenge it in effective ways.

This thesis offers a new model for understanding the rise of the word plantation as a keyword of anglophone hegemony in the early seventeenth century. Generally approached as a simple (and perhaps simplistic) synonym for colony in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plantation is missing from printed Elizabethan texts which promoted hegemonic settlement in Ireland and the Americas. Instead, in a colonial context, plantation rose to sudden prominence in promotional pamphlets published in 1609 and 1610, and James VUI was an active agent in this discursive shift. Tracing the word's rise to a unrecognized connection with Protestant pamphleteering from the sixteenth century, the thesis argues that plantation had taken on a distinctive association with religious reform and Protestant conceptions of divine providence by the time the word was adopted as the Jacobean name for colonial hegemony. In addition to an inherent ambiguity, the word plantation offered James a means for suggesting both classical and Christian authorities for the hegemonic enterprise - a duality that was not open to colony. More definitively than kingdom, colony, or commonwealth, the word plantation yoked the civil and the ecclesiastical, and therefore transformed the colonial promotional pamphlet into a space where monarch and subject could publicly, but indirectly, contest competing conceptions of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority. Through rhetorical analysis which considers how the printed form itself was engaged in the making of meaning, the thesis provides a study of the colonial promotional pamphlet from 1571, when print was first used to promote a particular settlement, and 1641, when violence broke out on "plantation" lands in Ireland. It offers new readings of colonial texts by Waiter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, John Davies, John Donne, and John Cotton, as well as an examination of the rhetoric of "plantation" as it was deployed by James VI/I.

This study explores the role of boundary-spanning individuals in the development of Strategic Service Partnerships (SSPs). SSPs are the latest manifestation of Public- Private Partnerships (PPPs). However, these partnerships are remarkably underresearched. Furthermore, the role of key boundary-spanning individuals in developing and maintaining PPPs and other partnership forms is poorly understood. This study closes these gaps in the literature by examining the development of SSPs and showing how the role and contribution of boundary-spanning individuals can be understood. Boundary-spanners are shown to exist as dynamic, structurally contextualised agents whose actions are shaped by a combination of organisational and contingency pressures and their own individual psychology. To understand the development of an SSP and the role of boundary-spanners, the study develops and tests a conceptual framework. This framework combines a sequential account of emergent interorganisational relationships with a policy process model. The thesis presents case study evidence from an in depth qualitative investigation of an emergent SSP in an English Local Authority to show that interaction between public and private sector organisations is critical to development of an SSP. It is also shown that boundaryspanning individuals are of critical importance in managing and shaping these interactions. This study represents an advance in understanding both PPPs and boundary-spanning individuals.

La plupart des historiens maliens considèrent le Vllème siècle de l'ère chrétienne comme la date de l'avènement de l'islam au Mali, alors que le soufisme n'y fit probablement son apparition qu'à partir du XVème siècle. Cette apparition soufie se caractérise alors par des pratiques individuelles et disséminées ici et là. Il faut donc attendre l'aube du XIXème siècle pour voir une véritable émergence du soufisme et une large expansion de l'islam avec les efforts déployés par Sïdï al­ Mubtar al-Kabïr, l'instauration de l'Etat musulman du Macina et le gihëid lancé par al-ijag 'Umar. Les deux voies spirituelles, Qadiriyya et Tiganiyya entreront en opposition, mais feront résistance à l'intrusion coloniale dans le pays. Après l'indépendance du Mali, en 1960, les soufis participeront activement à la vie politique et sociale du pays. Enfin les soufis maliens sont à l'origine de maintes œuvres intellectuelles destinées à faire connaître leur voie spirituelle. / For the most part, Malian historians see and consider the 7th century of the Christian era as the advent of Islam in Mali, while Sufism most likely came into existence there by the 15th century only. This Sufi first appearance is then characterized by spread and individual practices here and there. It is only at the dawn of the 19th century that a true emergence of Sufism and a great expansion of Islam through the efforts made by Sïdï al-Mubtar al-Kabïr, the establishment of the theocratic state of Macina, and the call to jihad by al-I:Iag 'Umar can be seen. The two spiritual paths known respectively as Qadiriyya and Tiganiyya will corne into conflict but they will both resist colonial intrusion into their country. After Malian independence in 1960, Sufis will take an active part in political and social life of the country. Finally, Malian Sufis are behind numerous intellectual works meant to make their spiritual paths known.