This thesis explores the configuration and performance of national identity in Britain and the British empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through a case study of the life of Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832). Using Mackintosh’s unpublished journals and letters, alongside his published and political writings, it illustrates the relationship between social identity and spatial location in the construction of national belonging. It shows how Mackintosh’s social and geographical location both enabled his vision of the nation to be influential and informed that vision. Born in the Scottish Highlands, Mackintosh received his education from leading proponents of the Scottish enlightenment in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Encouraged to identify himself with a concept of civilisation that was equated to an urban, metropolitan and middle-class masculinity, Mackintosh distanced himself from his origins and connections with Highland Scotland, a space deemed ‘backwards’ and uncivilised. As a young Whig gentleman living in London during the 1790s, Mackintosh brought Scottish Enlightenment principles to bear on debates over the French Revolution and reform in Britain. Configuring the nation through this debate, Mackintosh used classed, gendered and racialised tropes to draw the imaginary boundaries of national belonging. The relationship between national belonging, social identity and spatial location is most evident during the period that Mackintosh spent in Bombay. Mackintosh’s portrayal of himself ‘in exile’ in Bombay, his attempts to reform Bombay’s colonial society and to protect himself and his family from Indian ‘degeneracy’ offer an insight into what it meant for him to feel ‘at home’. Arguing that this concept of ‘home’ was premised upon an exclusively white and middle class masculinity that was imagined spatially as metropolitan, this thesis shows how Mackintosh attempted to write this identity into the histories of England that he produced at the end of his life.

At the core of this thesis is an examination of how Aquinas's materialistic understanding of resurrection shaped his thinking on human nature, individuality and bodily identity. Resurrection implied two things with respect to the individual body. First: the union between soul and matter was intimate and essential. Aquinas held that the soul is the only substantial, or nature-determining, form in a human being. Second: the material part in a human was relatively independent from the soul. Aquinas grounded the relative independence of body from soul on the accidental form 'dimensive quantity', which gave to the body its organic structure, individualised its matter, and supported its material continuity. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss Aquinas's Aristotelian and Averroan sources. For Aristotle, although individuality had its basis in matter, all matter was exchangeable without prejudice to identity. Problematically for the theologian working on resurrection, Aristotle offered no account of postmortem bodily continuity. Averroes, crucially, imported Aristotle's geometrical notion of 'body' as a three-dimensional kind of quantity into his discussions of bodily identity. Averroes thought that matter had a bodily structure of its own, supporting its continuing identity across radical change. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss Aquinas's thinking on the individual body and bodily identity. Reflection on resurrection, it seems, pushed Aquinas towards adopting a position on the nature of matter similar to Averroes'. In the 1270s, critics (mostly Franciscan) of Aquinas's theory of human nature turned it on its head, argued that it threatened the body (with heretical consequences for the identity of Christ's corpse), and set off the late-thirteenth century's defining debate on human nature. Chapter 5 discusses the divergent ways in which the Dominicans Thomas of Sutton, Robert of Orford, and Richard Knapwell defended Aquinas's theory of human nature and its consequences for postmortem bodily continuity at Oxford during 1277-86. It culminates in an examination of Knapwell's advanced work on the nature of matter, which built upon Averroes' and Aquinas's. The thesis contends, furthermore, that these three Dominicans can still be grouped under the banner of the 'early Thomistic school' if the ground they share is understood to be primarily political, rather than primarily doctrinal.

This thesis considers philanthropic activities directed towards new mothers and destitute children both “at home” and in a particular colonial context. Philanthropic encounters in Birmingham and Sydney are utilised as a lens through which to explore the intersections between discourses of race, gender and class in metropole and colony. Moreover, philanthropic and missionary efforts towards women and children facilitate a broader discussion of ideas of citizenship and nation. During the period 1860 to 1914 the Australian colonies federated to become the Australian nation and governments in both Britain and Australia had begun to assume some responsibility for the welfare of their citizens/subjects. However, subtle variations in philanthropic practices in both sites reveal interesting differences in the nature of government, the pace of transition towards collectivism, as well as forms of inclusion and exclusion from the nation. This project illuminates philanthropic and missionary men and women, as well as the women and children they attempted to assist. Moreover, the employment of “respectable” men and women within charities complicates the ways in which discourses of class operated within philanthropy. Interactions between philanthropic and missionary men and women reveal gendered divisions of labour within charities; the women and children they assisted were also taught to replicate normative (middle-class) gendered forms of behaviour. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which race impacted upon philanthropic activities: throughout the experiences of Aboriginal women and children on mission stations interweave with white women and children’s experiences of philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney. Comparisons of philanthropic efforts towards white and Aboriginal women and children highlights the “whitening” of philanthropy in the colony of New South Wales and the existence of a differentiated philanthropy. Discourses of race were also crucial to philanthropic practices in Birmingham, which strove to create good subject/mothers and citizen/children for the British nation.

Throughout the ‘long eighteenth century’ Britain was heavily reliant upon soldiers from states within the Holy Roman Empire to augment British forces during times of war, especially in the repeated conflicts with Bourbon, Revolutionary, and Napoleonic France. The disparity in populations between these two rival powers, and the British public’s reluctance to maintain a large standing army, made this external source of manpower of crucial importance. Whereas the majority of these forces were acting in the capacity of allies, ‘auxiliary’ forces were hired as well, and from the mid-century onwards, a small but steadily increasing number of German men would serve within British regiments or distinct formations referred to as ‘Foreign Corps’. Employing or allying with these troops would result in these Anglo-German armies operating not only on the European continent but in the American Colonies, Caribbean and within the British Isles as well. Within these multinational coalitions, soldiers would encounter and interact with one another in a variety of professional and informal venues, and many participants recorded their opinions of these foreign ‘brother-soldiers’ in journals, private correspondence, or memoirs. These commentaries are an invaluable source for understanding how individual Briton’s viewed some of their most valued and consistent allies – discussions that are just as insightful as comparisons made with their French enemies. Although their impressions borrowed from many prevalent stereotypes, especially in analyses concerning national character, these soldier-authors had a unique perspective and their writings reflect this. These men belonged to the soldiering profession, and this solidarity among military men would often focus their attention away from national or cultural distinctions, and towards defining how their allies adhered to the common ideal of a good soldier. The result was that though the British public may have maintained a derogatory attitude towards German soldiery, Britain’s own military men – due to shared identities and experiences – viewed them far more favourably.

This thesis examines cinematic representations of the L.A.P.D. within the context of discourses of law enforcement in Los Angeles and contends that these feature films constitute a significant strand within such discourse. This contention, which is based upon the various identifiable ways in which the films engage with contemporary issues, acknowledges that the nature of such engagement is constrained by the need to produce a commercially viable fictional entertainment. In four main chronological segments, I argue that it is also influenced by the increasing ethnic and gendered diversity of film-makers, by their growing freedom to screen even the most sensitive issues and by the changing racial and spatial politics of Los Angeles. In the 1940s and 1950s, the major studios were prepared to illustrate some disputed matters, such as wire-tapping, but represented L.A.P.D. officers as white paragons of virtue and ignored their fractious relationships with minority communities. In the aftermath of the Watts riot of 1965, racial tensions were more difficult to ignore and, under a more liberal censorship regime, film-makers―led by two independent African American directors―began to depict instances of police racism and brutality. Between the major L.A.P.D. anti-gang initiative of 1988 and the Rodney King beating of 1991, two films were released which tackled the inter-related issues of gang violence and the controversial nature of the police response. In the febrile atmosphere of the time, each found itself at the centre of local discourses of law enforcement. Then, in the wake of the King beating, Los Angeles and its police force endured the 1992 riots, the trial of O.J. Simpson and the Rampart scandal. These highly publicised events, which gave the L.A.P.D. a world-wide reputation for racism, brutality and corruption, also informed several movies in which the misdeeds of filmic policemen outstripped even the worst excesses of their real-life counterparts.

The overarching aim of this thesis is to see how the ancient Iranian world in general, and that of the Achaemenid Empire (550-331 BC) in particular were depicted by the (mainly) British academics and intellectuals during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The significance of this period (along with its preceding fifty years) lies in the way in which comparative philology was playing an increasingly pivotal role in a number of academic disciplines. Because of the supposed Indo-European commonalities between the Greeks and Persians, many were compelled to frame these peoples within an entirely new set of spatial boundaries that was mostly defined by a demographic hypothesis, which recommended that the late Bronze Age Indo-European intruders from the Steppes were one of the main causes of a fundamental cultural shift in the region. The intellectual underpinnings of this new approach were manifold. These included ideas pertaining to race, culture (and the manner of its prehistoric acquisition), language, and mythological heritages. In addition, since Romantic Hellenism, almost exclusively, defined the way in which the Persian Wars and the conquests of Alexander were related by the classically-trained historians of the period, it was a challenge to accommodate this new – and largely anthropological – framework within the Hellenic scheme of things. By concentrating on the writings of the Oxford ancient historian, Sir John Linton Myres, amongst others, this work intends to pursue two closely connected lines of inquiry. First, because of his intellectual interest and versatility (classicists, anthropologist, philologist, etc.), a better understanding of his thoughts can go a long way in comprehending this manifold intellectual modus operandi. Second, without such an undertaking, there would be precious little context and almost no analytical foundation for the historiographical examination of those aspects of Greek history which are of some relevance to the Achaemenid Persians and the Iranian world.

This thesis explores how Americans articulated, imagined and understood their relationship with the Continental Army as it operated around them during the American Revolutionary War. It examines both those who fought and those who did not, and considers what these people thought the army represented as it engaged in an increasingly bitter civil war. It reflects on how the creation of an unprecedented military force in North America challenged colonists’ conceptions of who they were. Americans understood the Continental Army as a military community that represented places: often their community, sometimes their colony, and increasingly their continent. Created to secure the North American continent, the army would come to embody its cause. Coverage of celebrations and commemorations ensured that the imagined army, the army of people’s perceptions, could correspond with these lofty ambitions. This army, representative of a physical continent, and those who inhabited it, could serve to highlight connections and similarities among its people, and their distinctions and differences from those who did not. This army offered a means for people to imagine themselves as a community, belonging to a continent, and connected by its interests and aspirations. However, the ‘continental’ aspect of the army was not the only possible perspective. The army was itself an imagined community. Professional connections sometimes spanned geographical distinctions, and on other occasions reinforced them. For many people, it was these connections that conferred the most significant conceptions of identity, whether they looked on the army as consisting of fellow-professionals, or of professional outsiders. As it became an increasingly distinct and organic military community, those outside of the army found their own way of resolving their imagined differences. Some embraced the image of an army that could meet their continental aspirations; others adopted the notion of the army as a threatening and distinct institution.

This thesis examines the impact of revolution upon slavery in the Atlantic world, focusing upon the period of profound and unprecedented change and conflict in the Bahamas during the final decades of the eighteenth century. It argues that the Bahamian experience can only be satisfactorily understood with reference to the revolutionary upheavals that were transforming the larger Atlantic world in those years. From 1783, the arrival of black and white migrants displaced by the American Revolution resulted in quantitative and qualitative social, economic and political transformation in the Bahamas. The thesis assesses the nature and significance of the sudden demographic shift to a non-white majority in the archipelago, the development of many hitherto unsettled islands, and efforts to construct a cotton-based plantation economy. It also traces the trajectory and dynamics of the complex struggles that ensued from these changes. During the 1780s, émigré Loyalist slaveholders from the American South, intent on establishing a Bahamian plantocracy, confronted not only non-white Bahamians exploring enlarged possibilities for greater control over their own lives, but also an existing white population determined to defend their own interests, and a belligerent governor with a penchant for idiosyncratic antislavery initiatives. In the 1790s, a potentially explosive situation was inflamed still further as a new wave of war and revolution engulfed the Atlantic. The various ways in which Bahamians responded to the prospect of the new possibilities seemingly opened up by the Haitian Revolution would have lasting consequences. Whilst engaging critically with both the detail and general interpretive tendencies of existing Bahamian historiography, the thesis seeks to demonstrate the manifold, complex, and contingent nature of the relationship between the eighteenth-century revolutions and the Atlantic slave system. As such, it aims to show the potential of an Atlantic history integrating local and more general perspectives to facilitate a more nuanced and fully transnational account of the ‘Age of Revolution’.

The thesis investigates the ideas and activities of the Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen, and his interaction with a range of British intellectual, political and cultural figures. Keshab propounded novel and influential ideas regarding the relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’ to audiences in Britain and India (concerning British rule in India, education, religion and spirituality, the position of women, global history, universalism and modernity), ideas that were profoundly shaped by his experiences as a colonial subject in two powerful centres of empire - London and Calcutta. The thesis draws upon approaches from biographical, intellectual, social, cultural and political history in order to locate Keshab within an analysis which relates the construction of identity in public discourses in multiple sites of empire to an analysis of the experience of colonial subjectivity at the level of friendship, family and self. This analysis is grounded in an exploration of the social construction of notions of ‘difference’, with particular reference to ideas of race, gender, class and nation. Through bringing London and Calcutta into a single analytic frame, the thesis demonstrates the ways in which encounters between subjects from metropole and colony, and the representations of these encounters in both the metropole and the colony, shaped identities in an imperial context. The thesis pays particular attention to the sustained inter-cultural dialogue between Keshabite Brahmoism and British Unitarianism. Discourses of universalism in Britain and Bengal are analyzed as they developed in relation to each other, a relation that was limited and reconfigured by inequalities of power immanent in imperialism. The thesis brings Brahmo and Unitarian universalism into a postcolonial focus, and rematerializes Keshab within a genealogy of Bengali intellectual history which is itself tied to universalist discourses in the imperial metropole.

This dissertation challenges recent grand syntheses which talk unhesitatingly of ‘the rise of American Democracy’ or ‘the democratization of American life’ during the early nineteenth century, and place political parties at the forefront of this narrative. In the Introduction, newly-available data on election turnout is employed to demonstrate an inverse relationship between the strength of parties and popular participation at the polls during the early 1820s. Chapter One then examines Federalist-Republican competition, and popular resistance to that framework, in Boston, Massachusetts, in order to show that far from naturally promoting democratisation, parties can serve to sustain the dominance of a small political elite. Chapter Two turns to Illinois where the inhabitants, locked in a struggle over whether to legalise slavery in their state, rejected parties in favour of alternative political arrangements that they considered better suited to their bid to define and implement the will of the people. Chapter Three questions the common assumptions that parties, elections, and policy-making were closely linked during this period, and suggests that political historians should pay more attention to alternative forms of participation such as petitioning, instructing, and lobbying. Finally, Chapter Four uses the presidential election of 1824 as a lens through which to explore the motives of those contemporaries who did argue in favour of party development, in order to demonstrate that a commitment to democracy was the least of their priorities. Taken as a whole, this dissertation argues that the rise of political parties was by no means inevitable in the early 1820s, and that their dominance of United States politics in later decades had important costs, as well as benefits, for popular participation.