The dissertation contextualizes the unique creation of citizenship during the first two decades of the British-administered Palestine Mandate. It emphasises the mandate's quasicolonial regime in order to understand how the British officials and the Palestinian Arabs understood and actively practiced citizenship and the rights associated with that status. The aim of the dissertation is to offer a historical analysis of the legislation, discourses, practices and expressions of Palestinian nationality and citizenship. In doing so, it finds that nationality and citizenship became less like abstract concepts and more like statuses integrated into political, social and civil life and as markers of civic identity in a changing society. British officials in London and in Jerusalem crafted Palestinian nationality and citizenship in order to ensure that these statuses reflected the policy of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. The thesis examines the topic by analysing both the British colonial perceptions and subsequent legislation of citizenship in Palestine and the reactions by the Arab population to the transition from Ottoman subjecthood to the new status of Palestinian citizens within the larger British colonial empire. I argue that the native population relied heavily on their prewar experience as nationals of the Ottoman Empire, a status granted by both jus sanguinis and jus soli provisions, as a basis for their contestation over mandate citizenship. Meanwhile, British officials crafted citizenship to be separate from nationality based on prior colonial legislation elsewhere, a view of the territory as divided communally, and the need to offer Jewish immigrants the easiest path to acquisition of Palestinian citizenship in order to uphold the mandate's policy. From 1918 throughout the Palestine Revolt that began in 1936, the institutionalisation of citizenship effectively distinguished between Jewish and Arab citizens and allowed for the administration to treat the citizenship status each group differently.

This thesis examines the ways British policy towards Kenya was made from 1960 to 1980 – from the last years of British colonial rule and through the first two decades of Kenya’s existence as an independent state. Despite the late colonial traumas of Mau Mau, relationships between the British government and the new government of Kenya were very close. British officials actively pursued influence, and a combination of multiple and overlapping interests and a dense network of relationships encouraged British politicians, civil servants and diplomats to place a high value on this relationship, coming to describe it as ‘special’. The thesis examines how ‘policy’ was made, and argues that this emerged from numerous decisions taken by individuals at multiple levels, informed by ‘habits of thought’ as well as a general understanding of British interests which was shared – despite some rivalries and tensions between UK government departments. British attitudes were also shaped by misunderstandings and prejudices. Kenya, by contrast, was emerging as a neo-patrimonial state. This thesis examines how these systems interacted with one another and recognises the clear difference: British officials worked within a bureaucratic system in a way which gave their decisions a coherence and consistency; Kenya’s elite pursued personal and factional interests. Even so, the British reinforced Kenyan neo-patrimonialism by working with individuals rather than through official channels. The thesis argues that, despite the disparity in structure and form, this was a negotiated relationship. Leading Kenyans were often adept at using the British relationship to their particular advantage and were able to influence and shape British decisions in ways which complicate any simple neo-colonial analysis. The relationship remained close because British interests and those of leading Kenyans came to align on crucial issues, ensuring a continued mutual interest in the relationship.

This thesis argues that the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) and its policies precipitated the course of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 revolution. It draws upon both opposition and Communist Party documents across twenty-five state, regional and local archives in the Czech and Slovak republics, as well as secret police reports, interview testimony, audiovisual materials and newspaper reports to offer a comprehensive reappraisal of both Czechoslovakia’s 1989 revolution, and the last few years of Communist rule which preceded it. This thesis analyses the responses of grassroots, district and regional Communist Party committees to the KSČ leadership’s own version of perestroika, known as‘přestavba’ (restructuring), between 1986 and 1989. In contrast to Michal Pullmann’s (2011) work, which focussed only on the Party ‘elite’, the contention presented here is that the KSČ leadership used přestavba to put more responsibility onto local officials,whilst simultaneously preventing reform of the top Party structures. Local Party minutes show how this led to increased resentment and distrust among the Party membership,which affected the extent to which přestavba’s policies were implemented. The instability which přestavba caused also manifested itself in the official Socialist Youth Union (SSM). Newspaper reports, interviews and Party minutes show how přestavba caused tensions within the SSM membership as it tried to remain both relevant and representative of young people, and at the same time maintain its loyalties to the KSČ.Secret police and local opposition reports show that, after 17 November 1989, the SSM not only opposed the KSČ’s reaction to the emerging political crisis, but that in doing so spread news of the revolution and encouraged strike action. The KSČ’s own responses during the revolution, never subject to any serious historical analysis, are also offered here. Mirroring the approach taken by James Krapfl (2009), who studied Czechoslovakia’s revolution from the perspective of the ‘winners’ and drew extensively on local and regional opposition documents, this thesis looks at the losing side by drawing on equivalent regional and local Communist Party sources. The tensions přestavba caused affected the Party’s ability to handle the demands made on it during November and December 1989. And having been encouraged to find their ownsolutions to the crisis, local functionaries and the Party grassroots decided instead to reject both the Party leadership and přestavba itself.

This thesis contributes to one of the main debates of British imperial history, the relevance of the Empire to British society. It examines a number of twentieth century imperial activist groups and discusses in detail the Junior Imperial League and the League of Empire Loyalists. It argues that the Junior Imperial League was an important imperially-minded organisation which gave valuable practical support to the Conservative party. It suggests that the imperialism of the League of Empire Loyalists had ideological roots in the imperialist ideas of the late nineteenth century has been overlooked by historians who have perceived it as relevant only to extreme right-wing politics. It suggests that both these groups have been given too little, or the wrong kind of, attention by historians. The first has simply been overlooked and the second has tended to be subsumed into a search for British fascism rather than studied as a specifically imperial body. The analysis of these two groups, in the general context of imperial group activism, hints at a reading of British imperial consciousness that it more subtle than the one in much current literature. Imperialism was neither ubiquitous nor non-existent. A substantial number of activists in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, estimated to exceed a million, cared about the Empire in various ways and with a range of intensity. Members of imperial activist groups came from all classes, although the leadership of imperial activism was often upper-class. However, imperialism mattered most when it was most ‘banal’ and most intertwined with a broader political Conservatism. Members of the Junior Imperial League rarely saw their imperialism as controversial or something separate from their broader political vision. They associated it with the governance of the Empire, its defence, trading relationships, education, and Anglo-Saxon feelings of ‘kith and kin’. The League of Empire Loyalists revealed a different pattern of imperialism at a time when empire had become much more contested. The LEL mobilized people who saw empire as the salient feature of their own political identity. In many ways their central concerns were similar to those of the Junior Imperial League but their sense of their marginality revealed how far empire had moved from the mainstream of British politics.

This thesis provides a complex and in-depth analysis of Russian Holocaust remembrance on the level of memory politics and its manifestations that is contrasted with a local case study on Rostov-on-Don using oral history interviews and archive research. In a first step the thesis delivers an analysis of the Russian post-Soviet public treatment of the Holocaust and what share remembrance of the katastrofa has within remembrance of World War II in Russia. Drawing on approaches from Halbwachs, Assmann and Welzer on communicative and multigenerational memory research as well as historical studies it is furthermore demonstrated how the largest mass killing of Jews on Russian territory is remembered by different generations of Rostovians today and how this private representation of World War II and the Holocaust contrasts with public forms of remembrance. Above all, the thesis provides new facts about the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don by introducing previously unexamined eyewitness accounts. In doing so, the thesis illustrates that a tradition of privileging perpetrator sources in previous western studies has worked to the detriment of research on the events in occupied Rostov, for which we have relatively more first-hand testimony. The thesis thereby adds an important contribution to the discourse surrounding the blank spots in the Russian memory of World War II.

Our current understanding of the medieval local environment is largely based on scholarly writings focusing on the policies towards the landscape pursued by the social elite. This presents us with some obvious problems if we want to understand local places through the eyes of the lower orders. But that is exactly what this study aims to do. By re-examining a variety of sources this research seeks to reconstruct the physical—and in some respects, metaphorical—environment of three contrasting English villages, using this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings, and how this led to the development of the local economic strategies and social structures that can be pieced together from the records of the medieval manor. Since the emphasis here is largely on attitudes toward local environment, the intellectual approach moves beyond more traditional English historical spheres regarding the peasantry to consider mentalities. This has rarely been a consideration for historians concerned with English medieval peasants. Indeed, one might ask just how we can hope to uncover the thoughts of those who left little documentary evidence behind? Reconsidering the records that survive, it is clear that peasants left a great quantity of material waiting to be uncovered. Hidden within seigneurial documents can be found direct peasant testimony, notably their personal names, and those they bestowed upon the landscape. Through these documents—alongside the physical environment—we find further signposts indicating how they felt, thought about, and commemorated their local landscape. This study reveals that some peasants used the landscape to set themselves apart from their neighbours. It shows that, although uneducated in the formal sense, some nevertheless had a strong grasp of contemporary scientific thought. It outlines the means through which locally important folk stories were embedded within the landscape itself. And it sees beyond the officially endorsed local village landscape, with its authorized roads and footpaths, to reclaim the real environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

The Metamorphosis of Battersea is a study of the process of building development in a London parish during the nineteenth century. Part I reviews existing literature on the subject and looks at the physical and pre-urban background. It also provides a brief overview of the creation of the essential infrastructure of the suburb, from sewers to railways and from churches to music halls, and looks at the social and occupational background of the population as it grew with breathtaking rapidity from less than 3,000 in 1801 to 170,000 a century later. Part II discusses the evidence for building cycles in Battersea. The myriad men responsible for building the houses are then examined. This was an industry which essentially remained a collection of hand crafts throughout the period, albeit with some increase in the scale of operations after c.1870. Almost all of the thousands of builders and others came from within a five-mile radius of Battersea, and few lasted more than five years, most considerably less. The speculative nature of housebuilding was always at present and left a trail of bankruptcies and lesser failures in its wake. A classification of building estates according to the occupation of the initiator is proposed. Most were small operators who often failed to make the sure profits they expected when they set out. Case studies in Part Ill demonstrate that despite the degree of fragmentation in both estates and building, the operation of the various processes tended to produce homogeneous results in terms of the type and quality of housing, and of the tenants who occupied it, at leas: when new. This convergence often occurred despite the aspirations of landowners and developers, so that the supply and demand equation was usually in balance over a mid- to longer-term period, although there were severe cyclical fluctuations causing casualties among the many groups associated with the transformation of Battersea from an agricultural settlement with a substantial industrial base to a fully-fledged London suburb, larger than most provinicial towns

In contrast to previous cold war studies which have focussed on propaganda and the cultural contest between the USA and USSR, this thesis demonstrates how British film, theatre, and art marginalised communism, and by association political radicalism, through the reinforcement of dominant negative stereotypes. This thesis examines how largely negative portrayals of communism reflected the views of their creators: individuals and groups who were not part of the official state apparatus, but were illustrating their own perception of the communist threat. It is therefore a cultural examination of the visual portrayal of a political ideology within British film, theatre and art. Through the use of recognisable stereotypes, communism was demonised through a variety of guises: from aggressive and sinister domestic militants through to the portrayal of communism as being ‘un-British’ and a challenge to traditional values and beliefs. Although such anti-communist representations were dominant, more sympathetic portrayals gradually emerged, such as the naive, the gullible or those simply disillusioned and seeking change. Through a determined eclectic analysis of a broad range of sources from film, theatre and art this thesis will show that domestic concerns dominate in all three media. An in-depth look at the CPGB, the Artists Group and Realism, will demonstrate that British communism had no positive cultural influence within the media considered, leaving any sympathetic portrayals down to individuals. The changing fortunes of the Communist Party of Great Britain will also demonstrate how geopolitical events led to a decline in its domestic support and the continual reinforcement of negative communist portrayals. What emerges is that in the post-war years British film, theatre, and art looked with suspicion at an alien ideology largely associated with a hostile foreign power, and without any real challenge, its continued negative representation helped to establish a dominant anti-communist ideology.

This thesis challenges the traditional paradigm, which assumes that the period c.1050-c.1250 saw a move away from the ‘biblical’ or ‘liturgical’ kingship of the early Middle Ages towards ‘administrative’ or ‘law-centred’ interpretations of rulership. By taking an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, and by bringing together types of source material that have traditionally been studied in isolation, a continued flourishing of Christ-centred kingship in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is exposed. In demonstrating that Christological understandings of royal power were not Incompatible with bureaucratic development, the shared liturgically inspired vocabulary deployed by monarchs in the three realms is made manifest. The practice of monarchical inauguration forms the focal point of the thesis, which is structured around three different types of source material: liturgical texts, narrative accounts and charters. Rather than attempting to trace the development of this ritual, an approach that has been taken many times before, this thesis is concerned with how royal inauguration was understood by contemporaries. Key insights include the importance of considering queens in the construction of images of royalty, the continued significance of unction despite papal attempts to lower the status of royal anointing, and the depth of symbolism inherent in the act of coronation, which enables a reinterpretation of this part of the inauguration rite.

This thesis explores the response of national and local newspapers to issues of race and black and Asian immigration in Britain between 1948 and 1972. Scholars have highlighted the importance of concepts of race, identity and belonging in shaping responses to immigration, but have not yet explained the complex ways in which these ideas are disseminated and interpreted in popular culture. The thesis analyses the complex role newspapers had in mediating debates surrounding black and Asian immigration for public consumption. By engaging with concepts of race and tolerance, newspapers communicated anxieties about the shape British culture and society would take in the postwar years. Their popularity granted them opportunities to lead attitudes towards black and Asian people and multiculturalism. The influences of social, political and cultural developments on both the national and local level meant newspapers often adopted limited definitions tolerance which failed to combat racism. In other cases, newspapers actively encouraged racist definitions of belonging which privileged their largely white audiences. In order to understand newspapers’ engagement with concepts of race and identity, this thesis analyses the various influences that informed their coverage. While the opinions and ambitions of prominent journalists had a significant impact on newspaper policy, the thesis highlights the language and genres newspapers used to appeal to large audiences. It argues that this had a significant influence on how responses to immigration were communicated in the public sphere.