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Seal impressions on bullae offer new ways of approaching the local realities of Seleukid administrative and fiscal practice. Previous studies of these objects have focused primarily on the iconography of the impressed seals. However, analysis of the find-spots of bullae, their forms, the sealing protocols employed, the quantities of extant seal impressions, and the interactions that are evidenced by several individuals impressing their seals on a single bulla, enables a range of aspects of royal bureaucracy in Babylonia to be reconstructed. This study is based on thousands of published and tens of unpublished bullae from several Seleukid sites, and also incorporates a few bullae from elsewhere that are impressed by seals with Seleukid motifs. It demonstrates the importance of groups of men ‘on the ground’ for the articulation and enforcement of royal power. Routine bureaucracy ensured that taxes were collected and local authority maintained throughout the long periods when the king and court were absent from a region, and even during instances of conflict over the throne. Nonetheless, some of the surviving evidence appears to reflect bureaucratic failings; there were also moments of reform and instances of idiosyncratic behaviour. The bullae suggest that administrative practice was relatively homogeneous across Babylonia, but differed from that known from the Greek cities of western Asia Minor. There are however similarities between Seleukid administration in Babylonia and Ptolemaic administration in Egypt, suggestive of cross-fertilisation between the two Hellenistic powers. This study is important because scant information survives about the daily realities of Seleukid control from anywhere in the empire, and very little on Seleukid rule in Babylonia. Fully exploiting these initially unpromising sources helps to fill an important gap in our knowledge, and enables broader comparisons of imperial structures between the Seleukid, Ptolemaic and Achaemenid empires.

This thesis explores the idea of Englishness in the context of a social movement that lasted from 1920 to 1951, known as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and later, the Green Shirts and Social Credit Party. It is primarily a study of the movement’s founding leader John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982), who sheds light on the reinvention of English identity, politics and culture in interwar Britain. It surveys how Hargrave and his Kindred constructed their Englishness against the backdrop of cultural change in the 1920s, before assessing their engagement with young, likeminded national movements on the European continent. It concludes with an appraisal of Hargrave’s attempts, after he adopted the ideology of Social Credit in 1925, to translate his movement’s cultural sensibilities into a mainstream political directive, positioning it against (and at times within) contemporaneous projects elsewhere, including European fascism. Assessing these thematic treatments collectively, I argue that the Kibbo Kift was an innovative expression of Englishness that embodied a libertarian impulse to ‘decolonise’ the metropole, before turning in on itself and finally fragmenting. This study seeks specifically to interrogate cosmopolitan Englishness—a patriotic sensibility associated with the breakdown of the imperial system and premised on notions of cultural relativism. Many of its proponents have posited it as a means of bridging class, gender and ethnic divisions at home and abroad. This concept elucidates, in the first instance, the logic of Hargrave and his followers in blending professed traditions of colonised and so-called primitive peoples with those of England’s pre-imperial past. They domesticated these elements in various ways, thereby conveying a compelling response to Britain’s perceived decline following the Great War of 1914-1918. Concurrently, the Kindred’s utopian proposals, which resonated most profoundly with the literary and artistic intelligentsia, former Suffragists and European youth movements, alluded to an alien, totalitarian quality that became more pronounced, distorted and inhibiting as the group ventured into British mass politics in the guise of the Social Credit Party. It was not merely political extremism and violence that limited the SCP’s success, however. This thesis attributes the decline of the movement to tensions inherent to its cultural politics—between intellectualism and activism, and cosmopolitanism and Englishness.

This thesis uses the Royal Navy as case study to explore the structures, values and meaning of patronage at the end of the long eighteenth century. Patronage underpinned naval promotion but it also determined where officers, seamen and dockyard workers were stationed, their access to advice and crafted their reputations. The practical need to ensure competent men received promotion reveals to us factors beyond ambition and status which shaped all eighteenth-century patronage. The physical mobility of naval men and women also meant they organised a large proportion of their patronage by letter, providing us with a wealth of epistolary evidence of its operation. The collection of Admiral John Markham’s personal and private papers, acquired by the National Maritime Museum in 2013, forms the foundations of this study. By drilling down into Markham’s relationships and correspondence, this thesis uncovers the explicit and implicit patronage which operated within individual presentations of sensibility, friendship and honour. It then expands the study outwards to include similar patterns of interaction found in the lower levels of society and between those who underplayed their participation. Patronage was essentially a mechanism of trust founded on an individual’s ability, character and connections. The tendency for eighteenth-century writers to not be explicit about their patronage has obscured its extent but this thesis demonstrates that patronage operated at all levels of society and within all forms of friendship, not just professional or political alliances. The need for connections who could facilitate patronage shaped eighteenth-century society but the way individuals distributed their favour and framed their engagement was affected by social and cultural pressures and expectations. In uncovering these deeper structures, this thesis transforms the way that we understand patronage in eighteenth-century British society and beyond.