In this thesis I explore the ways middle classes in two provincial cities imagined the relationship between the city and the rest of the world. How did they make sense of local identity in the light of economic, geopolitical and cultural globalisation? I examine the political cultures and social structures that sustained their ways of thinking, showing how their responses were shaped by the economic connections of the two textile cities, and were articulated in municipal cultural policy around art galleries and the opera. I follow other historians in arguing that although the nineteenth century is typically portrayed as the age of nationalism, the cultures of 'second cities' make a powerful contribution to the development of European modernity. Where I depart from other work on second cities is in my desire to work comparatively and with a transnational frame. I show that ideas about local character informed the ways provincial elites responded to globalisation around the turn of the century. In the first research chapter I discuss the composition of the middle classes in the two cities, and the institutions and practices which bound them together. In the second research chapter I discuss opera in Lille. Nineteenth century opera is traditionally seen as an important way for its patrons to promote particular ideas about national identity. In this chapter I show how it was also used to make statements about local identity, and to connect the city to the latest European trends. The third research chapter concerns the Manchester municipal art gallery. I show how municipal management was used to express ideas about local prestige and sophistication. I also show that municipal councillors looked to cities in Germany for examples of how to manage the gallery, and make it respond to local needs, which they identified with industry. In the final chapter I examine the various ways in which local elites used industry and commerce to imagine in concrete terms the relationship between the city and the globe. I show how they produced, collected and disseminated knowledge about the world through local institutions, principally the Chambers of Commerce.

The way in which people interact with machines is changing rapidly. The touch screen has become so common now that it no longer rouses amazement. It is also likely that voice control will become more ubiquitous and even the idea that individuals will be able to control common consumer technologies merely by thinking a command is no longer in the realm of science fiction. It is surprising then how little attention has been focused on the historical and cultural contexts out of which the hyper-efficient control of machines has arisen. This thesis offers to be the first cultural history of the finger-tip control of technology. Its historical context is mid-twentieth century America, a time and place in which pushbutton contrivances became common facets of life from the preparation of toast on breakfast tables to the manufacture of toasters on automated assembly lines. Looking at magazine editorials and market research reports; company memos and union newsletters; state-sponsored trade fairs and especially advertisements from the period, I examine how the mere “touch of a button” on things like TV sets, automobile dashboards and elevator cars could be understood as the exemplary means of task execution and enhancement of human potential, and how the moment of user interaction with machines could be charged with significance and stand for a cluster of postwar American life-ways with freedom, effortlessness, comfort and convenience as ideals. With the understanding that mid-century affluence was often shadowed by anxiety though, I also draw attention to “pushbutton living’s” discontents. Detractors of the pushbutton equated finger-tip convenience with cultural decadence. Instead of empowering users, the finger-tip simplicity of some technologies were said to activate laziness and erode personal agency. I also discuss the unintended consequences that came with pushbutton ease: appliances might be on when assumed to be off, and in the worst case the very existence of the “American way of life” could vanish in a “pushbutton war.” Most importantly though, through case studies in three environments - the home, the automobile, and the workplace - I highlight ways that the finger-tip actuation of machines could have a bearing on social relations.

The colonisation of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 marked the beginning of permanent English settlement in North America. This history of colonisation in Virginia has traditionally been told from the perspective of settlers in the Jamestown fort, or Virginia Company investors who were embroiled in faction. In contrast, historians have rarely engaged with how colonisation in Virginia interconnected with English society more broadly, including the impact that colonisation had on the cultural and political landscape of early modern England. This thesis explores this significant reciprocal component of colonisation, drawing on a wider range of historical actors and issues to explore how colonisation shaped contemporary English society. To do this, this study adopts the concept of commonwealth as the key lens of analysis, as it framed how individuals across the English Atlantic world responded to colonisation: investment in the colony, transatlantic transportation and trade, as well as representations of Virginia in letters, print and on stage, were articulated in terms of commonwealth. This approach tests the claim that the motivation for colonisation in Virginia was ‘trade and plunder’, by considering the wider social and political context of overseas expansion; however, it also offers a new interpretation of how people across the social spectrum in English society experienced and responded to colonisation in Virginia. Thus, the thesis offers a new interpretation of colonisation as it shaped English society, politics and culture in the early seventeenth century.

This thesis explores how Parliament’s policy towards English Catholics changed during the English Revolution by examining their experiences of the sequestration and compounding system. Before 1642, sequestration and compounding had been used as a penalty against recusants to raise revenue for Charles I’s Personal Rule for nonchurch attendance. Parliament intended the new sequestration process to be a temporary solution as a consequence of the war, and originally targeted both religious and political enemies. By 1650, sequestration was used by Parliament as a method to punish political enemies, and throughout the Interregnum, Parliament continued to adapt the legislation as a consequence of the current political environment. Petitioners needed to equip themselves with information on how to compound for their estates. Catholic petitioners had to establish how they were to encounter the new legislation, and most crucially, provide substantial evidence to successfully compound for their estates. It is shown that Catholics were able to access guidance on how to manoeuvre themselves through the sequestration and compounding process through official and popular printed material, which influenced the tactics they used in their compounding petitions. Catholics actively sought to have their sequestration discharged by providing evidence of their loyalty to Parliament and to their country. Crucially, Catholic petitioners were able to utilise their networks with influential Protestants who had wider political connections. Through these networks, it is revealed that moderate politicians were conciliatory towards Catholics of social privilege, and, that Catholics were integrated with Protestants throughout this period. This thesis, therefore, establishes that English Catholics were not the primary focus of sequestration during the English Revolution, and, in fact, were able to integrate and play a part of local and national society.

This thesis explores the relationship between gender, property and power in the context of British slave-ownership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, working to unpick the categories of slave-owner, ‘West Indian’ and absentee. It demonstrates how both men and women played crucial roles as transmitters of West Indian property, acting as conduits who helped to facilitate the transmission of slave-based wealth into metropolitan society. The heart of the thesis is an analysis of qualitative material. It uses Barbadian slave-owner Thomas Lane as a lens through which to interrogate the complicated relationship between absentee slave-ownership and masculinity, exploring how male absentees, unlike many of their literary counterparts, were able to conceive and present themselves as both slave-owners and gentlemen. But it places a particular focus on female absentees, examining the mediations and constraints that these women faced, while also highlighting the ways in which they were able to carve a place for themselves within these always restricted parameters. Looking at Jamaican slave-holder Anna Eliza Grenville, it examines the ways she negotiated her position as a married woman and substantial property owner, as well as situating her slave-ownership within her broader social, political and imperial worlds. Indeed, nearly a quarter of absentees who claimed compensation following the abolition of slavery in 1834 were women. Using the records of the Slave Compensation Commission the thesis examines, where possible, how the most substantial female slave-owners became claimants and how they bequeathed the Caribbean property they owned or compensation they received. Absentee slave-owners were a large and diverse range of people. This thesis demonstrates just some of the many ways that these absentees, male and female, worked to bring slave-ownership ‘home’ to metropolitan Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Since the 1980s, there have been myriad debates, both inside and outside of academia, on whether the ‘boom’ in representations of sexualised nudity in the wake of the so-­‐called sexual revolution should be understood as a force of progress and sexual liberation, or as a form of continued repression and exploitation of women. Although these debates often focus upon female nude models, framing them either as sexually liberated women or victims, the voices of the women central to these debates remain largely unheard. This new study interrogates the oral histories of ten women who appeared in the North-­‐ American magazine Playboy between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. Their accounts make it clear that scholars have to transcend the dyadic opposition between victimhood and free agency in regard to representations of sexualised nudity and nude modelling. Moreover, by untangling the complex workings of the power dynamics within the field of nude modelling and the interviewees’ attempts at navigating this field, it examines the contours of power, inequality and conflict in the social reality of posing nude within a market of sexualised nudity, all the while taking into consideration instances of agency and resistance. By investigating the experiences of female nude models, this study offers a unique perspective on the post-­‐1960s ‘boom’ in the commercialisation of sex. Its results support the understanding that the history of sexuality has to be investigated as an entangled history of class difference and power dynamics along the hierarchical male/female divide of a still unequal gender order. A change of perspective in law concerning the choices, rights and problems of models in the business of female nude modelling will be only a first, but necessary step of improvement in the navigation of a complex and uneven power field.

The public burial of the war dead in Classical Athens has traditionally been a subject of much scholarly interest. Although the origins of the procedures described by Thucydides as patrios nomos are still a matter of some debate, far less attention has been devoted to the Athenian war dead of the Archaic period. This thesis aims to redress this balance, looking at the practice of war burials in early Athens, through a range of evidence including mythology, archaeology and art. The thesis begins with a study of the Homeric epics, which provide our richest source for the early treatment of the war dead. The poems reveal a highly stratified society divided between the elites and the masses, where social status was strictly delineated by the postmortem fate of the fallen. Chapter 2 focuses on early Greek mythological traditions concerning burial truces and the mutilation of the dead. It is suggested that the major change implicit in these stories towards the end of the Archaic period can be aligned with wider ideological shifts in the perception of the dead in Athens and elsewhere. The iconographical and archaeological evidence forms the subject of Chapter 3, which looks at artistic depictions on vases and funerary monuments in early Athens. The fate of the war dead, it is argued, was fundamentally defined by the highly elitist mentality which influenced the contemporary practice of war. Finally, Chapter 4 sets these conclusions in the context of Athenian political history, tracing the social and institutional developments of the citizen army up to the reforms of Cleisthenes. The treatment of the war dead, it is concluded, provides important insights into the nature and composition of Archaic Athenian armies, illuminating a number of social and cultural shifts which transformed Athens towards the end of the sixth century BC.

This thesis focuses on the Jamaican and English history of the Dawkins’ and explores the relationship between their slave-owning activities and their subsequent entrance into the metropole’s landed ranks. It demonstrates how one particular family were able to establish themselves as wealthy sugar planters on one side of the Atlantic, whilst its later generations migrated to England and drew upon the West Indian fortune to transform themselves into members of elite county society during the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuries. Central to this thesis is an analysis of the Dawkins’ Jamaican plantation papers and their English estate records. It traces their colonial land building activities from the earliest days of their settlement on the island, during the mid-seventeenth-century, in an effort to understand how the foundations of their wealth were established by the first two generations of the family. By the middle of the eighteenth-century they had amassed a fortune large enough to allow the third generation to become absentees. The scene shifts from Jamaica to England where the family, headed by Henry Dawkins II, focussed on becoming part of Britain’s provincial elite after migrating to the metropole in the late 1750s. They engaged in a number of undertakings strategically designed to facilitate this blending which are explored across four chapters. These include the construction and development of country estates, marriage into established landed families, the acquisition of political office, and the re-crafting of their image to that of a refined genteel family. The examination of these undertakings sheds light on the different areas into which colonial fortunes spilled over as the profits from the Dawkins’ slave-based enterprise “came home”.

This thesis examines Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) influence on how a number of Spanish novelists have written about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) in the last seventy years. It seeks to demonstrate that a familiarity and engagement with À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) were instrumental in the genesis of some of the most significant milestones in Spanish literature since the civil war: Nada (1945) by Carmen Laforet; Señas de identidad (1966) by Juan Goytisolo; Volverás a Región (1967) and Una meditación (1970) by Juan Benet; El cuarto de atrás (1978) by Carmen Martín Gaite; Sefarad (2001) by Antonio Muñoz Molina; and Tu rostro mañana (2002-07) by Javier Marías. The thesis argues that an awareness of how Proustian themes and techniques are used by these Spanish authors enhances our understanding of the function of memory and literary creation in their work. It argues, moreover, that an appreciation of Proust’s pervasive influence on Spanish memory writing obliges a reexamination of certain shibboleths in Spanish cultural history. The thesis seeks to correct the misconception that Franco’s regime maintained a rigid stranglehold on imported culture that stunted the development of Spanish literature by preventing Spaniards from reading works considered an affront to National-Catholic sensibilities and by isolating Spain from narrative developments elsewhere in Europe following the Second World War. Furthermore, the thesis challenges the notion that Spanish authors’ treatment of their country’s past, their seemingly inescapable impulse to return generation after generation to the disturbing history of the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship, is a manifestation of first-hand or inherited trauma.

My PhD thesis explores a nationalist movement from the Northern United States known as ‘Young America’; a group of Jacksonian politicians and writers associated with a publication based in New York City called the Democratic Review. I argue that their political ideology was defined by a new – more cosmopolitan – conception of American nationalism; one based on the idea that ‘popular sovereignty’ at the local level was a ‘natural law,’ or universal right, which would thrive in the absence of government intervention, whether by federal authority in the United States, or the imperial powers of Europe. This central belief shaped four aspects of the ‘Young Americans’ worldview. Firstly, they assigned the federal government a very limited domestic role, promoting states’ rights and free trade. Secondly, they advanced an interventionist foreign policy to defend universal rights beyond American borders. Thirdly, they championed intellectuals as the supreme arbiters of a ‘natural order’ discernible only through reason. Finally, ‘Young Americans’ believed that the ‘natural laws,’ which formed the bedrock of a democratic society, degraded the black race whilst they uplifted the white. However, this view did not translate into a purely pro or anti-slavery stance. Rather, ‘Young Americans’ made a white supremacist case for popular sovereignty and free labor, which called for the extermination or deportation of blacks to tropical regions. Although the movement was ultimately divided between the Democratic and Republican parties, their advocacy of Jacksonian nationalism continued to shape their conflicting views on the sectional crisis. Thus, my thesis highlights the continuing importance of Jacksonian ideology during a decade usually defined in terms of ‘sectional’ tensions over slavery. In the process, it shows that concepts like ‘natural law’ and social progress had wider - and more unexpected - meanings for antebellum Americans than historians have appreciated so far.