This thesis recovers a parliamentary struggle over English taxation which erupted at the 1660 Convention parliament that welcomed Charles II back from exile. It lasted until the eve of the second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-67. At its centre lay a complex and shifting legislative initiative for preserving England’s naval transformation of the 1650s: the ‘Supply Acts’ for granting statutory taxes to support a strong and durable royal navy. Sponsored by King Charles and his parliamentary servants, this legislation met a hostile response in scribal and print publications that advanced a rival military agenda. The most prolific author of this offensive was the lawyer and intellectual Fabian Philipps. Caricatured by modern historians as an eccentric on a mad quest to restore England’s equestrian caste to its ancient glory and prestige, he has been dismissed as a feudal anachronism. This thesis situates his views within a fresh interpretive framework and a newly reconstructed historical setting, permitting us to appreciate that the final outcome of the contest over taxation had the long-term consequence of proportionately reducing the traditional discretionary violence of the caste. Through close attention to Philipps’ work in these contexts, a case study of state monopolization of violence is furnished.

The standard narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism in Latin America is one of US expansion and British informal influence. However, it was France, not Britain, which made the most concerted effort to counter US power through Louis-Napoléon's creation of an empire in Mexico under the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian. Despite its significance to French and Mexican history, this intervention is invariably described as an "illusion", an "adventure" or a "mirage". This thesis answers the question why some Mexicans believed that the survival of the nation itself depended upon French intervention, and why France sought to impose an informal-imperial model on Mexico. It does so by analysing the full context of Franco-Mexican relations from 1820 onwards: French and Mexican ideas about monarchy in Latin America; responses to US expansion and the development of anti-Americanism and pan-Latinism; the consolidation of Mexican conservatism and the French Second Empire's influence as a political paradigm; and, finally, the collaboration of some Mexican elites with French imperialism. This thesis draws upon French, Mexican, British and US sources, especially diplomatic dispatches, periodicals and published works. The approach challenges the separation between intellectual history and international history. By going beyond the conventional history of ideas focus on 'canonical' texts, it seeks to identify the extent to which currents of thought normally considered to be the preserve of well-known intellectuals and politicians were part of a wider political culture that influenced French policy in Mexico, and shaped the contours of Mexican political discourse. An important dimension of the relationship between Mexico and France was the transatlantic and transnational context in which it developed, where competing conceptions of Mexico and France as nations, the role of Europe and the United States in the Americas and the idea of Latin America itself were challenged and debated.

What role do concepts of the thinking and feeling self play in the processes of imperial rule? How do individuals within empire manage and subvert the government of the self the ecumenical power demands? I address these questions through an exploration of the inner theatre of operations of the Assyrian Empire, which dominated the Middle East in the early first millennium BC from its capitals in North Iraq. The key sources are the state correspondence, c.4,000 letters on clay tablets, written in the Semitic Akkadian language in the cuneiform script. They provide a window into the everyday practice of empire, supplemented by royal inscriptions on clay and stone. These texts have recently been edited and published in high quality interactive scholarly editions online. In the first part of the thesis, I propose the concept of an 'intentional loop' traversing the interior and exterior world. I explore the concepts of ṭemu 'thought, intention, order, news' and libbu 'interior,' which linked these worlds. Ṭemu, a thought traversing the libbu, unfolded through language and action, manifesting events which looped around into further thought and action. I then analyse techniques used by the Assyrians to shape the interiorities of subjects to satisfy the demands posed by these concepts, using the material to interrogate theories of governmentality and biopolitics. The second part of the thesis explores how subjects negotiated this regime of interiority through language, before proceeding to explore alternative relationships defined by kinship terminology, and finally antagonistic relationships. By employing methods inspired by linguistic anthropology's application of Bakhtin's insights into dialogue and quotation, the dyadic relations explored in this section are resituated in the larger currents of imperial ideology. Thus, building on the recent work by Pongratz-Leisten and Liverani, the thesis further advances our understanding of the Assyrian imperial phenomenon.

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This thesis explores how public understandings of “everyday sex” - or the sexual practices and preferences deemed appropriate to “ordinary” men and women – were reshaped during the 1970s. Using the development of the Durex condom brand, the extension of the welfare state to include family planning services, and the enormous popularity of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex as case studies, it draws upon a wide range of sources in order to provide a critical history of Britain’s “sexual revolution” or sexual liberalisation. Overall, it argues that liberalisation was a process limited in scope, exclusionary in form and frequently chaotic in imposition. Following work on the formation and governance (or self-governance) of the “liberal” subject, and the characterisation of modern society as the “rule of freedom”, the thesis identifies attempts to define a strictly-bounded liberal heterosexual subject as a key development of the period. This gendered (and frequently classed) subject would freely consume sexual commodities (like Durex condoms), freely use state family planning services, and freely improve his or her sexual talents. As the thesis shows, this new freedom brought with it new pressures and new expectations, but also a new hostility towards those who did not fit the mould: the liberal heterosexual subject was positioned in opposition to a range of increasingly impermissible alternatives – the single mother or the sexually unadventurous “square”, to take two examples – gaining further definition from just who he or she was not. Challenging progressive narratives of the “revolution” on another front, the thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the liberalising process was shaped and mediated by an array of actors, not all of them motivated by “progressive” goals, as well as the many instances in which change in the sexual sphere was rooted in accident and contingency as much as careful planning.

Mexico had a fixed place in the antebellum American imagination. It was, most agreed, a failed republic whose chronic political turbulence proved the United States’ exceptional stability. The Civil War, however, shattered the notion that the United States was immune to the forces of internal dissension which had plagued Mexicans for decades. This realisation destabilised Mexico’s place in U.S. public discourse. During the 1860s, an awareness of their own fallibility caused some Americans to sympathise with their sister republic. As political factionalism persisted in the United States into the 1870s, however, a growing number of them invoked images of Mexican anarchy as portents of their own nation’s future. It was not until the early 1880s, as Americans extended their commercial reach south of the Rio Grande, that they viewed Mexico as their nation’s protégé and therefore a reflection of its resilience and strength. By tracing of images of Mexico in U.S. public discourse between 1860 and 1883, this dissertation uncovers a current of anxiety regarding what some Americans saw as a dangerous spirit of factionalism in U.S. politics during this period. Historians often view concerns about the condition of the nation’s political culture as a conservative force that fuelled opposition to the innovations of the Civil War era. This study, however, demonstrates that fears of factionalism transcended party and sectional lines. Moreover, it reveals that actors in public discourse used images of Mexico to harness these anxieties behind a range of policies - emancipation, Radical Reconstruction, and even commercial expansion were all were presented to Americans as programmes to harmonise national politics and so restore the United States to its proper standing as the exceptional New World republic. This dissertation argues that Americans could embrace some revolutionary measures, so long as they believed they could bring them lasting domestic peace.

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