This thesis presents a unique exploration of societal vulnerability to climate variability through an analysis of the historical climatology of colonial western India between 1780 and 1860. It utilises a range of historical documentary sources, most notably English language newspapers alongside materials written by officials of the British East India Company and British and American missionaries. Information from these sources is used to reconstruct past rainfall variability, with the resulting climatic chronology used as a backdrop against which to examine societal responses to climate. The study adopts a content analysis methodology to reconstruct monsoon intensity from 1780-1860. This is calibrated against the instrumental rainfall record for western India, which extends back to 1847. The reconstruction therefore represents a 67-year extension of the monsoon record for western India. The extended chronology is compared with existing reconstructions of climatic forcings related to monsoon rainfall, including the strength of the Somali jet and indices of El Nino Southern Oscillation. These suggest a stationarity in the relationship between these forcings and monsoon rainfall during and after the study period, indicating that the reconstruction methodology is robust. The analysis of societal vulnerability to climate focuses upon severe drought episodes identified through the rainfall reconstruction. Eight such episodes are identified, all occurring where drought was widespread across the study area. Of these, five drought episodes occurred after previous years of deficient monsoon rainfall. Vulnerability at the local level appears to have been driven predominantly by indebtedness and a lack of government accountability, coupled with limited markets. Institutional adaptation policy changed significantly with the shift from Maratha to British rule in 1818 through the adoption of laissez faire drought remediation. Evidence suggests that this did not affect vulnerability significantly during the duration of the study period, as the widespread acceptance of the doctrine amongst the colonial community avoided institutional inertia. However, this may have served to increase vulnerability to droughts in the later part of the nineteenth century.

The political economy of late eighteenth warfare is a relatively under researched theme in the debates over the establishment of a colonial dispensation in South Asia. This thesis seeks to engage with the changing politics of colonial warfare over the period c. 1775-1805. It is being argued here that the ubiquitous and incessant warfare of the period was productive of a specific early colonial order. The efforts at re-ordering civilian control of the military, effectively exercised by the civilian councils at Madras and Bombay, thus provide a useful entry into contested political terrains where early colonial state formation was transacted.

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This thesis is a comparative study of three different 'crises' of British foreign rule, spanning a 150-year period: circa 1810 to 1960. Arranged into three case studies, it surveys British encounters with Thuggee in early nineteenth-century India, the Irish Volunteers in early twentieth-century Ireland, and Mau Mau in mid-twentiethcentury Kenya. Each crisis was figured as an extra-ordinary threat to state sovereignty. In turn, extra-ordinary legal measures—'states of exception'—were introduced to try to suppress those seeking to contest or exit official claims of sovereignty over their lives. The intention of this thesis is closely to examine the three suppression campaigns in India, Ireland and Kenya in order to bring greater insight to the extent to which legal exceptions were foundational for British state sovereignty abroad in this period. The thesis engages deeply with the theoretical work of two scholars (in particular) who have done much to re-think the nature of European, but not colonial, state power and social control in the post-Enlightenment period: Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. As well as situating its reconsiderations of the three crises in British India, Ireland and Kenya in the context of their theoretical insights, this thesis therefore seeks substantially to reappraise the work of Foucault and Agamben in colonial and foreign contexts. To do so, it draws on a wide range of primary material, including: parliamentary debates and papers, official correspondence, administrative reports relating to crime and policing, trial records, judicial statistics, fictional works, newspaper articles, contemporary journals and other periodicals, memoirs, diaries and private papers. The ambition is to produce a wide-ranging historical survey of the ways in which departures from the posited norms of the 'rule of law' have articulated diverse forms of state power and social control in three markedly different British-administered polities abroad, and, moreover, to assess to what extent these 'departures' can be understood as exceptional.

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This work is devoted to situating the life, ideas and work of Jayaprakash Narayan in the horizon of protest and emancipatory politics in twentieth century India. It intends to show that JP must be taken as one of the main architects and promoters of political cultures of protest in XX century India, an ensemble of practices and forces acting within and outside the realm of institutional state politics, and involving political parties, anti-statist movements and nongovernmental organizations. Despite being readily identified as a Gandhian socialist, my general argument in this dissertation is that JP´s life-long political engagement with the politics of protest and emancipation should be decoded through the logic of a political culture of protest he identified with lok niti, a formula that embraces diverse ideals, practices and political strands of opposition to the state brought together by a common aversion to and rejection of “powerpolitics” or raj niti. I will argue that Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement provided the event that created the fidelity that propelled JP into politics and that socialism was the framework through which he conceived of social transformation throughout his life. Indeed, socialism, Marxism and the ideas of Gandhi represented for JP little more than systems of interpretation that should be combined with others for the promotion of a truly revolutionary political practice of protest, which he defined as lok niti.

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