This thesis re-evaluates Edmund Burke’s (1730-1797) image of America by focusing on the place of colonial America in his early thought and pre-parliamentary writings. In so doing, it considers Burke’s relationship to the humanist tradition, offers an appraisal of Burke’s historicism, and seeks to describe the nature of his place within the Age of Enlightenment. Burke’s interest in the British North American colonies emerged well before his rise to prominence as a Member of Parliament in the mid-1760s. Behind Burke’s later partisan speeches was a capacious understanding of America as a European frontier with a colonial experience that also included the Spanish and the French, native inhabitants and imported slaves. His early writings are an important example of the manner in which eighteenth-century thinkers perceived that in heretofore unknown peoples and civilisations there existed an opportunity for historic comparison, as well as for working out the complex implications of particularity and universality. They suggest a way in which “the reception of America”, according to David Armitage, by figures like Burke can help us to see “what uses America had within earlier intellectual projects and to what extent America shaped their distinctive features”. This thesis is foremost an attempt to explore the ways in which America provided the young Burke with material that enlarged his mental horizons and fashioned his distinctive historical and political thought. Finally, the thesis seeks to make scholarly contributions to studies on the place of America in the European consciousness and to the concept of Atlantic History.

This dissertation surveys the constitutional evolution of the Canadian governor general’s role between 1847 and 1878. It analyses incidents in the terms of five consecutive governors general—Elgin, Sir Edmund Head, Monch, Lisgar, and Dufferin—and explores how each interpreted his loosely-defined role. While Confederation in 1867 is usually seen as the watershed in Canadian constitutional history, its effect on the viceregal role was limited. The most profound change—the transition to responsible government—had already occurred in 1848. After 1848 it was understood that in internal matters the governor general would follow the advice of his Canadian ministers. Elgin played a key role in putting this new experiment in colonial policy into practice. The advent of self-government for Canada did not mean that the governor general became insignificant, however. The governor retained a role as guardian of the constitution, and the prerogative of refusal of assent to ministerial advice still existed, even if it was infrequently invoked. Elgin, Head, Monck and Dufferin all encountered situations in which at least some political observers believed such refusal would be warranted. In the event, only Head exercised this prerogative. In the formative years of Canadian party politics, the viceregal office afforded an opportunity to exercise informal leadership. Monck in particular played a much-underestimated role in helping to negotiate alliances among political antagonists. Lisgar, by far the most politically seasoned of the five incumbents, paradoxically presided over a stable ministry during his entire term of office. His comparative inactivity in the political realm has led historians to dismiss him as indolent. Lisgar was involved, however, in behind-the-scenes negotiations leading to the 1871 Treaty of Washington. Canadian disappointment over the terms of the treaty, combined with the absence of any archival collection detailing Lisgar’s activities, has unfairly cast Lisgar as a historical scapegoat. The study ends with the drafting of a permanent set of permanent set of Letters Patent and Instructions for the governor general in 1878, a constitutional milestone that has been largely overlooked in Canadian historiography. This initiative on the part of Canada’s Liberal minister of justice, Edward Blake, to more clearly spell out the limits of the governor general’s role was spurred in large measure by Dufferin’s intrusiveness. Throughout this formative period, the evolution of the viceregal role was influenced both by circumstance and the character of the individual office holders.

The first contact of Andean culture with the Christian faith took place over 450 years ago in 1532. One hundred and thirty years later, around 1660, there was the tacit assumption that the Church was established in the Andean region. In its evangelisation of the region the Church opted to use the vernacular languages, of which Quechua, the language of administration of the Inca empire, was predominant. The thesis examines the Church's appropriation and use of the Quechua language, and the resultant appropriation of the Christian faith by the Andean people in terms of their total understanding of reality, in which language, semantic categories and spatial concepts played a key role. After exploring in chapter one the nature of the culture clash involved as a result of the Conquest, the Spanish and Inca language policies are examined in chapter two. This is followed by a consideration in chapter three of the Church's option for the vernacular and its outworking in the Third Lima Council of 1582-3. Chapter four analyses the life of the emerging colonial Church in the setting of the Indian parish, especially religious texts, and raises the issues surrounding the ambivalent role played by the indigenous language. The contours of the indigenous response are traced in chapter 5, prior to a concluding chapter which summarises the subversive role of the vernacular with regard to the Church's orthodoxy. It also points to its effect on Andean cultural history. In conclusion questions are raised of the implications of this for our understanding of past and present in the Andes, for the expression of the Church's view of indigenous religion, and ultimately of the relationship of truth and freedom.

This thesis analyses the development of the ideas and theories of Oliveira Viana (1883-1951) and Roberto Simonsen (1889-1948), placing them in their historical context and showing how they illuminated and influenced contemporary trends in Brazilian thought and governmental policy, with particular emphasis on the social legislation passed by the Vargas regime between 1930 and 1945. The two theorists are characterised as progressive conservatives, since they aimed to preserve the existing hierarchical structure of society by adopting new, progressive methods. Both men advocated increasing the role of the state: Viana was particularly influential in the early 1930s in the area of political theory and institutional reform, whilst Simonsen, as an early proponent of economic development, came into his own in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the Estado Novo turned tentatively towards a policy of industrialisation. The Introduction gives a brief outline of Brazil's political and economic history up to 1945 and the intellectual currents of the 1910s and 1920s. Chapters 1 to 3 analyse Oliveira Viana's position as a social scientist and a political theorist, including an account of his critique of liberal democracy and its workings in Brazil, and his practical suggestions for political reform. Chapter 4 discusses the conservative motives which underlay Vargas's adoption of a policy of social legislation. Chapter 5 describes the evolution of Roberto Simonsen's ideas, showing how his theories on economic development were presented as a response to social unrest, while Chapter 6 analyses the development of his ideas on the need for industrialisation to serve the home market and the difficulties which he faced in having them accepted as official policy. Chapter 7 deals with Viana's ideas on the social question during his period as juridical consultant of the Ministry of Labour (1932- 1940), and the policy which he and other functionaries evolved towards Brazil's syndical structure. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 then give an account of the direct impact of Viana and Simonsen on three specific areas of social policy: the Labour Justice law and the reform of the syndical legislation in 1938-40, the minimum wage and industrial training. Finally, Chapters 11 and 12 describe Simonsen's ideas on economic planning and American aid.

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This Ph.D. thesis examines United States political intelligence in regard to the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlvai, the Shah of Iran, the accuracy of this intelligence, and it's influence on American policy from 1950-1979. Based on archival material, declassified documents, and interviews with relevant personalities, this thesis seeks to chronicle nearly three decades of intelligence analysis on the factors governing political stability in Iran, and establish the veracity of this analysis vis-à-vis the historical record. In the early 1950s, American intelligence operatives contributed to the overthrow of the nationalist government in Iran headed by Dr. Muhammad Musaddiq, and the restoration to a position of authority of the Shah. In its exploration of the motives behind the 1953 covert political intervention to unseat Musaddiq, the thesis finds that the Eisenhower administration acted out of a set of Cold War priorities that included the need to maintain cohesion in the Anglo-American special relationship and fears of Iranian neutrality. In doing so, the United States gained a pliant ally, but one who's power base was tenuous. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, intelligence analysts concluded that, in the absence of significant economic and political reform, the Shah's regime had become so unstable as to virtually guarantee revolutionarily change. Acting on a broad consensus among the intelligence community about the regime's weaknesses, the Kennedy administration sought to bolster the government with limited financial and political support while encouraging reform. American pressure on this front led the Shah, in 1963, to announce the "White Revolution", a six point program for reform designed to shift the monarch's base of support from the traditional ruling elite to the lower classes. While American policymakers viewed to program as a progressive step forward, intelligence analysts were included to view the reforms as ill-conceived and designed largely to consolidate power in the hands of the Shah.

This thesis is about Newfoundland, Canada. It concerns the ways in which Newfoundland and its people have been authored by visiting strangers. The problem of authorship is situated within an ethnographic reflection on the politics of identity and resource management in rural Newfoundland. This politics is dominated the rhetoric of development and underdevelopment. According to this rhetoric, Newfoundland is backward, and the job of government is to facilitate the region’s progress. It is argued that the contemporary concern with Newfoundland’s progress may be considered as a form of writing. The issue is, then, not how Newfoundland came to be underdeveloped, but how Newfoundland came to be authored as underdeveloped. It is the exploration of the history of the writing of Newfoundland that forms the core of this thesis. This exploration is, in the Foucaudian sense, archaeological. Through a reading of travelogues published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an account is given of the ways in which visitors have created a knowledge of Newfoundland, and the epistemes of vision and representation that have constituted the possibility of that knowledge. This archaeology of the inscription of Newfoundland is organized into four sections, which are distinguished both chronologically and thematically. The first, concerns the expeditions of “scientific” explores of the late eighteenth century. Placing their accounts in the context of the emergence of empiricism and rationalism, it is shown that their visits represent a radically new approach to the authorship of Newfoundland, one which centred around the observing eye of enlightened traveller. The second discusses the writings of geologists who traversed Newfoundland in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The focus of this discussion is the aesthetics of time and how ideas of the primitive informed the envisioning of the landscape of Newfoundland. The third section examines how the idea of the wilderness was extended to the constitution of the Newfoundland “other” as a degraded European subject. Particular reference is made to the writings of missionaries and to their concern with the regulation of desire as a cultivation of the wilderness within. The fourth and final section addresses the authoring of Newfoundland from a nativist perspective in the later half of the nineteenth century.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.