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In northern British Columbia, the Sylvester Allochthon of the Slide Mountain terrane is the most inboard of Cordilleran suspect terranes, resting as a vast klippe upon miogeoclinal strata of the Cassiar Platform. The Sylvester is oceanic; it comprises gabbro, pillowed and massive basalt, banded chert, carbonate, argillite, ultramafics and minor arenite, which range in age from Late Devonian to Late Triassic. Internal structure in the Sylvester Allochthon is characterized as a stack of innumerable interleaved tectonic slices, bounded by subhorizontal, layer-parallel faults. These lithotectonic units are an order of magnitude smaller than the terrane itself and may consist of only a single or a few repeated rock types. The internal structure of the Sylvester is complex but not chaotic; small numbers of slices occur together in larger second-order packages which are also fault-bounded and lensoidal. However, tectonic juxtaposition of unrelated lithologies and older-over-younger faults are common. The "stratigraphy" of the Sylvester assemblage is thus tectonic. Sliver-bounding faulting within the Sylvester is known to have, at least in part, predated its post-Triassic, pre-mid Cretaceous emplacement. The Sylvester was emplaced onto North America as the roof thrust to a foreland-style duplex within underlying North American strata. vii viii The Sylvester Allochthon is the most inboard of accreted terranes, however it does not represent a simple marginal basin. New microfossil dating demonstrates that most rock types occur through the complete range of Sylvester ages. Coeval but depositionally incompatable lithologies must have accumulated in separate ocean floor paleoenvironments. Lithologies of the allochthon derive almost exclusively from layer 1, only the surface of oceanic crust. Thus, Sylvester slices are telescoped remnants detached from a vast area of ocean crust which ranged in age and width through the upper Paleozoic but which is now otherwise entirely consumed. Similarities of rock type, internal structure, age range, and regional tectonic setting have identified the Sylvester Allochthon as broadly correlative with a discontinuous series of terranes extending the length of the Cordillera. Together, these terranes may represent the remnants of what was once the late Paleozoic proto-Pacific ocean floor.

Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / Burgeoning exotic consumerism in the eighteenth century supplied British consumers with an increasingly material “Orient,” which never seemed so accessible as when it could be physically consumed, in the form of exotic groceries or ingestible substances like opium. My dissertation investigates how the linguistic representation of foreign, ingestible substances – which I call “exotic ingestants” – problematizes such attempts to access or master the Orient by underscoring the gap between literary trope and material thing. In the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Moore, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and others, exotic ingestion provides a flexible figure through which British authors do not just imagine the Orient, but also critically diagnose the ways in which that Orient functions as a cipher for domestic fears and fantasies. Their texts self-consciously highlight how both consumer practices and discursive representations fetishize, appropriate, or otherwise distort the Oriental “other” in question. A self-reflexive discursive mode, however, does not imply a consistently anti-imperial agenda. The authors in this study interrogate cultural binaries for a range of purposes, but what does remain consistent is that they do so in order to construct, renovate, or re-imagine their own sense of self. Going beyond the models of contamination or domestication that critics usually deploy when considering cultural representations of opium and tea, I investigate scenes of exotic ingestion as dynamic sites of identity formation, where British authors negotiate their national and transnational subjectivities by consciously engaging with constructions of cultural otherness. Each chapter compares two authors to spotlight one distinctive mode of cross-cultural imagination, and the way it plays out through figurations of exotic ingestion. Together, the four chapters trace a historical trajectory. The evolving scene of exotic ingestion offers an exemplary window into Britain’s construction of its own imperial identity, which develops in response to historical events such as the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, the 1851 Great Exhibition, and the Opium Wars with China. The prominently consumerist mode of British imaginations of China explains that rival empire’s particular, though not exclusive, significance to this project. Treating China as a case study but contextualizing it within both Sino-British relations and the Orientalist discursive tradition that emerged out of Britain’s reception of the Arabian Nights, this dissertation contributes to ongoing efforts at relocating British consciousness at the intersection of national, imperial, and global discourses and practices.

This thesis looks at five case studies of attempted co-operation between British political parties. The objective is two-fold: to provide an explanatory framework to better understand instances of potential cooperation within the institutional context of British politics, and to build analytical narratives that shed light on the inter- and intra-party dynamics when co-operation between parties has been mooted in Westminster. It addresses a lacuna in the study of British Politics by providing a temporal comparison of understudied examples of attempted co-operation. This comparison inductively draws out what lessons can be learnt about why co-operation is attempted, and the factors that inhibit it. This framework suggests that these examples of mooted co-operation constitute disruptions of the majoritarian norms which inform the British Political Tradition. It does so through a historical institutionalist lens: the cultural norms of Westminster provide a strategic context, but elite political agents strategically interact with this institutional environment. This tradition is manifested through intra-party pressure against co-operation, and a belief that co-operation is electorally disadvantageous. Equally, actors' interpretation of what is possible or desirable within the perceived constraints of Westminster party politics really matters. This suggests a role for situated agency and strategic leadership, captured through the concept of a disruption/defence of existing institutional equilibrium derived from heresthetics. This thesis contends that the discourse around co-operation holds a rhetorical and performative purpose beyond the success or failure of formal co-operation. Institutional context and memory create incentives for actors to either accentuate or downplay the effect of co-operation, but do not determine the shape and aims of cooperation. As a result, both culture and calculus are all-important to inter-party co-operation.

One of the central challenges in modern British historiography is the reconciliation of narratives about the nature and meaning of the British Empire with older themes of class and hierarchy. The historiographical shift to empire and away from class since the 1980s and 1990s coincided with a fundamental shift in Britain's social structure and composition, which itself demands historical explanation. The history of the British honours system - an institution that has blended ideas of class hierarchy with meritocracy and service - can reveal much about social change in twentieth century Britain and its empire. Using a mixture of official and unofficial sources and organized chronologically, my dissertation charts the history of the honours system from the creation of the Order of the British Empire in 1917 to a major set of reforms at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Honours were an active tool of policy and social distinction. Government decisions about who should receive honours and what honours they should receive reveal the importance of different kinds of service and the social class of the individual to be honored. Applied across the whole empire, the system had a double edge: it produced loyalty and kept different social groups in their place. The ever-presence of the institution means that it gives us a consistent benchmark across the twentieth century for what kinds of service was seen as most in need of recognition at different times by the state. The creation of the Order of the British Empire in 1917 opened up the honours system to non-elites, women and a much larger proportion of imperial subjects for the first time, and vastly expanded the number of people who received honours. I argue that change in the honours system during the twentieth century was not a simple matter of linear `democratization', as it is usually portrayed in the British media and by the modern British monarchy and government. Instead, it reflected different priorities at different times. In the empire, the state used honours to buy loyalty from subjects in exchange for social and cultural distinction; however, its symbolism was also appropriated positively and negatively by different groups to make political claims on or against the imperial state. Changes in who got what honours almost always had a specific purpose, and were often rapid. Initially conceived as a way of rewarding voluntary war work, in peacetime the Order of the British Empire was reworked to become an honour where the majority of awards went to paid central state servants. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in which government experts were well-rewarded with honours, politicians and bureaucrats made an effort to distribute honours more widely around the community. Teachers, health workers and other providers of local services benefitted from this change, as the honours system within Britain expanded almost in direct correlation to its shrinking global influence as the British Empire fragmented. At the end of the century, John Major's Conservative government made a deliberate decision to focus once again on voluntary service to the state. This uncontroversial shift in focus helped to bring together two of the functions of the modern British monarchy: its role since the nineteenth century as the official leader of the voluntary sector, and its function as the authenticator of public recognition through the honours system. This theoretically `classless' reform to the honours system reinforced existing divisions in British society by distinguishing between lower-ranked voluntary work and high-ranked professional, philanthropic and celebrity service. There was no clear-cut distinction between merit and hierarchy in the honours system. As a result, in periods of major social change in twentieth-century Britain, honours had an active role in reshaping social hierarchies in Britain and in parts of the empire/former empire. Honours obfuscated the meaning of distinction in modern Britain through the system's connection to the monarchy and its broad use as a political, imperial and social tool. A complicated and entangled combination of personality, status, merit, peer review and luck determined who received what honours. As a result, Britain's premier system for publicly recognizing service and distinguishing status could never fully differentiate between these two functions. In part this was because those who ran it did not desire to separate hierarchy from distinguished service, and because such separation was effectively impossible within existing frameworks. Citizens, subjects, interest groups and post-colonial governments used honours to challenge political and social structures, but it was difficult to break out of the fundamental framework in which honours gave distinction and status in exchange for a performance of loyalty to the Crown. The only escape was the complete rejection of the system, which was a rare choice except in certain parts of the former empire.

Between 1660 and 1720 the British American empire expanded to incorporate new settlements, new trade routes, and it occupied a growing place in the British export economy. This expansion created challenges in transoceanic navigation and understanding of local geography, particularly as ambitions to trade in new markets in Spanish America gained traction. Mariners, merchants, scientists and policymakers required useful knowledge to enable their voyages and imperial activities. To meet this growing demand, print artisans in London produced an increasing amount of printed geographical information in the form of maps, charts and geographical texts. Draftsmen, engravers and printers applied their skill and labour to produce 179 maps and charts of the British Americas, and these artisans in turn benefitted from the income supplied by consumers. The increasing valorisation of empiricism and eyewitness knowledge resulting from the 'scientific revolution' also informed the inclusion of useful and practical information on maps and charts, and publishers asserted their credentials in claims to accuracy and novelty. Crown-sponsored voyages, buccaneers and chartered companies supplied eyewitness information from the Spanish Pacific and Caribbean, although the quality of information varied depending on the voyage itineraries and priorities. The growth of this market for maps and charts of the Americas highlights how the economic and territorial exploitation inherent to British empire was partly enabled by artisans living thousands of miles from colonial spaces. It further demonstrates the pivotal role of empire in Britain's long-term economic growth, and highlights that useful knowledge was central not peripheral to early modern socio-economic development.

Thesis ed., 1930, has title: The English traveller and the new science, 1660-1732. / "A Bison book." Bibliography: p. [161]-173.

This thesis provides empirical evidence to assess the long term contribution of the B.C. forest industry to the provincial economy. Estimates of resource rent are constructed to measure the direct contribution of the resource to provincial income and growth. Measures of rent are constructed for a firm level sample (1906-76) and at an industry level (1918-92). The figures for rent are used to generate estimates of the share of provincial income measures directly attributable to the industrial exploitation of the province's forests. While there were periods during which the direct contribution to provincial income and its growth was nontrivial, in general the growth of forest industry rent did not drive overall economic growth but rather lagged behind. Rent was low on average and volatile during the years before W.W.II, rose rapidly from roughly 1940-51, then declined unevenly. To investigate the forces which underlie both the broad trends and the variability in rent, a stylized model of the forest industry is applied in an empirical analysis. Broad changes in aggregate rent were the result of changes in rent per unit of B.C. timber. The rapid increase in rent coincided with a marked rise in the price of forest products. The secular decline resulted from the combination of a falling output price and rising costs. An investigation of real harvesting costs indicates that depletion played a role in this increase. The variability of rent is also explored and found to be most strongly influenced by factors reflecting market risk which the B.C. industry could not diversity away from. The rent measures may not capture the full impact of the forest industry, so the industry's potential role as a leading export sector is also examined. The possibility of a stable long term link between forest exports and provincial income is investigated using cointegration tests. B.C. forest exports and G.D.P. are not cointegrated; their levels axe not linked in a deterministic way in the long run. A bivariate VAR, is used to examine the short run interaction between the growth of forest exports and provincial G.D.P. The results do not strongly support the view that the forest industry acts as a leading export sector in the provincial economy.