This dissertation seeks to consider the colonial experiences of Britain in Ireland and India in a comparative context – to contrast their encounters with, and explorations of, early modern Ireland with the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian subcontinent. The early experience in Ireland helped shape the developing British belief in their own superiority, leading them to draw distinctions between themselves and other peoples. This laid the groundwork for later endeavours, notably in India. While separated by time and space, these British colonial experiences shared several important characteristics. Early modern Ireland provided the British with important guidelines and models for behaviour, many of which were later adopted in India. The manipulation of history in Ireland, the description of the Gaelic Irish in travel accounts and the application of the law as a tool of reform all provided valuable patterns for the ways in which the British structured their later empire in India.

The Paternalistic employment relations practice was in existence in most areas now known as Nigeria before the advent of the British colonialists (Ubeku, 1993).The British colonialists replaced the Nigerian Paternalistic employment relations system with their Voluntarist employment relations system. This was done without any considerations for the differences in the socio-cultural realties of Britain and Nigeria and the differences in the socio-cultural realities of the various ethnic groups that were merged to become Nigeria. This thesis however demonstrates the importance of socio-cultural factors in the transfer. The Nigerian Paternalistic employment relations practice was based on the predominantly agricultural economy, culture and traditions which formed the basis for systems of work and reward while the British Voluntarist employment relations practice was developed based on the prevailing social, political and economic philosophy at the period of industrial revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain. This was that of lasisez-faire, with respect for individual liberty based on the Benthamite utilitarian principle (Yesufu, 1982:31; Florence, 1957:184). As there are very few studies (if any) on comparative employment relations practice between the developed countries of the world and the developing African countries; this study relying on secondary sources of data collection and the case study methodology identified a close relationship between culture and employment relations practice in particular and management practices in general. The study concludes that it is very problematic if not impossible to device a template of employment relations practice and other management practices in one cultural area and transfer to another cultural area or areas.

“In Between Places” is a study in literary geography at the end of empire. It begins from the premise that decolonization itself is a question of place and the relationship of people to places. From this premise, the dissertation explores the narrative techniques that emerge from this moment of historical transformation, in which decolonization was inevitable but not yet fully achieved. The formal elements of decolonial fiction—an emphasis on the individual transformation of place, the incorporation of narrative settings both temporary and fragile—express the ways that spatial relations were central to the political aims of late colonial and early postcolonial writers from across the globe and who express a range of complicated cultural politics. This dissertation begins with an introduction that situates British decolonial fiction in terms of theories of space and place, the transition between modernism and postcolonialism, and current critical debates surrounding forms of anticolonial critique in the twentieth century. In the subsequent four chapters, the dissertation provides case studies of the narrative fiction of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Doris Lessing. Combining formal analysis, archival research, and literary and political history, this dissertation reconstructs the ways that colonial and postcolonial subjects respond to the places they inhabit—at the level of the room, the house, and the city. To tell this story, the chapters move from the abstract space of geopolitics to different sites within urban environments and domestic households. “In Between Places” explains how place functions aesthetically and politically; how Caribbean, African, and English sites were physically marked by colonialism; and how midcentury writers of decolonization used literary setting to resist myths of imperial belonging as well as to uphold them.