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Between 1842 and 1857, British interactions with the Qing Empire shaped and informed the development of British liberal attitudes. However, amid the widespread historiography devoted to uncovering international influences on British liberalism during this period, the impact of the Anglo-Chinese relationship remains a footnote. Instead, focus is given to how Europe, America and the British Empire assisted in the advancement of British politics and liberal thought. This thesis redresses this oversight – showing how Anglo-Chinese frictions in the mid-nineteenth century brought into question British notions of free trade, international law, diplomatic standards and non-intervention. Britain’s determination to improve its trading network in China matched by the Qing’s refusal to allow further Western expansion, informed British liberal debate and shaped political attitudes. Most notably, it resulted in Sir John Bowring, the former Foreign Secretary of the London Peace Society, ordering the military bombardment of the port of Canton in late 1856. The bombardment – which resulted in the second Anglo-Chinese conflict (1856-1860) – is well-documented by historians. However, the development of Bowring’s political convictions, which provided an ideological justification for war, has been overlooked. This thesis uncovers how interactions with China forced Bowring and the British expatriate community more generally to reconsider the meaning of free trade, the boundaries of international law and their commitment to non-intervention. In addition, it shows how Bowring’s actions resulted in a heated debate that captured the attention of Britain’s political elite and, through the General Election of 1857, the British public more generally. As a result, it facilitated an open and vibrant debate that queried whether, to secure British trade, military intervention could be deemed an acceptable diplomatic method – a discussion that forced the development of the nation’s liberal attitudes. This thesis tackles two relatively distinct areas of historical research that rarely interact. First, it sheds new light on the scholarship that has examined foreign influences on the development of British liberal ideas in the mid-nineteenth century. It shows that through an investigation of relations with peripheral nations such as China, historians can gain a fresh and more detailed perspective on how and why nineteenth century liberal attitudes developed. In addition, it challenges the existing framework adopted by Sinologists in their assessment of Anglo-Chinese relations. Recent studies remain focused on uncovering how nineteenth century Western expansion into the Qing Empire affected its political, legal and cultural development. This thesis reverses this approach – arguing that this relationship not only affected events within China but in addition, shaped British liberal debate and consolidated British political ideas. This thesis calls, therefore, for historians to reconsider the importance of relatively peripheral nations on the development of British ideals and liberal thinking in the mid-nineteenth century. By examining these new frontiers, it sheds new light on the making of British liberalism.

The thesis investigates anxieties about urban life in late Victorian and Edwardian culture, and examines emotional responses to urbanisation, industrialisation and modernity at this high point of urban growth and rural-urban migration: one that marked Britain’s decisive breakthrough to a largely and permanently urbanised society. During the period, earlier nineteenth-century tropes of the ‘shock’ of the city, and anxieties surrounding rapid early urbanisation and industrialisation, began to recede. But from the 1880s onwards, as life in industrial cities came to be regarded as the norm, new anxieties came to the fore: concerns that related to the very pervasiveness and inescapability of urban life. I argue that the historically unprecedented growth in the size of cities placed enormous strain upon conceptions of the individual in modern society: the impulse to conceive of mass urban society in the abstract was in constant tension with a new, modernistic awareness of the essential humanity of each individual. The research utilises insights from the recent ‘emotional turn’ within the humanities, which is more sensitive to psychological factors in cultural practices and social processes; and brings this historiographical turn to bear on attitudes towards the city. An emotional approach enables both a deeper and subtler exploration of high cultural responses, and the extension of the range of sources and actors beyond ‘ideas’ and ‘intellectuals’. The thesis integrates a wide range of sources: literature, art, the writings of urban planners and social commentators, medical writings, working-class autobiographical writing, and oral history transcripts. Such an approach reveals the common emotional impulses and shared structures of feeling behind a diverse range of responses to the urban environment, and provides a deeper understanding of contemporary emotional life. It thus illuminates the ways in which individuals, societies and culture react to the complexities of modernity, and provides insights into the relationship between social transformation and emotional experience.

<div> <div> <div> <p>This dissertation examines the preservation of the Church of England in Interregnum England. It incorporates a microhistorical analysis of parish life in four Puritanical counties located in East Anglia, namely Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. In the current historiography on the Church of England, scholars of religious history have traditionally associated both Puritan and sectarian activity with the political upheaval, religious reform, and the collapse of cultural norms that accompanied the English Interregnum. Absent from this scholarship, however, are the voices and actions of those devoted parishioners who refused to abandon their parish church after its disestablishment in 1649. These followers, henceforth called “Conformists,” both fostered and maintained a shared cultural system that stabilized their communal interaction in a period exemplified by politico-religious chaos. In a period characterized by bloody conflicts, their instruments were not swords, but sermons. Thus, this project reveals that the perseverance of Conformists amid the persecution of Cromwellian England was not arbitrary, but a disciplined reaction in which spiritual guidance was actively sought and developed. Central to this response were the actions of sequestered Conformist ministers who guided their displaced congregations by administering forbidden sacraments and emboldening communal engagement. </p> </div> </div> </div>

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<p>  </p> <p>While the medieval lexicon did not include a comprehensive term for disability as we understand it today, images of impaired and disabled bodies proliferate in Middle English texts. This dissertation investigates textual representations of the material body across some of the most popular genres of the later Middle Ages (religious exempla, confessional literature, and hagiography) to demonstrate how medieval authors implement impaired bodies in service of spiritual exploration. I show how impaired medieval bodies that are often excluded from discussions of disability—for instance, personified sins, aging bodies, and martyrs’ bodies—are represented in distinctly material terms, drawing attention to medieval authors’ complex and nuanced explorations of bodily difference. Through sustained close readings and attention to medieval authors’ engagement with their source texts, I find that the impaired body operates as a generative site for engagement with significant ontological questions of the period —and that these textual depictions ultimately reveal the body’s resistance to easy or straightforward categorization. Moreover, my research demonstrates the utility of a more nuanced disability studies approach to medieval literature, intervening in current discussions about the ethics of applying the lens of disability to historical texts.</p>

The primary focus of this thesis is on representations of Germany and Germans in the sports pages of English newspapers from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, when EURO 96 generated press coverage that prompted much comment and criticism, both in England and in Germany. Studies focusing on media representations from the mid 1990s onwards, such as those by Maguire, Poulton and Possamai (1999), Garland and Rowe (1999) and Garland (2004) have been helpful in deconstructing the language used by football journalists and in identifying negative national stereotyping. More recently, however, Ramsden (2007) and Young (2007) have developed our understanding of Anglo-German cultural relations and how they have changed since 1945. In the light of these recent developments this thesis seeks, firstly, to analyse the discourses embedded within the ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ meta-narrative which has characterized press coverage of Anglo-German football since international fixtures between the two countries were resumed in 1954 and, secondly, to contextualize them in the broader history of Anglo-German cultural relations and how they developed over the forty years or so that followed. Though drawing on some insights from both cultural and media studies the methodology employed is essential historical. This does not mean, however, that press reports and comment are regarded as unproblematic primary sources. Recent methodological approaches the history of sport, notably by Booth (2005) and Hill (2006), have pointed to the importance of viewing such sources as texts which are thus open to deconstruction. A complementary emphasis on historical context is nevertheless justified, principally because it is important to explain variations that have occurred over time. Though there were some similarities in the way that Anglo-German football was covered in 1954 and 1996 – and at various points in between - there are also striking differences which it is argued here are primarily explained by conditions prevailing at the particular historical junctures at which representations were generated. The relationship which existed between Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was significantly different to that which existed between Britain and re-unified Germany in the 1990s. This was an important contingent factor and helps to explain variations in the deployment of journalistic discourses over the years. Thus this thesis breaks new ground in that it emphasizes the historical contextualization of representations over a long period and seeks to counter any tendency to look backwards from the viewpoint of the mid 1990s. The discussion proceeds chronologically from the 1950s to the 1990s in order to demonstrate variations in the way that discourses were deployed over the years. Thus the representations generated provide a way of reading the state of underlying Anglo-German relations at any given point. One chapter is devoted to the 1966 World Cup Final on account of its significance in press discourses relating to Anglo-German football and in what is popularly referred to in England as the 'thirty/forty years of hurt' that followed. Whereas academic attention in relation to football-related representations has previously concentrated on the downmarket tabloid press, this study is equally concerned with quality and middlemarket titles. Thus The Times and the Daily Express are considered alongside the Daily Mirror and the Sun. Finally – and in contrast to previous accounts which have considered the English press in isolation – a chapter on German newspaper coverage (principally Bild, Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) has been included to allow some comparisons to be made and to point to directions in which future research might be pursued.

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“Race in a Godless World” examines the racial thought of atheists in Britain and the United States from about 1850 to 1914. While there have been no comprehensive studies of atheists' views on race, there is a trend in the historiography on racial thought, which I have described as the “Race-Secularization Thesis,” that suggests a link between the secularization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an increase in nineteenth-century racialism – that is, racial essentialism and determinism – as well as resulting racial prejudice and discrimination. Through a study of both leading and lesser-known atheists and freethinkers, I argue that the “Race-Secularization Thesis” needs to be reconsidered. A simple link between secularization and racialism is misleading. This is not to suggest that the “Race-Secularization Thesis” contains no truth, only that secularization did not inevitably lead to racialism. This dissertation helps to tell a more complex and nuanced story about the relationship between atheism and racial thought. While in some cases, nineteenth-century atheists and freethinkers were among the leading exponents of racialist views, there is an alternative story in which the atheist worldview – through its emphasis on rationality and skepticism – provided the tools with which to critique ideas of racial prejudice, racial superiority, and even the concept of race itself.