This dissertation explores formations of the ‘colonial’ in Sudan through the vantage point of transformations in debt and temporality. Situating Sudan in an Ottoman-Egyptian context, it offers an account of how debt and land came to be reorganised so as to be separated from the realm of ethical relations. It does so by exploring legal-juridical changes brought about under Ottoman-Egyptian rule, which gradually altered notions of selfhood and time. In light of this, forms of resistance—especially during the Mahdist uprising—are shown to be a reformulation of disciplinary and ethical regimes and a (re)fashioning of subjects. Concluding with the early decades of British colonial rule, it considers the temporal regimes used to neutralise Mahdist subjectivities, which involved producing a rational, sedentary, and calculative peasantry oriented toward—not an afterlife but—a prosperous future.

This dissertation examines symbolic representations of British imperial power through the appropriation and display of Indian “things.” The objects and spectacles examined here—the Koh-i-Noor diamond, tigers and tiger hunting, and turbaned men on display—are all invested with a range of social and symbolic meanings within both their indigenous and imperial contexts. The things appropriated into the British Empire’s styling of itself that are discussed in this study were each traditionally associated with masculinity and kingship in their native Indian context and subsequently displayed on and around the bodies of British women. This study advances a relationship between the theatrics of British imperial power, and the emasculation and objectification of Indian men. A list of images has been submitted as a supplemental digital file with this dissertation.

The study of Indian indentured servitude in the British Empire has largely been confined to the histories of slavery or free labor. Few scholars have connected indenture to larger processes in the British Empire. This dissertation examines the global nature of Indian indenture to find how trends in colonial power were inflected in the relationship between the state and the indentured worker. This dissertation uses the colonial experience in South Asia as a basis for its global history. It contends that the history of the colonial rule of law in the subcontinent was of deep importance to the mechanisms of indenture. By looking at archival records from the United Kingdom, Trinidad, Fiji, and elsewhere, this dissertation finds that officials in the indenture colonies were attempting to transform indebted Indian peasants into indentured workers. This process was inflected by the experience of colonial rule elsewhere. At first, this meant the implementation of ideas tied to imperial liberalism. Following the challenges to British colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, the indenture colonies mirrored a wider movement towards conservative governance. The ways in which the colonial state attempted to control and manipulate workers underwent a dramatic shift. In the indenture colony, colonial power exerted both authoritarian and paternalist tendencies. This dissertation uses the governorships of Arthur Hamilton-Gordon in Trinidad and Fiji to explore this shift. This dissertation makes its argument by focusing on the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. In doing so, it moves beyond the model of studying indenture that has looked at the British Empire as a whole, or otherwise in specific colonies or sub-regions. Using Trinidad and Fiji allows for a deep understanding of continuity and change. For example, Trinidad can be used to examine indenture’s beginnings, as the colony began to import Indian indentured labor in 1842, while Fiji can be used to understand late indenture. Furthermore, colonial officials, ideas of authority, capital, labor, and goods were always circulating throughout this global empire. The study of Trinidad and Fiji allows for a critical understanding of such exchanges and this dissertation uses both to explore bureaucratic offices, law, financial systems, governance, protest, medicine and health, and global agitation in Indian indenture. “The Currents of Restless Toil” is an in-depth study into the nature of colonial governance in the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. It explores the nuances of colonial power, providing a window into the theory and practice that shaped the restless toil of Indians across the world.

“Expanding Educational Empires” explores the interventions of American philanthropic foundations in educational programs for British Africa after the First World War. It reveals the extent to which a discourse of education – pedagogy and research – allowed American philanthropic groups, and the numerous governmental and nongovernmental organizations with which they cooperated, to shape the interwar British Empire, and institutionalize a colonial ideology that aligned with American corporate and cultural interests. American philanthropists portrayed these interwar colonial activities as benevolent, apolitical enterprises, glossing over the fact that their influence over the overlapping agencies with which they cooperated filtered easily into official organs of power. By the 1940s, when the Anglo-American partnership no longer served the interests of American-based global capital, American philanthropists performed an effortless volte-face against a mercantilist British Empire. They now found it expedient to invoke both their nation’s ingrained hostility to colonialism and their expertise in native affairs, which had been attained primarily through support of interwar British imperialism, as justification for meddling in the postwar international arena, using education to construct a global community committed to corporate American preferences. This project investigates the close collaboration between American and British agents in the formulation of interwar colonial education, exposing it as a comprehensive program that entailed accumulating knowledge about British territories, particularly in Africa, and disseminating the findings worldwide, thereby establishing new ideological and economic international assumptions. It reveals that American interference in this ambitious project constituted an extension of the longstanding domestic state-building endeavors of early-twentieth-century American philanthropic foundation managers, and their partners. The “unofficial”, humanitarian framework of education allowed a web of American agents to smoothly and remarkably embed themselves in a foreign government’s operations with the ulterior motive of powering American international influence, a story that has significant implications today.

This dissertation studies conflict in a hierarchical international system, the British Empire. How did the British Empire respond to violent and nonviolent resistance within its colonies? I develop a theory explaining how and why an imperial metropole becomes involved in and grant concessions to its colonies. Unlike federal nation-states and looser relationship like in an international organization, modern European empires were characterized by selective engagement of the metropole with its peripheral colonies. This has important implications for understanding metropolitan response to peripheral resistance. In contrast to more recent work, I find that violence was more effective at coercing metropolitan concessions to the colonies in the British Empire than nonviolence. I argue that this occurred because violence overwhelmed the capabilities of local colonial governments, and violence commanded metropolitan attention and involvement. This theory is supported with a wide range of data, including yearly measures of anticolonial resistance, every colonial concession made by the British Empire after 1918, daily measures of metropolitan discussions of colonial issues from cabinet archives, and web-scraped casualty data from British death records. In addition, I present in-depth case studies of British responses to resistance in Cyprus and the Gold Coast, along with a conceptual schema of different types of resistance to understand strikes, riots, terrorism, and civil disobedience in a number of other British colonies. My findings show that the effectiveness of resistance is conditional on the political structure that it is embedded in and that hierarchy matters for understanding state responses to resistance.

This thesis consists of a poetry manuscript and a critical component that considers the poetics and history that inform the writing of that manuscript. Critical Component: Charting the Sea in Caribbean Poetry This thesis focuses on the influence of the sea in constructing identity in the writing of Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Dionne Brand. It is particularly interested in examining how these poets trace identity primarily in The Arrivants, Omeros, and No Language is Neutral through their various employments of the sea and liquidity in those works. I then read selections from two of my poetic forbearers from the British Virgin Islands - Alphaeus Norman and Verna Penn Moll - in order to examine the construction of the sea in their poetry against the canonised work of Brathwaite, Walcott, and Brand. I argue through close contextual readings of the selected works that through engagement of various approaches each poet arrives at a portrait of Caribbean identity that is constructed integrally through the fluid, mutable natures of the sea. The five poets are scrutinised in four chapters, in relation to their personal philosophies regarding national or regional identity through essay writings and interviews but more prominently in close readings of their poetry and in particular their representations of the sea. I begin by arguing that in Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1980), the importance of the sea in the various formations of West Indian identity is represented through the exercising of his tidalectic process in his reconstructions of the archetypes of Legba and Ananse, and his ritualising of cricket and calypso. In Walcott's Omeros (1990), the sea is presented as the embodiment of history itself through which all of Saint Lucia's contemporary inhabitants must access their ancestral memories. Walcott utilises the Atlantic as a creolising force in his reimagining of the Homeric archetypes of Philoctetes, Achilles, Hector, and Helen. Brand however, departs from this metaphorical interpretation of the sea and turns inward, redefining the boundaries of land, sea, and sexual desire in Trinidad through a remapping of that island that is focused on the ocean, waterways, and the bodies of women. Lastly, British Virgin Islander poets Alphaeus Osario Norman and Verna Penn Moll embrace different mythic versions of the sea. Norman's work creates a distinct sailor aesthetic that resonates with classic European naval and militaristic poetry as a way to invoke a national pride, while Penn Moll focuses on performances of cultural and communal waterside rituals to frame narratives of local history and village culture. Ultimately, I argue that the sea is presented variously as a portal through which history and tribal memory can be accessed, and as a supernaturally transformative force for the poet. Creative Component: Make Us All Islands Make Us All Islands is a poetry manuscript based in the British Virgin Islands that explores historical and personal relationships with the sea. The first section revolves around the various arrivals of liberated Africans rescued from slave ships wrecked or captured by the British Navy in the early 1800s. The liberated Africans were not enslaved, but rather forced into indentureship before ultimately being segregated from society and then disappearing from history. The second section is built around the departure of a generation of Tortolan men to work in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic at the turn of the following century, alongside other Anglophone Afro-Caribbean migrants. A large portion of these poems are built around accounts of the greatest boating disaster in the islands' history, the loss of a schooner christened Fancy Me which wrecked in a hurricane in 1926 off the coast of the Dominican island Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory.

This project focusses on the historic border region of the Himalayas as a central space for negotiations of power and identity in British South Asia. It particularly focusses on the standardization of mapping and surveying practices as socio-technological discourses through the 1840s to the 1920s that lead to the transformation of trans-Himalayan and Tibetan land into British territory that could be invaded, settled, and controlled. With a unique focus on subaltern agents moving through and past the Himalayas, this project writes a history of the transformation of the imaginary of the mountains, from a spatial feature that connected vibrant pre-colonial geographies to a natural resource object and a political border that delineated the limits of imperial territory. While previous scholarship has tended to examine the history of the Tibeto-Himalayan borderlands in the context of its importance to the British Indian, Indian, or Chinese nation-building practices, this project foregrounds the importance of trans-Himalayan connections and exchanges in examining the structural transformation of a region where historical forces simultaneously undermined the power of the British Indian state while reflecting the hegemony of its imperial project. Additionally, this project explores the tensions between the construction of “universal” discourses of empirical scientific practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which claimed to orient the practices of geography, cartography and ethnography, and the constraints of the British imperial system predicated on the same coercive technologies to identify territory. The epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about Tibet and the Himalayas rose out of a series of contestations between the appropriation and rejection of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors. Tracing a near hundred-year arc, I locate geography as a unique facet of colonial modernity that dictated imperial logics of developmentalism at the frontiers of the British empire, thereby demonstrating the birth of modern geography as mired in haphazard expeditions, rather than proceeding from well-defined scientific theory and protocols. This dissertation concentrates on three main aspects to revisit the history of construction of the geo-knowledge of the Tibeto-Himalayan borderlands by focusing on situated actors and connections: the epistemological contributions of native Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese surveyors in the employ of the Survey of India, the mobilization of labor for trans-Himalayan military and surveying expeditions, and the interactions between imperial knowledge productions and “indigenous” modes of spatial thinking as related in Tibetan revelatory guidebooks detailing the space of the Himalayas. Each of these aspects was critical in the re-constitution of the Himalayan mountains as a spatial unit that divided rather than connected political communities on either side.

Drawing on archival materials, family stories, and student artwork, “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1795–1855” examines how nineteenth-century American missionary education in South Asia facilitated dominant-caste supremacy while distributing negotiated sensibilities of colonial modernity. The work’s first section explores the arrangement of an educational nexus of mutual benefit between the Jaffna Peninsula’s dominant Veḷḷāḷar caste, the British Ceylonese government, and American Protestant missionaries. I track this nexus from its origins in the veranda school of Tamil Śaiva poet Kūḻaṅkai Tampirāṉ (1699–1795) to its apogee in the American Ceylon Mission boarding schools of the late 1840s. The dissertation’s second part examines two pedagogies of colonial modernity: the embroidery of needlework samplers that taught an American form of gendered domesticity, and map drawing that imparted a geographically specific and American-style national identity. By describing three moments in its development and two pedagogical facets of its career, the dissertation argues that an educational nexus crafted for some Veḷḷāḷars a distinct Jaffna Tamil identity that is geographically bound, gendered, and pervaded by a sense of superiority. This dissertation makes two significant contributions to South Asian studies, first by demonstrating an unexamined arrangement of power in the context of colonialism—the educational nexus—and second, by exploring the way colonial teaching methods in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed South Asian ways of being.

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.

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.