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.

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a British historian of culture and a pioneer during the 1920s in linking history with the social sciences. Much existent writing on him today simply tries to summarize his views on the historical process or on specific time-periods. There is a fundamental lack of real historical perspective on Dawson, linking him to his own intellectual environment. This thesis attempts to remedy that lack. It demonstrates that the most important years in which to understand Dawson’s development were roughly those of the interwar period (1918-1939). During those years he wrote scholarly books as well as social and political commentaries. This thesis uses Dawson’s life and writings as a window into his world—hence it is a “study in British intellectual history between the world wars.” A number of contexts will be examined through relevant archival and published source material: textual, social, cultural, and biographical, all in order to account for the numerous ideas and events that raised questions in Dawson’s mind to which he then responded in his writings. Chapter one studies Dawson’s reputation from the interwar years up until today in order to highlight his broad visibility, the diverse images through which his work was viewed, and the central themes he engaged with and which are the subjects of the following chapters. Those themes are: (1) Dawson’s entry into British sociology during the 1920s; (2) his response to the question of human progress in Britain after the Great War; (3) his response to historiographical problems surrounding religious history, nationalism, and empiricism; (4) the various ideas of religion present in interwar Britain and the wider Western world by which Dawson informed his thinking not only about religion but also about (5) those “political religions” (as he saw them) taking shape in the totalitarian regimes during the interwar years. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to general knowledge of interwar British history, aid more historically sensitive readings of Dawson’s work today, and reveal something of Dawson’s “cultural mind”: the fundamental interdisciplinary and catholic ways of historical thinking by which he viewed the past and the present and which were his most important contributions to the discipline of history.

La période de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle est celle d’une expansion territoriale de l’Europe dans le monde. Cette expansion a cherché à se légitimer par le biais d’un discours qui se voulait humaniste : l’homme blanc, fort de sa supériorité raciale et culturelle, se devait d’aider les autres populations à atteindre un stade avancé de développement.Les historiens français et britanniques ayant travaillé sur l’Égypte lagide y ont, eux aussi, été sensibles. Les hellénistes ont amalgamé l’hellénisme à la culture européenne contemporaine, faisant de l’Égypte hellénistique un modèle. Ce dernier laissait un héritage que seuls les empires européens étaient capables de recueillir. De leur côté, les égyptologues, sensibles aux canons du Nouvel Empire, centrés sur la culture égyptienne, tout en acceptant l’idée du colonialisme civilisateur des barbares, considéraient la présence grecque en Égypte comme un corps étranger déstructurant une société déjà en déclin.Cette présente étude se propose d’analyser la réception de l’Égypte hellénistique à la lueur des paradigmes coloniaux, à travers les écrits de six savants : Pierre Jouguet (1869-1949), Auguste Bouché-Leclercq (1842-1923), Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919), Harold Idris Bell (1879-1967) et William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). / The period from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that of a territorial expansion of Europe in the world. This expansion has sought to legitimize itself through a speech that was meant humanistic: the white man, with his racial and cultural superiority, had to help other people reach an advanced stage of development. The French and British historians who have worked on Ptolemaic Egypt have also been affected by it. The Hellenists amalgamated Hellenism to contemporary European culture, making a model of Hellenistic Egypt. This left a legacy that only the European empires were able to collect. For their part, Egyptologists, sensitive to the canons of the New Kingdom, centered on Egyptian culture, while accepting the idea of civilizing colonialism barbarians, saw the Greek presence in Egypt as a foreign body destabilizing a society already in decline. This study aims to analyze the reception of Hellenistic Egypt in light of colonial paradigms, through the writings of six scientists: Pierre Jouguet (1869-1949), Auguste Bouché-Leclercq (1842-1923), Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919), Harold Idris Bell (1879-1967) and Flinders Petrie (1853-1942).