"Afterlife of Empire" explores Ottoman cultural, social, and political continuities in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg administration (1878-1914). The research focuses on the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire - an influence perpetuated both by the efforts of the Ottoman imperial state, and by the former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina itself to explain the lingering aftereffects of the Ottoman Empire in the province. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that the Ottoman subjects and the former territories did not stop being Ottoman in any significant sense immediately after the separation from the empire, and that the break with the empire was not that of rupture, but characterized by enduring features of the empire that evolved to respond to diplomatic and strategic interests in the region. A shift from the common inclination to analyze the Habsburg period as the introduction of modernity, and a focus, not on the national/ethnic framework constructed around identity, but on the overlapping, multiple loyalties in this study convey a more accurate representation of the period and an assessment of what legitimacy and sovereignty meant in this region. By drawing on Ottoman and Bosnian archival sources in focusing on Bosnia's overlapping imperial, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering the Ottoman context after its formal departure, and the significance of incorporating Islamic intellectual history in understanding the past and present of Bosnia Herzegovina and Southeastern Europe in general.

This dissertation explores the ethics and norms associated with contracting in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt as a contribution to the institutional study of ancient contract and its relationship to the economic history of the Roman world. Although ancient contracts in the Hellenistic tradition (i.e., non-Roman law contracts) have been studied rigorously from a legal perspective, there has been no systematic study of contract as an economic institution in the eastern half of the ancient Mediterranean. The first three chapters argue that such a study is a historical desideratum and seek to establish the theoretical and methodological basis and scope of such a project. Theoretically, the most decisive factor in determining the nature, extent, and success of contract as an economic institution is actual enforcement, as opposed to mere legal "enforceability." While the modern (Western) state has been justly credited with having had a transformative effect on contract by publishing clear rules (i.e., contract law) and providing effective "third-party" enforcement, even modern contracts depend on the enforcement activities of the individual parties and the power of social norms. Historically, there is no question that the ancient state, Rome included, was less invested and less effective in its support and promotion of private contracting than its modern counterparts. Ethics and norms therefore played a larger and more important role in ancient contracting than they have in the last century and as such need to be studied in their own right. The nature of the project also argues for Egypt being the primary locus of study, since the papyri afford us the most complete access to ancient individuals and organizations using contracts to organize transactions. After the theoretical and methodological discussion, there follow explorations of several important social values and norms with respect to contracting in Graeco-Roman Egypt, including trust (pistis), "respect" (eugnōmosynē), and "breach." The results show how "personal" contracting was and reveal some of the ways in which individuals bridged the inevitable "trust gaps" in their efforts to build credible commitments with those outside the immediate circle of their trusted intimates. It also illuminates the discourse of reputation, a key lever in ancient contract formation and enforcement. Finally, the notion of breach is shown to have become both more common and to have evolved conceptually in written contracts over time. It is argued that these changes in the idea and drafting of breach should be interpreted in light of a larger pattern of historical and legal development spanning the second century BCE to the second century CE, a period which witnessed an increasing "moralization" of contract, itself an adaptation to an enforcement regime heavily dependent on ethics and norms. The last chapter offers a synthesis of the findings and a prospectus of the next phase of the project, which turns to the role of the state, arguing that it was generally more effective and activist than the current opinion allows.

This dissertation is a study of contemporary forms of Quranic learning among women in urban Pakistan. Over the last two decades, Quran study programs which promise an in-depth and personal knowledge of the text, have become immensely popular among educated women from all backgrounds in urban centers of Pakistan. Placing an emphasis on developing skills for reading and understanding the Quran, such programs of study have adopted an approach to textual engagement that departs significantly from previously dominant modes of recitation and memorization of the Quran in everyday practices of ritual devotion. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among women participants of Quranic study, this dissertation investigates these sites of learning to highlight the competencies, logics and modes of argumentation that are encouraged and cultivated among women readers of the Quran. It locates the shift from Quranic recitation to reading within a genealogy of the modernist exegetical tradition popularized by Syed Abul Ala Maududi in the mid-twentieth century in South Asia which made the `ordinary' reader its main focus rather than the scholarly world of the Ulama. It foregrounds this as the condition under which a popular hermeneutics of the Quran emerges in contemporary Pakistan and demonstrates how privileging a modality which illuminates the Quran's `true' meaning steers conceptions about the text and its role in defining ethical action for women readers. This study analyzes how contemporary practices of Quranic hermeneutics by `ordinary' women rely on the ethical cultivation of interpretive agency which is generated simultaneously by notions of the autonomous self and a normative understanding of Quranic injunctions. Through an analysis of women's experiences of reading, it shows that Quranic study in these sites occurs at the nexus of competing modalities of textual engagement in which women combine religious and secular capacities, skills and sensibilities for reflection on the Quran's meaning. It highlights the ways in which seemingly contradictory modes of reflection--one which is critical and another which is governed by devotional affect--are productively reconfigured together for discerning the ethical import of Quranic injunctions and their insertion into the idioms governing everyday life. This dissertation argues that such a mode of appreciation produces a unique register for reflecting on the Quran's pedagogical potential, thus imbuing the desire for `reading as understanding' with the promise of personal and collective social transformation. It also unravels assumptions about the discreteness of the spheres governed by religiosity and secularity in a post-colonial context and enables for a consideration of the ways in which the intersection between the two have been productive of new modalities of womanhood, sociality, and politics.

The present study examines the merchant networks which exported slaves from the Black Sea to Genoa, Venice, and Cairo from the late thirteenth to the late fifteenth century on the basis of both Arabic and Latin sources. It begins with an explanation of features distinctive to slavery in the medieval Mediterranean, the most important of which was its ideological basis in religious rather than racial difference, as well as a comparison between the Christian and Islamic laws governing slavery. In subsequent chapters it covers the variety of roles played by slaves in Mediterranean society, how the use of individual slaves was shaped by their gender and origin, and the processes which led to the enslavement of people within the Black Sea region. The heart of the project is the fourth chapter, an analysis of the commercial networks which conveyed slaves from the ports of the Black Sea to those of the Mediterranean. This chapter profiles individual merchants who dealt in slaves, traces the routes and identifies the logistical challenges of the slave trade, and analyzes the relative importance of various groups of merchants in supplying the Mediterranean demand for slaves. The next chapter explains the process of finding, inspecting, and buying a slave in the marketplace and how it differed from the purchase of other commodities. The final chapter addresses the place of the Black Sea slave trade in the political and religious context of the late medieval crusade movement. Proponents of the crusades argued that Christian merchants, especially the Genoese, were strengthening the sultan of Egypt to the detriment of the crusaders by supplying him with slaves for military service. The validity of these accusations is examined in light of the sources informing the rest of the study.

This dissertation explores how antiquity and some of its early modern admirers understand the notion of certainty, especially as it is theorized in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a first-century educational manual for the aspiring orator that defines certainty in terms of consensus. As part of a larger discussion of argumentative strategies, Quintilian turns to the “nature of all arguments,” which he defines as “reasoning which lends credence to what is doubtful by means of what is certain” (ratio per ea quae certa sunt fidem dubiis adferens: quae natura est omnium argumentorum, V.10.8). These certainties, he later specifies, include not matters of scientific demonstration or objective fact, but the agreements of various communities: the laws of cities, local customs, and other forms of consensus. As the foundation of persuasive rhetoric, these consensus-based certainties situate argumentation as the practice of crafting agreements rather than demonstrating necessary conclusions. Taking as its point of departure Quintilian's novel understanding of certainty, this study looks to some of Quintilian's intellectual forebears as well as his later readers to show how his work is both a nexus of earlier intellectual developments as well as an important inspiration for later accounts of certainty, even into the early modern period. After illustrating in the first chapters of this dissertation how Quintilian's manual incorporates elements from Aristotelian notions of dialectic and rhetoric as well as from Ciceronian skeptical approaches to epistemology, I show how Quintilian's curriculum for the orator shapes the thought of Italian humanists, especially that of Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), a reformer of scholastic logic and dialectic, and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), an influential Neapolitan jurist. Adopting Quintilian's rendering of certainty as a matter of agreements and conventions, these later authors elaborate their own novel approaches to various fields—including law, language, and logic—through this ancient understanding of certum. Contrary to modern notions of certainty as objective or scientific fact, Quintilian's humanist readers continue to root this concept in consensus, both within the courtroom and without.

Lai, Pak Kin Patrick. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-146). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Definition of Stone Spade --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Importance of Stone Spade Research --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Structure of the Thesis --- p.6 / Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- The Neolithic Chronology in Hong Kong --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Lithic studies: Typological Analysis and Functional Analysis --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Chaine Operatoire and Cognitive Archaeology --- p.26 / Chapter 2.4 --- Research on Stone Spades --- p.34 / Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODOLOGY --- p.37 / Chapter 3.1 --- Research Questions --- p.37 / Chapter 3.2 --- Fieldsite specification --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3 --- Research methods --- p.41 / Chapter 3.4 --- Use Wear Analysis --- p.43 / Chapter CHAPTER 4 T --- HE YUNG LONG NORTH ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSEMBLAGE --- p.52 / Chapter 4.1 --- Yung Long and the surrounding area --- p.52 / Chapter 4.2 --- Lithic assemblage of Yung Long North (YLN) --- p.55 / Chapter 4.3 --- Correlation Tests on Selected Artefacts --- p.67 / Chapter 4.4 --- Results of Use Wear Analysis --- p.78 / Chapter 4.5 --- Preliminary Summary --- p.96 / Chapter CHAPTER 5 --- THE CHAINE OPERATOIRE OF STONE SPADES AND THE LITHIC ASSEMBLAGE FROM YUNG LONG NORTH --- p.99 / Chapter 5.1 --- Lithic Manufacturing as Part of the Cultural Development --- p.99 / Chapter 5.2 --- What are the choices selected in the design and planning of lithic manufacturing? --- p.101 / Chapter 5.3 --- Standardisation --- p.110 / Chapter 5.4 --- What is the function of stone spades and its relationship with agriculture? --- p.118 / Chapter 5.5 --- Where to Discard? ´ؤ the Cognitive Map on Space Utilisation --- p.127 / Chapter 5.6 --- What subsistence strategies are reflected in the lithic assemblage? --- p.128 / Chapter 5.7 --- How the manufacturing is organized? --- p.130 / Chapter 5.8 --- What is the Cultural Development represented in the Late Neolithic Yung Long? --- p.134 / Chapter 5.9 --- Conclusion --- p.135 / Chapter 5.10 --- Some final remarks --- p.137 / REFERENCES --- p.139 / APPENDIX A --- p.147 / APPENDIX B --- p.160 / List of Tables / Table 3.1 Average dimension of adzes and roughouts from YLN / Table 4.1 Counts of the whole Late Neolithic lithic assemblage from YLN / Table 4.2 Correlations of 20 Spades from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.3 Correlations of 41 regular adzes from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.4 Correlations of 71 adzes from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.5 Adze measurements from YLN and SKSH (after Chan 2005) / "Table 4.6 Correlations of summarized adze typologies (Regular, Single-Shouldered and Double Shouldered adzes) from Late Neolithic YLN and SKSH" / Table 4.7 Correlations of 35 Projectile Points from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.8 Correlations of 11 Yues from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.9 Correlations of 12 Netsinkers from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.10 Correlations of 16 Picks from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.11 Correlations of 29 Hammerstones from Late Neolithic YLN / Table 4.12 Use wears on replicas after task-oriented experiments / Table 5.1 Comparison among the Late Neolithic lithic assemblages around Yung Long (North) (Ng Ka Yuen and Chan Ka Yuen: after Au 2004) / List of Figures / "Figure 1.1 Hong Kong in its regional setting (Source: Lands Department, HKSAR 2010)" / Figure 4.1 Bar Chart Showing the Number of Pieces of Implements from YLN in terms of materials / Figure 4.2 Pie Chart showing the Percentage of Implements Materials from YLN / Figure 4.3 Pie Chart showing the Percentage of Implements Types from YLN / Figure 4.4 Radar Diagram of 20 Spades Measurements from YLN / Figure 4.5 Radar Diagram of Adze Measurements from YLN and SKSH (after Chan 2005) / Figure 4.6 Radar Diagram of 71 Adzes Measurements from YLN / Figure 4.7 Radar Diagram of 35 Projectile Points Measurements from YLN / Figure 4.8 Radar Diagram of 11 Yue Measurements from YLN / Figure 4.9 Radar Diagram of 12 Netsinkers from YLN / Figure 4.10 Radar Diagram of 16 Picks Measurements from YLN / Figure 4.11 Radar Diagram of 29 Hammerstones Measurements from YLN / Appendices / Chapter Appendix A --- Artefact Statistics / Chapter Appendix B --- Maps and Plates

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Benjamin Franklyn Blakney. / M.C.P.

This thesis is about organizations working in the field of British civil liberties between 1934 and 1989. It examines the relationship between the concepts of civil liberties and human rights within a British context, and discusses the forms of political activism that have accompanied this subject. At the centre of this work is an examination of the politics of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), an organization that has played a key role in the protection and promotion of civil liberties from its formation in 1934. It also examines the activities of a range of other organizations that considered themselves to be active on such a subject. The thesis argues that thinking about civil liberties has been extended throughout the twentieth century to incorporate a more positive and broader conceptualization of rights. However, for all the increased importance of the politics of human rights, a tradition of civil liberties has remained crucial to organizations working within such a field. The thesis also seeks to demonstrate that concerns about civil liberties have often reflected the political ideologies of those acting on such issues. Whilst a large amount of conceptual agreement has existed over the importance of the subject within Britain, this has consistently been met with disagreement over what this means. NGOs have played crucial roles as mediators of such a conflict. In performing such a role, the civil liberties lobby has been characterised by a set of professional, expert activists that have, at times, been able and will to engage with radical political ideas.

In surveys of American architecture, the so-called “colonial period” from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the war for independence in the 1770s has generally been viewed from an “Anglo-American” perspective with a concentration on the British colonies that would become the United States. This period has been defined by the transplantation of architecture from the “mother country” to British North America according to what the architectural historian John Summerson has characterized as “English standards pure and simple.” The persistence of historiographical assumptions that privilege English sources and focus on evidence of “Englishness” still serves as the core of early American architectural narratives. While an effort has been made to increase the diversity of those represented, yet one dimension has essentially been written out, that of America’s connection to Ireland. And yet Irish elements have long had a presence in the already existing historical evidence. Therefore this dissertation takes an alternative view of that same colonial history by collecting the available Irish materials and tracing the threads that tie Ireland to America, whether that connection is direct or mediated through England. By assembling various forms of evidence, often relegated to footnotes, asides, or ambiguous citations, this dissertation seeks to construct a counter-narrative that spans the Atlantic and stretches from the 1530s to the 1730s. It explores a diverse constellation of elements including landscapes, plans, buildings, and monuments, while situating them within a larger historical context, thereby reframing some of the same canonical events, individuals, and artifacts that currently appear in surveys of American architecture. With a shift in perspective comes a shift in the history, one that complicates, challenges, and at times upends, Anglo-centric readings of colonial America and the transformation of its physical environment. For when seen from the perspective of Ireland, a more complex, as well as a more “Irish,” story emerges, resulting in a history that has, in effect, been hiding in plain sight. In making this history visible, the dissertation addresses both the historical and historiographical conditions that produced some of the gaps, tensions, ambiguities, and erasures that have contributed to keeping this history hidden. Taking Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 as a starting point, the dissertation begins in 1530 and examines some of the preconditions for American colonization in England and Ireland. Then, working from the historiographical foundations already laid regarding the English plantations in Ireland and Virginia, it goes on to address the continuity of connections that run through New England, the “Middle Colonies,” and the American south, including such well known works as William Penn’s plan for Philadelphia, George Berkeley’s Whitehall, and William Byrd II’s Westover, all three of which have been viewed as exemplary in their ties to English sources and influences. Though traditionally divided by period, type, style, and region, here they are no longer treated as isolated data points but rather as part of a larger, inter- connected, and continuous story, one intimately, and inextricably, tied to Ireland and “Irish” networks in England and America. In addition, by examining the historiographical as well as the historical dimensions and placing the history and the historiography in dialogue, this dissertation hopes to offer insights into the production of early American architectural history, as well as the production of plans, spaces, and objects. In doing so it seeks to call into question the overwhelming “Englishness” of the American colonial period as it has been constructed through histories of American architecture and planning during the twentieth-century.

When Frank Zappa died in 1993, he left Civilization Phaze III as a last testament to both his musical and thematic purpose. The work received a handful of reviews in the popular music press, and has subsequently been ignored by both the popular press and, with few exceptions, academia. Many are the composers whose careers have been thought describe a mid-period mastery, followed by later decline. This presumption seems to have fallen upon Frank Zappa, apparently due to his retirement from the concert stage, and final years writing music on the Synclavier. This thesis seeks to demonstrate that Zappa's compositional abilities were in no way diminished at the end of his life, but had instead reached a peak level of mastery in composition of his last work. This thesis shall provide an analysis and musical/extra-musical description of this piece, with the intention of situating it in relation to Zappa's compositional legacy, and to establish Civilization Phaze III as the crowning compositional achievement of his career.