This thesis provides a coherent history of Celtic ideas in the modern era. Combining intellectual and cultural history in a transnational framework, it has two main aims. The first is to chart the transformation of perceptions of the Celts from those of a sought-after European ancestor to those of a marginalised people living on the ‘fringes’ of western Europe over the longue durée of 1700-1900. The second aim is to illustrate the wider intellectual, cultural, and political ramifications of this protracted ideological shift. I examine the scholarship of antiquarians, historians, philologists, race scientists, and other intellectuals of all stripes, before investigating how Celtic cultural nationalist movements grew out of these ideas and remained anchored in them. With the racialisation of nations and the cultural shift wherein the nation became a salient political consideration in the period c.1780-c.1820, Celtic ideas were no longer mere passive descriptors of nations, their particular pasts, and their places within wider European history, but active connectors of peoples with both their history and their supposed national destiny. Developments in scholarship combined with the changing imperatives of national thought led to the emergence of an archetypal Celtic image around 1830, where ‘the Celts’ became usefully politicised by both English chauvinists and Celtic nationalists alike. This era also saw the beginnings of Pan-Celticism, where race, far from being used to castigate the Celts, became a central pillar around which members of the different Celtic nations rallied. Tracing Celtic ideological vicissitudes over this longue durée serves as a case-study for how national thought and its conceptual relatives evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following the early-modern squabbles over Celtic ancestry through to the early-twentieth century Pan-Celtic movement, the version of Celticism we have inherited more or less intact today.

At different times between 1545 and 1642, the navies of England and France both grew in strength and declined. This thesis traces the advances and regression of both kingdoms’ sea forces and relates these changes to concurrent developments within the state. As a comparative study, it shows that, in sharing the Channel and with an increasing use of the early modern maritime theatre, English and French naval expansion was intertwined. First, approaching the administrative transformations of both navies and, then, progressing to discuss fiscal, technological, maritime and finally aesthetic developments, this thesis highlights the relationship between naval and state strength in early modern Europe. As a comparative study of early modern state and naval development, this project has been particularly inspired by the research of Jan Glete. Consequently, through quantitative statistical analysis and other techniques, it accounts for naval and state growth. It uses a large source base of archival evidence from national and regional archives in England and France, printed documentation, and resources from museums and art galleries. As well as engaging with the military revolution debate, where it is argued that early modern naval developments justly deserve greater prominence, the thesis also produces a framework that accounts for the rise and decline of naval strength. It suggests that three principal factors can account for these developments in early modern Europe. First, naval strength was reliant upon the will, enthusiasm and political stability of the monarch. Second, transnational influence and engagement helped to shape the size and appearance of state fleets. The English Channel was an international theatre of political and cultural exchange that facilitated English and French advances. Finally, the geography of both kingdoms is explored, because the size, composition, visual design and location of state navies were conditioned by it.

This thesis will present a comparative and internationally contextualised history of Anglo-French relations in Japan between 1858 and 1868. It will introduce the concept of ‘enclave empires’ to describe the conduits for Western informal imperialism that were created in Japan by the imposition of the treaty-port system in 1858. It will aim to address longstanding gaps in the historiography by assessing that system as a multinational construct that depended upon the cooperation and collaboration of each treaty power operating within it. At the same time, it will show how the management of the Japanese treaty-port system was increasingly dominated by the British Empire and the French Second Empire, the two most powerful Western trading nations in Japan during the 1860s. It will examine how global contexts impacted upon British and French foreign policymaking during this period, and how this catalysed an increasingly bitter AngloFrench struggle for control over the ‘enclave empires’ in Japan. It will also seek to broaden the scope of the historiography beyond the sphere of diplomatic relations by considering the perspectives of prominent non-diplomatic British and French actors whenever relevant. Finally, it will address significant historiographical oversights in the use of relevant primary source material through the critical appraisal of contemporary private paper collections. By adopting this four-pronged methodological approach, this thesis will demonstrate that Anglo-French relations fundamentally defined the process of creating and developing informal ‘enclave empires’ in Japan in the decade between the conclusion of the ‘unequal treaties’ in 1858 and the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

France and Britain are European neighbors and have distinct policing styles and traditions which are evident in their approaches to public order policing. Using an updated version of David Waddington's 'Flashpoints' model this thesis examines and compares the policing of public order in these two countries. It focuses on the institutional and operational dimensions within their historical, social and political contexts indicating the main areas of convergence and divergence. This research argues that a further review and adaptation of the 'flashpoints' model could effectively operationalise it as a tool for police community threat assessment. It also identifies a number of policy implications for both countries that should be accepted as further good practice guidance. There is a strong case for modification and convergence of approach on both sides of the channel. Neither country has achieved the necessary balance between state responsibility and civic rights required by the social contract. Police community relations in France need to be addressed at a fundamental level and public order policing in Britain requires additional research and review of its operational capability, for it is on the ground that disorder situations are dealt with and it is here that public confidence is won and lost.

This is a comparative study of two countries, England and France, two county towns, Warwick and Draguignan, and two families of the trading-manufacturing sort. It argues that, during the period around 1780-1820, the acquisition of a certain form of education, which included an emphasis on fluent reading, writing, and grammar. preferably Latin grammar, became as important as the acquisition of capital. This cultural capital gave its new owners a self-perceived distinction which allowed them to consider themselves and to be considered by others as different. Even if local, regional, and national differences are taken into account, this comparative study shows that this new perception developed as a transnational phenomenon, a form of culture sallS jrolltieres, even during the times of enmity and almost uninterrupted wars between Britain and France which characterise this period. This process had begun earlier in the eighteenth century, when the idea of a public opinion and its premise of equal interaction amongst its proponents was 'invented'; but it was facilitated by the French Revolution with its legacy of the notion of equality, and therefore of the importance of communication in forging democracy. The written word was the chosen means to achieve this. It is argued that this distinctive culture, in the production and consumption of which women played a considerable part, gave voice and a social and political consciousness to those who began to see themselves as the 'middle class'.

The fertility transition in nineteenth century Europe is one of economic history’s greatest puzzles. There is no consensus in the literature on the causes of this ‘fertility revolution’. Following a critical review of the empirical and theoretical literature, this thesis re-examines the economic correlates of the fertility decline through the analysis of two new datasets from England and France. For the first time, the relationship between wealth and fertility can be studied over the period of the fertility transition. Clear patterns are discovered, namely a strong positive relationship pre-transition which switches to a strongly negative relationship during the onset of the transition. Family limitation is initiated by the richest segments of society. I then introduce a simple model which links fertility and social mobility to levels of economic inequality. I argue that parents are motivated by relative status concerns and the fertility transition is a response to changes in the environment for social mobility, where increased mobility becomes obtainable through fertility limitation. This hypothesis is tested with the new micro data in England and France. Fertility decline is strongly associated with decreased levels of inequality and increased levels of social mobility. The analysis finds strong support for the role of changes in inequality and the environment for social mobility as central factors in our understandings of Europe’s fertility transition.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the Sack of Antwerp (1576), two of the most notorious massacres of the 1570s, were of international consequence in a confessionally-divided Europe. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of the Elizabethan political and print responses to both atrocities, evaluating to what extent and in what ways each shaped the increasingly Protestant political character of the period. It compares strands of argument aired by Elizabethan councillors, courtiers, military commanders and clerics, in contrast with the content of contemporary news pamphlets, to establish whether there was any overlap between the parameters of political debate and topical print. It investigates whether, and on what occasions, statesmen or figures associated with the court may have sought to confessionalise public opinion via the production of printed news. Analysing often overlooked printed sources, the thesis focuses on aspects of content and contexts of production. It considers the kinds of comment expressed on the massacres per se and in relation to: the nature of the wars in France and the Low Countries; Elizabeth’s foreign and domestic agendas; the compound significance of her gender, the unresolved succession and her realm's vulnerability to foreign invasion; and providential discourses concerning God’s favour and protection. These lines of enquiry throw up some insights into changing English attitudes towards the Catholic crowns of France and Spain and key figures abroad. Finally, the thesis reaches some broader conclusions regarding the development of an increasingly militant Anglo-Protestant nationalism in the mid-Elizabethan period.

Over the last twenty years, the analysis of social networks has become an increasingly significant tool for sociologists, anthropologists and historians alike. Network analysis has not yet, however, been adopted extensively by historians of ducal Normandy or the Anglo-Norman realm. Although there has been some useful work on specific families or political groups, these have tended to artificially isolate networks from one another and from their broader social milieux. It has become clear that these problems can only be addressed by both inter and intra network analysis over a broader time frame, and that those networks themselves must also be conceived in broad terms. This thesis therefore considers three aristocratic kin-groups of significant contemporary and subsequent importance; the Clares, Giffards, and Tosnys, and includes both their cadet branches and their in-laws. All three groups are examined in terms of their kinship structures, their roles as lords and vassals, and their relationships to the church. While much of the material is Anglo-Norman, the chronological range extends from c.940 to c.1200. The aim has been to produce a fuller picture of how all three great family enterprises were constituted, developed, interacted with one another and were embedded within society, and to acknowledge that no man, and indeed, no kin-group, is an island entire of itself.

This thesis examines the theme of women’s madness in the 1960s and 1970s through the works of four English and French writers and film-makers: Chantal Akerman, Emma Santos, Jane Arden and Mary Barnes. It examines how these four writers and film-makers inscribe madness into their texts from a sociological angle, presenting the texts and films discussed as socio-historical artefacts while analysing each writer and film-maker’s representation of women’s madness. Inspired by psychologist Phyllis Chesler, who argues that madness is tied to socially defined gender roles and used to demarcate violations of expected gendered behaviour, this research analyses various manifestations of ‘madness’ from the everyday madness of Chantal Akerman, to psychiatrically incarcerated madness in the texts of Emma Santos, to madness influenced by anti-psychiatry through the works of Jane Arden, to complete immersion in anti-psychiatry with Mary Barnes. The interdisciplinary and cross-cultural nature of this thesis combines fields from both English and French studies, from the study of female writers and film-makers, psychoanalytic theory, the history of psychiatry and how they intersect with gender combined with contemporary feminist writings of philosophy, psychology, and theology.

‘The Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Carlyle’s French Revolution’ examines the work of Thomas Carlyle as a crucial aesthetic intervention in the modern reception of the French Revolution in Europe. It interrogates the prevalent critical constructions of Carlyle’s work and finds them to proceed predominantly from the Whig historical agenda, structured around such key nineteenth-century concepts as utilitarianism and civilisational and moral progress. Within this critical framework, Carlyle’s largely conservative cultural stance and Christian spirituality are hardly allowed any creative potential and, ever since the famous fabrication of James Anthony Froude who depicted Carlyle as ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, they have been perceived as artistically-stunted, irrational, and out of touch with the nineteenth-century political, social and cultural realities. In examining Carlyle’s involvement with German Romanticism on the one hand, and with contemporary British periodical press on the other, this thesis proposes a more comprehensive reading of Carlyle’s politics, aesthetics and spirituality in an attempt to represent his radically open, catholic and indeed cosmopolitan artistic agenda which taps into the Scottish Enlightenment concept of rationality, Calvinist scepticism towards nineteenth-century progressivism and acute perception of evil in this world, and post-Burkean Romantic aesthetics of the sublime. We chart the aesthetic movement from Carlyle’s early dialogue with Schiller and Goethe to ‘The Diamond Necklace’, Carlyle’s first artistic rendition of the French pre-revolutionary scene, delivered as a (Gothic) moral tale and anticipating The French Revolution (a historical work that uniquely employs the Gothic genre within historical narrative, arguably unparalleled in British post-Burkean Romanticism). The critical reception of The French Revolution in Britain is examined, with special attention paid to the highly unfavourable review by Herman Merivale in The Edinburgh Review, in order to challenge the Whig line in Carlylean criticism and to expose the fundamental artistic, political and moral disagreement between Carlyle and Merivale. Carlyle’s Calvinist stance sees both Merivale’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s facile exorcism of the categories of good and evil from their historical agendas as irrational given the recent French terror (which, in Carlyle’s reading, released its demons precisely through such a botched ethical deal). Similarly, I highlight Carlyle’s close dialogue with John Stuart Mill both in their correspondence, and in the publications in the London and Westminster Review, while I argue that this intellectual exchange is crucial for the reading of The French Revolution as a text challenging Mill’s utilitarianism, and written within the institutional framework of the contemporary periodical press. Finally, Carlyle is seen to make capital of the concepts of Gothic and sublime, introduced by Edmund Burke and popularised by the Anti-Jacobin Review in Britain, by applying them directly to the French mob in search of a new spiritual tongue for his times (a move that even a nineteenth-century radical liberal thinker such as Mill sees as politically, if not artistically, far too subversive and revolutionary). Creative non-conclusiveness and playful deconstruction of the prevalent post-revolutionary narratives of 1789 characterise Carlyle’s deeply spiritual and artistically-sophisticated text, which, in an orthodox Christian reading, rejoices in the messy, dark and complex residue of human history, through which Christian providence acts in mysterious and unexpected ways that do not allow for any simple, de-mythologised reading.