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This thesis examines the diverse body of seafarers known as ‘lascars’. Scholarship devoted to lascars who were employed during the age of sail has tended to focus on the minority who stayed and settled in Britain. Studying lascars as migrants can have the effect of obscuring the time they spent afloat and often risks casting them in the role of victims. Historians have failed to address fully the issue of how these men resisted the oppressive conditions of their employment whilst at sea. This thesis draws upon a wealth of unused source material – including logbooks, seafaring diaries and judicial records – to reconstruct lascar unrest aboard British merchantmen operating in the Indian Ocean between 1780 and 1860. It uncovers a wide range of hitherto overlooked forms of agency amongst lascars. These include everyday acts of collective protest such as demonstrations, refusals to work, assaults on officers and disorderly religious festivals. Such tactics enabled lascars to exert considerable influence aboard ship by venting anger, resisting unpopular orders and gaining concessions from their superiors. They also serve to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a ‘mutiny’ and how this could vary considerably between different cultural contexts. This thesis also examines more serious forms of mutiny, during which lascar crews killed commanders, commandeered vessels, expropriated cargoes and overturned established shipboard social relations. Uprisings of this nature occupy an important place in the long history of lascar employment and add significantly to our understanding of the Indian Ocean world. The last eight decades of East India Company rule witnessed a spate of such incidents, before European expansion and steam navigation rendered them unfeasible. The documents generated by this form of mutiny also provide one of the very few means of recapturing a lascar voice from the archives. Mutiny in all its forms thus offers an unparalleled window onto the working lives of these seafarers and the unique wooden world they inhabited.

My thesis is an examination of Singapore's aspiration to become a Global City for the Arts as set out in the Renaissance City Report released in 2000. By examining the key issues surrounding Singapore's attempt to become a Global City for the Arts, this thesis discuss the reasons why Singapore want to be achieve this aim and identifies the key obstacles in realising this goal. Using a Pierre Bourdieu framework of analysis, I provide a different way of examining Singapore's perception of its position in relation to other cities in the world and highlight key areas that Singapore needs to develop as it seeks to truly become a Global City for the Arts. By expanding and extending Bourdieu's concepts of 'field' and 'habitus', I show how the Government firstly, uses a variety of rules and regulations to manage the cultural production of arts and culture in Singapore and secondly, how it attempts to inculcate an appreciation of a specific aesthetic style in both Singaporean artists and audiences. I argue that Singapore's quest to become a Global City for the Arts is stymied due to its inability to develop a meaningful international global profile through the way it attempts to micro-manage the creation, production and consumption of culture in Singapore. These issues coupled with a rapidly changing Singapore society only serve to undermine Singapore's attempt to become a Capital of Culture. I assert that unless there is a fundamental shift in the way policy directives are implemented and enforced in Singapore, it is highly unlikely that Singapore can truly attain its goal of becoming a Global City for the Arts.

This thesis examines the operation of morally asymmetrical distinctions in the discourse produced in advance of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It does not set out to explain the invasion's occurrence, but, based upon the analysis of media texts, parliamentary debates, and political speeches, focuses upon aspects of the processes of justification and criticism preceding invasion. It blends together aspects of the work of Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann, with insights drawn from various approaches to the analysis of discourse and communication, in pursuit of an understanding of how the discursive space available to contributors to debate is restricted. It pays close attention to the closely related processes of 'disclaiming' and 'ontological gerrymandering' - interventions which are concerned with controlling what is, and is not, the case - particularly in terms of the way that they are orientated towards controlling how the person making them is to be observed. It is argued that the circulation of the illegitimacy of various positions puts some contributors at risk of being observed according to the more negative side of a morally asymmetrical distinction. It is argued that this creates 'difficulty' for them, and incites their engagement in particular forms of discursive work in the attempt to avoid illegitimacy themselves. Close attention is paid to any observable regularities in the ways in which contributors attempted to avoid having their position associated with, amongst other things, 'anti-Americanism', 'appeasement', 'pacifism', 'warmongering', or a 'pro-Saddam' stance, all of which would threaten their legitimacy. A variety of techniques are identified, including the invocation of a contributor's history of positions (their 'communicative career'), as well as their use of their allegedly less legitimate context-specific allies as a contrastive foil, at the expense of whom they claim their own legitimacy.

The thesis is an attempt to examine the Labour Party's involvement with the question of Palestine from the time of the party's first declaration on the subject in 1917 to the de facto recognition by a Labour Government of the State of Israel in January 1949. It considers the development of attitudes within the Labour Party, primarily those of the party leaders and policy makers, but also of the wider party membership, on the questions of Zionism, the Palestinian Arabs, the role of the British Mandatory Government, and the future of Palestine. It also discusses the formulation and content of official party policy throughout the period, and the part played by groups representing Zionists and Arab interests, in particular the Jewish Socialist Labour Party, Poale Zion. The thesis also assesses the extent to which the Labour Party was able to influence the Palestine policies of successive British Governments. During two crucial periods, between 1929 and 1931, and from 1945 to 1949, Labour Governments held office. Both periods are considered exclusively with the aim of examining reactions within sections of the Labour Party to the policies pursued, and the influence such attitudes had on Government policy.

Focusing upon American veterans' depictions of the US intervention in Vietnam and its aftermath, this thesis argues that bodies and issues concerning embodiment form the epicentre of these representations. Chapter One uses narratives by Ron Kovic, John Ketwig, Philip Caputo and others to illustrate that military training is a transformative process wherein the recruit's body serves both as index of, and vehicle for, his metamorphosis into a soldier. As these authors suggest, training inculcates a utilitarian attitude towards embodiment: the soldier's body is, primarily, a disciplined body whose value- and masculinity- resides in 'its' power to inflict injury upon the 'enemy'. As Chapter Two demonstrates, however, such machine-bodies (and the conceptualisation of embodiment which engendered them) were 'out of place' in-country. Veterans like W.O. Ehrhart, Nathaniel Tripp, Robert Mason, and Tim O'Brien portray the Vietnam environment as inherently threatening to the US soldier's corporeal integrity. Viet Cong and NVA strategies also disempowered the American soldier, challenging his faith in the innate superiority of the machine-body. Confronting injury further undermined the soldier's sense of corporeal invulnerability. Chapter Three considers the wounding, and treatment, of American casualties of Vietnam, arguing that narratives by Caputo, Kovic, and (ex-Navy surgeon) John Parrish 'recover' aspects of injury excluded from officially-sanctioned discourse. Chapter Four extends this scrutiny of wounding, exploring its interpretation both in-country and 'back home', and highlighting Kovic's depiction of injury and its consequences in Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Chapter Five demonstrates that encounters with irreparable corporeal damage are imbued with a sense of crisis: such wounding simultaneously demands and resists representation. Texts by O'Brien, Kovic and others are considered as 'trauma narratives' here, and a connection is made between writing-as-retrieval, and the potential of narrativisation to promote psychical recuperation, both for veterans themselves and also, perhaps, for US society generally.

This thesis is a social history of Bombay city in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It explores material changes in urban life consequent upon the impact of modernity and the varied range of contestations of the colonial order which they provoke. The first chapter outlines the specific nature of colonial modernism and shows its impact on the city's spatial forms and on its social relations. Representing a highly selective, power-driven, and essentially technological manipulation of modernity, it ensures distorted and differential outcomes within urban society. These conditions are considerably aggravated by the sudden impact of the First World War, the subject of the second chapter. The War increases material scarcities, worsens conditions of urban life, widens disparities between rich and poor, and intensifies colonial repression. At the same time, the crisis of war brings to the city the full potential of the revolution in communications which carries a modem discourse of civic rights. In the city, Homiman and sections of the bilingual urban intelligentsia rapidly vernacularize this discourse and diffuse it into new social contexts. This is perceived by the local colonial state as seriously threatening and subversive. The third chapter shows how Gandhi's anti-modernist rejection of the city leads to his attempts to control, and in some aspects reverse, this gathering urban momentum for an expansion in citizenship rights. The final chapter considers the new visions of urban citizenship expressed in the agitation for an expansion of civil and democratic rights, and in labour protest movements. This critical modernism looks to the future, rather than to the past, and acts as a force to humanise the city, presenting an alternative and potentially more radical challenge to the colonial state than the Gandhian movement.

While the general idea is to demonstrate how non-Western culture has been represented by a Western one, the particular aim of the thesis is to offer an analysis of twentieth century images of Turkey in the West mainly through the texts of thrillers and travel accounts. Since Turkey has generally been treated as a Middle Eastern country in terms of geography, culture and religion in those texts I have randomly selected, the negative images of Turkey and the Turks have been examined from a non-European point of view taking into account Michel Foucault's analysis interpreted by Edward Said. In order to provide a better understanding of the texts studied in the thesis, there is a brief presentation of the history and development of travel writing and popular fiction as distinct literary genres in the Introduction. Moreover, as the thesis demonstrates that there are a great number of direct or indirect references to historical representations of the Turks identified with the Ottomans, a chronological account of early images is made in the first chapter. These images can be summed up under such general headings as 'Lustful' and 'Terrible' Turks or a combination of both. The analysis of contemporary images of Turkey has been undertaken separately in ensuing chapters. While the images of violence are discussed in the second chapter, the images of the exotic which appear in the third, and the fourth chapter deals with first impressions of Turkey and the Turks. The thesis, which concludes with a discussion of the evolving process of Turkish stereotypes from verbal to visual towards the end of the twentieth century, suggesting that there are also other discourses in the media, particularly in the cinema worth examining as they also construct and perpetuate the negative image discerned in the selection of the texts.

Distinguishing between different ways of thinking about antisemitism, this study concentrates on those theories that understand antisemitism as a uniquely modern phenomenon. Covering the period from the mid-19th century to the present day, it first examines the work of Marx and Nietzsche and then moves on to those theorists who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust and concludes with the postmodern writings of Bauman and Lyotard. It argues that these critical theories of antisemitism all relate the emergence of antisemitism to modern forms of political emancipation and questions the impact of the holocaust upon this body of thought. The study argues that the fluidity and open-endedness by which the early writers characterise modernity - most notably the ambivalence within modernity itself between the possibility of full emancipation and barbarity - comes to be replaced by an increasing pessimism that sees antisemitism as modernity's only possible outcome. It argues that this change is accompanied first by increasing the centrality of antisemitism to modernity, and also by defining more rigidly the concepts by which antisemitism is explained, most noticeably, the concept of "the Jews". This study argues that as a result of these interrelated developments, critical theories replicate many of the assumptions of the antisemitic worldview identified in the early works. By calling for a cautious and critical return to these earlier ways of explaining antisemitism, the study concludes by pointing to an approach that remains within the tradition of critical theory, but which re-establishes the critical distance between ways of accounting for antisemitism and the phenomenon itself - one in which the "Jewish question" is de-centred, the explanatory concepts reopened to question and the promise of emancipation reinvigorated.

This dissertation analyses the effect of the rise of Japan on the ‘British world’ during the early twentieth century, from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) to the outbreak of the First World War. Victory over Russia in 1905 transformed Japan’s international position, elevating it to the rank of a Great Power, and allowing it to become an increasingly significant actor in East Asia and the Pacific. As its presence expanded, so did the scope for interaction with the British imperial system, bringing Japan into closer, and often frictious contact with Anglophone communities from the China coast to western Canada. This dissertation seeks to analyse that process, and assess its significance both for the changing nature of the Anglo-Japanese relationship, and the evolution of the British imperial system. By incorporating sources from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the China coast within a single study, this dissertation integrates disparate historiographies that have taken either the imperial metropolis or the colonial nation as their object of study. It reaches three primary conclusions. First, it demonstrates that the imperial ‘periphery’ came to play an increasingly central role in how the British relationship with Japan was construed. Second, it showcases that a sense of external pressure from Japan, often interpreted in racial as much as geopolitical or commercial terms, became a prominent factor in how colonial elites came to redefine their position in a wider British world. Third, it shows that diverging racial views, in particular, came to constitute a structural problem in the management of the AngloJapanese relationship. The following study opens with an analysis of British assessments of the Russo-Japanese War, and proceeds to scrutinise several contexts in which Japan’s rise presented new forms of competition and rivalry: the British ‘informal empire’ in China; Japanese immigration to North America; and naval defence in the Pacific. Finally, it examines how these new controversies, in turn, forced the Anglo-Japanese alliance to evolve. As such, this dissertation aims to shed new light on both on the internal dynamics of the British imperial system, and its changing position in the world.