This thesis is a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 till the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir’s under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict. Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute’s evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent. Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, it foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir’s journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world. The thesis begins with British anxieties regarding independent India’s international identity that arose in 1945-47 and covers the international involvement in the first Kashmir conflict (1947-49). Next, it undertakes a survey of the initial American attitude to India (1945-47) and situates the early American approach to Kashmir (1947-49) in that light. The thesis then shows the transformation of Kashmir from being a Commonwealth concern to becoming an American affair (1949-53). Further, it traces the dispute’s transition from the prism of Western pact-politics to that of Subcontinental package proposal (1953-61). The thesis ends with comparing the last Anglo-American intervention in Kashmir (1962-63) with its Soviet counterpart (1965-66).

Having suffered a 'century of humiliation,' a ruinous war with Japan and a highly divisive civil war, China was looking for answers to the problems that had plagued it prior to the Revolution. Politicians, philosophers and film directors of the 1940s had played a key role in identifying exactly what the social problems facing China were. Following the Revolution in 1949 the newly victorious Communist Party of China would show the country what the solutions were. Whilst Mao's desire to reconstruct Chinese culture has been well documented, less attention has been given to the way in which propaganda was used in a highly integrated way to present this message to the people through a variety of different mediums. This thesis focuses on the use of specific 'Model Workers' to identify and examine the way in which poster propaganda and the cinema were used to further the Party's goals of national unity, cultural reform and the construction of a socialist state prior to the start of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

The study of Graeco-Persian relations is not new to academia, however, as much of our information is found within Greek literary texts, we are largely at the mercy of Greek bias concerning these relations. This thesis will present a detailed re-examination of the relevant sources to gain further understanding of Graeco-Persian relations, with a view to looking beyond Greek literary bias. This thesis proposes that the influence of the Persian Empire upon the Greeks was greater than is initially implied by our sources and I argue that in the majority of the contacts between Greek and Persian, Persia took control. The notable exception to this is the highly debated Peace of Callias, which forced Persia to offer concessions to the Greeks, but it should be noted that we have no record of possible Greek concessions to Persia, and so we must treat this topic with caution. This thesis expands our knowledge of Graeco-Persian relations by taking a view of the entire period of these relations, from initial contacts until the accession of Alexander the Great, allowing us to view more general trends throughout this period, rather than viewing shorter phases within the whole period.

This thesis examines Japanese postwar foreign policy, specifically regional policy, based on two hypotheses that are closely related: (1) There has been a growing interest among Japanese policymakers in Japan taking greater initiative independent of US policy, not only economically but increasingly in the political and even the security area. (2) Japan has been quietly pursuing definite strategies for enhancing its national interests, and this style of Japanese foreign policy has been effective for achieving its goals, given domestic, regional and international constraints imposed on it. The thesis offers detailed analyses, within the framework of IR and 1PE, on what has changed in Japanese policy, what has caused the changes, what Japan has achieved throughout the postwar period and how and why Japan's policy exhibits such a style. These themes arc examined by looking at Japan's regional policy in the postwar period in the historical context, as well as by studying three case studies, namely: (1) the ideological differences between the Japanese approach and the Washington and Post-Washington Consensus on economic development and systemic transition. (2) Japanese policy towards the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998 and (3) Japanese policy towards East Asian regionalism. Extensive interviews with Japanese policymakers, such as MOF and MOFA officials, and Japanese intellectuals arc used for investigating these case studies. The thesis makes the following original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it advances the discussions about the nature of Japanese foreign policy, which has been the subject of academic controversy over the last few' decades, by shedding light on two related questions, namely (1) whether Japanese foreign policy can be characterised as reactive or strategic, (2) whether Japan's US priority' in foreign policy has meant that its East Asia policy is decided according to US relations, or whether East Asia has occupied an important position in Japanese foreign policy. Secondly, the thesis also advances the discussions about the style of Japanese foreign policy. This is still an underdeveloped subject theoretically and empirically, but could potentially lead to more extensive arguments including the nature of leadership. Thirdly , detailed narrative analyses of Japan's policies towards important events in the 1990s, which have not yet been subject to sufficient scholarly debate, despite their great potential to offer insight into Japanese foreign policy, make a significant empirical contribution to the study of Japanese foreign policy. Furthermore, these empirical discussions, which arc concerned with significant regional development in East Asia, contribute to the study of regionalism as well, given Japan's great economic influence on the region.

The thesis offers a social history of opium in colonial Assam by tracing the evolution of representations, perceptions and ideological positions on opium from local, national and transnational perspectives which enables a new mode of reading the province’s specific encounter with colonialism and nationalism. It studies Assam’s history through the prism of opium, particularly the interplay between state and society during the period 1828–1947, and focusses on three groups—addicts, peddlers and reformers—whose interaction defined the terrain of the opium question in order to challenge the economic and nationalist bias in the historiography. It interprets opium as a cultural commodity and social practice and reorients the framework of opium in India from export trade to domestic consumption, using opium addiction in Assam and the global prohibition campaign as the vantage point to explore the interplay between colonial policy, local dissent, nationalism and transnational factors in order to understand the role that opium played in shaping social, cultural and political discourses. The thesis highlights that the opium discourse epitomised the juncture where local phenomenon, national processes and transnational developments overlapped and produced a complex narrative of the intersection of notions of indolence, improvement and industry with modernities, resistance and localisms. As a social biography of opium in colonial Assam, the thesis addresses deficiencies in our understanding of opium in India as well as the wider historiography of opium and enables modes of interpreting Assam’s unique encounter with colonialism and nationalism while also providing a framework to understand the influence of transnational factors in determining local facts. The thesis signals the centrality of transnational perspectives to drug history and is, therefore, both an attempt at recovery of local perspectives and regional specificities in the context of Assam as well as the insertion of locality into the global history of opium.

Despite the fact that there is considerable literature in the English-language on East Asian history in the nineteenth century, there are very few works that focus on the international politics of the region in the thirty-five years or so between the end of the Arrow War and the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in July 1894. As a result, the history of East Asia in this period is often understood as a period of brief moratorium for the Qing dynasty of China before it finally fell prey to Western and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the century. In reality, the Qing was neither as passive nor as powerless as is often believed. On the contrary, the Chinese were successful in re-emerging as the most influential regional power in East Asia by the 1880s by making a conscious effort to reassert their influence in East Asia not only through domestic self-strengthening, but also by drawing on the traditional network between the Qing Empire and its neighbouring vassal kingdoms. This point has already been raised by some historians who have focused on Chinese policy towards Korea – a country which became the focus of imperial competition not only between Qing China and Japan but also Britain and Russia from the 1880s. However, little attention has been paid to how other states reacted to China’s revival. Much light can be shed on this process by looking at how two of the most significant players, Japan and Britain, related to the reassertion of Qing power and to each other over the future of Korea in the period from 1876 to 1894. This dissertation will demonstrate that it was difficult for the Anglo-Japanese relationship to become closer when the international environment in the region required them to prioritise their respective ties with the Qing Empire.

The thesis deals with volunteer bodies in India from the end of the Great War to c.1947. It examines the genealogy of these bodies as a projection surface for ideal citizenship, a space to experimentally put those ideas into practice and as site of a mobilisational drive ‘from below’ rendering these bodies contested spheres of national self-definition. The energies of ‘Youth’, both feared and desired by many actors, were sought to be disciplined into volunteer corps and utilised for the building of a disciplined ‘modern’ nation. ‘Youth’ and ‘volunteers’ thereby become mutually related categories, the former needing to be transformed into the latter. Several groupings of ‘volunteers’ appeared at the time, such as the Seva Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Khaksars, and the Muslim National Guards, all of which were provided paramilitary training and were available for use not only for various ‘social service’ activities, but also political intervention and, when necessary, for displays of violence, the latter feature most evident during the Second World War and the communal violence leading up to Partition and Indian Independence. Three levels of analysis are undertaken herein: the first, of event history, which aims not at a comprehensive narrative but to provide illustrations of the operation and dynamics of youth and volunteer movements. The second is an intellectual history (or genealogy) of the movements, outlining a series of engagements with ideas relating to modernity as well as to organicist ideas of the nation as a body with its citizens as component parts. The third is a structural analysis of volunteer groups with their tendency to resemble one another. Such ‘family resemblance’ also reopens the question regarding the greater ideological formations of the first half of the twentieth century.

The existing scholarship has typically explained the emergence of modern Japan as a territorial sovereign in the late-nineteenth century to be a result of its response to Western imperialism, which paved the way for it to build its own empire. Scholars have found Japan’s motivation for drawing territorial boundaries either in the pursuit of the maintenance of independence or its entry into the international society. However their narratives do not fully explain why the process led to the establishment of Japan’s sovereignty over border zones with ambiguous territorial status, such as the Kuril Islands and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Approaching the question by investigating local developments, this thesis presents a twofold explanation for the emergence of territorial boundaries around Japan: that the rise of sovereignty had origins in the long-term decline of the border zones’ political institutions; and that Japan’s expansion into these zones was enabled by a diplomatic equilibrium (which the thesis calls the balance of favour) among the Western powers. The rise of trans-Pacific commercial activities, the decline of tributary trade in East Asia, and Russia’s strategic shift to the Far East prompted fundamental changes in the political landscape for the border zones. The Western imperialists in the 1860s and the 1870s saw it as best that Japan control these areas, because one imperial power’s territorial gain would have unleashed a scramble that none of them saw as worth fighting. The above argument provides an alternative to the conventional Japan-centred narratives of interactions between Western imperialism and the East Asians. It also adds to the historical study of the border zones by providing a comparative analysis and connecting them with a broader context. It thus bridges the historiographical gap between the diplomatic history of bakumatsu and Meiji Japan and the local histories around the archipelago.

Applying a Gramscian approach, this thesis explores the relationship between hegemonic struggles in South and North Korea and the inter-Korean reconciliation from 1998 to 2002 and it argues that the reconciliation was pursued as hegemonic projects by the ruling political groups of the two Koreas. In South Korea, the 1997 economic crisis was an organic crisis that Chaebol-friendly exportist Fordism in the early stages of neoliberalisation yielded. The crisis caused counter-hegemonic liberal nationalists to attain political power. The new North Korean policy was a ‘national-popular’ programme that pursued nationalism, a counterforce to anti-Communism with which the hegemonic group exercised ideological leadership. Seoul’s rhetoric was to enhance peace on the peninsula but, in reality, the reconciliation process was undertaken at the price of tolerating the North’s armed provocations and nuclear and missile development. The ruling political group clung to repairing inter-Korean relations because it was a project to obtain hegemony from the hands of the hegemonic group. In the case of North Korea, the new South Korean policy had a ‘national-popular’ outlook of nationalism but, in practice, it aimed to obtain economic benefits to preserve hegemony. The economic crisis in the 1990s was an organic crisis resulted from Pyongyang's autarkist Soviet Fordism that excessively subordinated the economy to politics and thus worsened the shortcomings of the socialist system. The crisis brought about unparalleled damage to the existing system and, most of all, severely debilitated the state’s tight grip on society. In particular, it undermined the Party's activities that indoctrinated North Koreans with the Juche Ideology that legitimized the dictatorship and made hegemonic rule possible. Weathering the crisis without a full-scale reform of the system was vital to maintaining hegemony, and thus Pyongyang urgently needed economic help from Seoul.

A comparação de taxas de substituição não-sinônimas (dN) e sinônimas (dS) permite inferir quais regimes de seleção operaram sobre regiões codificadoras. Genes com d>N/dS > 1 são candidatos a estarem sob seleção positiva, e scans genômicos em busca dessa assinatura se revelaram uma ferramenta poderosa. Trata-se de um método robusto, uma vez que assume-se que tais sítios estão intercalados nas regiões do genoma sob estudo (e portanto partilham a mesma história demográfica), e que têm como foco a variação em genes específicos, eliminando ambiguidades acerca do alvo da seleção. Por outro lado, o critério de ω > 1 para que genes estejam sob seleção positiva é muito conservador. Isso ocorre porque geralmente apenas alguns códons estão sob seleção positiva, enquanto a maior parte das mutações não-sinônimas são deletérias e, portanto, estão sob seleção purificadora. Por isso, convencionou-se analisar subconjuntos de códons em busca de seleção, seja através de uma base de dados mais restrita ou através de modelos que estimam diferentes valores de ω para subconjuntos de códons, tornando possível inferir quais deles estão sob seleção positiva. Os genes das moléculas MHC têm vários padrões de variação que indicam que algum tipo de seleção balanceadora atuou sobre eles (alta diversidade, grande diferenciação entre alelos e a existência de polimorfismos trans-específicos). Os genes HLA constituem um subconjunto de genes do MHC humano e estão localizados no braço curto do cromossomo 6. Os genes clássicos de classe I (HLA-A, HLA-B e HLA-C) são expressos na maior parte das células somáticas e desempenham papel central no processo de resposta imune adaptativa, capturando e apresentando peptídeos na superfície celular. A região da molécula de MHC à qual antígenos são ligados para serem apresentados a linfócitos T, dessa forma iniciando a resposta imune adaptativa, é conhecida como sítio de reconhecimento do antígeno (ARS). É bem estabelecido que os códons ARS apresentam taxas de substituição não-sinônimas maiores que as taxas sinônimas para esses três locos, consistente com um efeito de seleção balanceadora levando a maior variabilidade funcional na região da molécula que interage com o peptídeo. Os genes HLA clássicos apresentam centenas de alelos, e esses constituem clados que reúnem alelos filogeneticamente relacionados e com similaridades funcionais. Apesar de não haver controvérsia sobre a existência de seleção sobre genes HLA, não existe consenso acerca da importância relativa da seleção sobre linhagens alélicas e sobre alelos individuais na diversificação dos alelos de HLA, e essa foi a questão que decidimos investigar. Nossa hipótese nula foi a de que as linhagens foram os alvos da seleção e a hipótese alternativa foi a de que os alelos individuais foram alvos da seleção ao longo da história evolutiva dos genes HLA. Buscamos, primeiramente, fazer uma validação do método de inferência de dN/dS usando como estudo de caso os códons ARS e sua relação com a capacidade de inferência. Constatamos que, dos códons que encontramos sob seleção positiva, todos (exceto um) estão também na classificação clássica dos códons ARS ou a ±1 códon de distância destes, mostrando que existem evidências de seleção em sítios vizinhos aos ARS. Portanto, uma classificação expandida, que inclua os códons sob seleção que não estão nas classificações ARS comumente utilizadas, deveria aumentar o poder estatístico de testes de modelos de seleção nos genes HLA. Ao comparar os resultados obtidos em análises filogenéticas com bases de dados com e sem recombinantes, verificamos que a remoção de alelos recombinantes altera as estimativas de parâmetros, a identificação de códons com evidência de seleção e a significância dos testes de comparação de modelos. Nossas análises mostraram que ω é significativamente maior para pares de alelos de linhagens diferentes do que para pares de alelos de uma mesma linhagem e que existe uma correlação positiva significativa entre o tempo de divergência dos alelos e as estimativas de ω. Verificamos, ainda, que é possível rejeitar um modelo nulo de uma razão ω estimada para todos os ramos da árvore filogenética e favorecer um modelo em que ω é estimado separadamente para ramos entre e intra-linhagens em HLA-C. Em HLA-A e HLA-C, ω é significativamente > 1 entre linhagens. Mostramos também, para os mesmos locos, ω é significativamente > 1 nos ramos internos. Em HLA-C, o modelo que estima ω separadamente para ramos internos e terminais foi favorecido. Nossos resultados mostram que a intensidade de seleção atuando entre linhagens é maior do que aquela dentro de linhagens. Entretanto, mesmo dentro de linhagens, há fortes evidências de desvios de neutralidade, sugerindo a ação da seleção natural. / The comparison of non-synonymous (dN) and synonymous (dS) substitution rates allows us to infer selection schemes which operated in coding regions. Genes with dN/dS > 1 are candidates to be under positive selection, and genome scans in search for this signature have proved to be a powerful tool. It is a robust method, since it is assumed that such sites are interspersed in regions of the genome under study (and therefore share the same demographic history), and which focuses on the variation in specific genes, eliminating ambiguities about the target of selection. On the other hand, the criterion of ω > 1 for genes to be considered under positive selection is very conservative. This is because usually only a few codons are under positive selection, while most non-synonymous mutations are deleterious and are thus under purifying selection. Therefore, it has been conventioned to analyze subsets of codons in search of selection, either through a narrower data set or through models that calculate different ω values for subsets of codons, making it possible to infer which of them are under positive selection. The MHC molecules genes have different variation patterns that indicate some sort of balancing selection acted upon them (high diversity, large differentiation between alleles and the existence of trans-specific polymorphisms). HLA genes are a subset of human MHC genes and are located on the short arm of chromosome 6. The classical class I genes (HLA-A, HLA-B and HLA-C) are expressed in most somatic cells and play a central role in the process of adaptive immune response, capturing and presenting peptides on the cell surface. The region of the MHC molecule to which antigens are bound to be presented to T lymphocytes, thereby initiating the adaptive immune response, is known as the antigen recognition site (ARS). It is well established that ARS codons have higher non-synonymous than synonymous substitution rates on these three loci, consistent with an effect of balancing selection leading to greater variability in the functional region of the molecule that interacts with the peptide. The classical HLA genes have hundreds of alleles, and these constitute clades which group phylogenetically related and functionally similar alleles. Although there is no controversy about the existence of selection acting on HLA genes, there is no consensus on the relative importance of selection on allelic lineages and on individual alleles on the diversification of HLA alleles, and that was the question we decided to investigate. Our null hypothesis was that lineages were targets of selection and the alternative hypothesis was that the individual alleles were targets of selection during the evolutionary history of HLA genes. We sought, first, to make a validation of the method of inference dN/d>S using as a case study the ARS codons and their relation to the ability of inference. Of all the codons under selection we found, all (except one) are also in the classification of classical ARS codons or ±1 codon away from these, showing that there is evidence of selection at nearby sites to the ARS. Therefore, an expanded classification, which includes the codons under selection that are not commonly used in the ARS classifications, should increase the statistical power of selecion model tests on the HLA genes. By comparing the results obtained in phylogenetic analysis using data sets with or without recombinants, we found that the removal of recombinant alleles alters the parameter estimates, the identification of codons with evidence of selection and the significance of model comparison tests. Our analysis showed that ω is significantly higher for pairs of alleles from different lineages than for pairs of alleles from the same lineage and that there is a significant positive correlation between time of divergence of alleles and estimates of ω. We also verified that it is possible to reject a null model of one ω estimated for all branches of the phylogenetic tree and favor a model where ω is estimated separately for branches within and between lineages of HLA-C. In HLA-A and HLA-C, ω is significantly > 1 between lineages. We also show that, for these same loci, ω fis significantly greater than one or internal branches. In HLA-C, the model that estimates ω separately for terminal and internal branches was favored. Our results show that the intensity of selection between lineages is greater then within them. However, even within lineages, there is a strong evidence of deviation from neutrality, suggesting the action of natural selection.