This thesis seeks to illuminate the nature of the British national interest in Southeast Asia (SEA), as defined and pursued by the Attlee government, 1945-1951. The analysis is undertaken by examining the relationship between government and business in the region, identifying areas of consensus and conflict. It is established that the British government intended to do its utmost to aid British firms in SEA to re-establish their businesses after the disruption to production and trade caused by the war, as a means of protecting its own subjects and assets, and also of furthering British political and commercial interests in the region. However, this was at a time when the need to divert resources to reconstruct and support the domestic British economy made the task of assisting business overseas problematic, to the extent that government's ability to provide material support was limited. Whilst such logistical difficulties were real, it can also be said that differences over the level of assistance to business were heightened by ideological division between businessmen, on the one hand, and government officials, on the other. These themes are explored through an analysis of the interactions of British enterprises which had business interests in Siam (Thailand), Indonesia and Malaya, with the British government and the local British authorities in these countries. This examination takes place against the background of a readjustment in Britain's relations with these countries in the aftermath of the war. Given the urgency of reconstruction at home, the Attlee government was lessening Britain's overseas commitments. In SEA the British government firmly believed economic and social betterment to be pivotal to the task of quickly establishing stability and also, later on, in protecting the region from Communist expansionism. Therefore US cooperation was sought as a source of necessary resources, but at the same time the British were bound to protect British based business interests against US competition, not least because of their valuable impact on the value of Sterling. The Attlee administrations' endeavour to obtain US cooperation however often proved to be ineffective because of the US government's reluctance to be involved in this particular part of Asia. In practice, government assistance to and protection of business were not always possible in the aftermath of the war and firms needed to transform themselves to adapt to new times. Despite this, the two worked closely together and the British government often showed a great willingness to provide moral and practical support for British enterprises. In retrospect, this cooperation only worked where the demands of business did not conflict with the interests and policy of government, and under such circumstances, business was seldom satisfied. Those firms that did survive achieved this primarily by implementing their own strategies and some accomplished a great deal throughout the 1950s and beyond.

From the 1830s to 1917, despair in India drove a small minority into indentureship overseas. These were probably men and women of considerable initiative and extraordinary courage. Their achievements in British Guiana suggest this. Men, women, and children toiled relentlessly on the sugar plantations, while exploiting every conceivable niche to supplement meagre wages. They built a stable family life. They adapted rice and cattle to the plantation environment, thus adumbrating the character of future Indian villages; but they also resisted the injustices of the system. Indians founded villages throughout coastal Guiana, from the late nineteenth-century. In spite of endemic malaria, a hazardous environment requiring elaborate drainage and irrigation, poor sanitation, an undercurrent of Black envy, and the remorseless hostility of the plantocracy and the State to Indian enterpise in rice and cattle, they progressed. Indians adapted their rich material and religious culture, recreating aspects of their ancestral villages. At the hub of their tradition was the family: although most migrated alone, a modified joint-family structure evolved. Their thrift, industry, judicious delegation of family labour, and an exemplary commitment to their families, sustained them in activities which others considered unremunerative. The practice of Hinduism and Islam was costly; it encouraged saving. Cultural security strengthened their self-confidence and sustained effort; it bred a sense of purpose. By the 1920s, rice, cattle, commerce, etc., had spawned an Indian middle class. These set standards for the community: they established an entrepreneurial tradition; their professional achievements undermined Indian indifference to education; some promoted intellectual curiosity; and facilitated Indian participation in organised cricket, the most eloquent manifestation of arrival. The middle class expanded conceptions of attainable goals. But Indian adaptation was shaped profoundly by a resurgence of pride in the achievements of ancient India and the rise of Gandhi. A separate Indian community, differing significantly in their basic assumptions from those of the Blacks, developed in British Guiana. The implications for race relations were already ominous in the 1920s.

This thesis suggests a new approach to studying the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) containing Exodus. After surveying the history of research, Longacre suggests applying a contextualized approach to the study of these scrolls, which seeks to understand them first as individual material artefacts and then in comparison to other manuscripts which are most closely contextually connected to them. Each manuscript is only subsequently compared with increasingly contextually distant manuscripts according to a hierarchy of contextual proximity. A network of close contextual connections between the Hebrew DSS containing Exodus warrant the isolation of this corpus as a test case for application of a contextualized approach. Based on new transcriptions and reconstructions of each of the included manuscripts (1Q2 2Q2 2Q3 2Q4 4Q1 4Q11 4Q13 4Q14 4Q17 4Q18 4Q19 4Q20 4Q21 4Q22 4Q158 4Q364 4Q365 4Q366 Mur1), Longacre then analyzes patterns that emerge from a comparison of the characteristics of each of these manuscripts. Finally, from a close examination of textual overlaps from a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative perspectives, Longacre suggests several specific groups and clusters of texts and synthesizes them to provide clearer insight into the documented Hebrew-language textual history of the book of Exodus.

While there has been a significant focus on how hospitality was commodified, commercialised and standardised in the literature, less attention is given to the extent of which local traditions and hospitality change and adapt to the demand of tourists. Through an empirically grounded investigation, this thesis at micro-level gives an insight to how local hospitality and traditions in Mekong Delta (Vietnam) transform in homestay practice under the pressure of tourism development. Normally, the local traditions and hospitality are offered by the host and experienced by the guests. However by focusing on contact zone, the settings and decoration of homestays, this thesis shows this mechanism in Mekong Delta is not one way but a dynamic process. The guests do not only passively receive but also have influences on what the hosts can offer. In fact, the homestay providers have capitalised on what tourists want to see. As consequence, local traditions and hospitality are changing and subject to re-invention to adapt to legal requirements, tourists demands, and social context. Ironically, tourists are using homestay believing they are experiencing true Vietnamese culture, while actually the local Vietnamese people are changing their traditional home styles and behaviour to accommodate the tourists.

This thesis evaluates the design of monetary and macroprudential policies. Different models of expectation are examined to get a comprehensive understanding about the work of monetary and macroprudential policies. It is begun by assuming agents are boundedly rational under Recursive Least Square (RLS) and Stochastic Gradient (SG) learning, followed by fully rational agents under rational expectation (RE). When agents follow RLS learning, both determinacy and E-stability criteria are required to find preferred policies. We focus on the effect of habit in consumption in the design of preferred policies. We found the presence of habit in consumption enlarges both determinacy and E-stability region. The same methodology is then used in another model that features housing market and financial constraint. The result showed that a response to the growth of housing prices via the LTV rule may increase determinacy and E-stability. We also conduct a refinement in the design of preferred economic policies by incorporating SG-stability criteria, in addition to determinacy and E-stability. The result showed that central bank’s task gets more difficult since the Taylor Principle is insufficient to ensure a robust learnability of REE. In other works, we deviate from the assumption of boundedly rational agents and consider fully rational agents (RE). We examine the issue of monetary policy, banks’ lending decisions and business cycles in Indonesia. This thesis completes its analysis by evaluating the role of news in the formation of agents’ expectations.

This thesis addresses the quality of ‘difference’ in L2 English argumentative essays written by Japanese students by focusing on the use of metadiscursive nouns. It does this by comparing the similarities and differences in the use of 33 shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) as discourse construction devices in two corpora: the Japanese subcorpus of ICLE – Japanese writing in English as a foreign language – and the US subcorpus of LOCNESS – Americans writing in English as a first language. Based on Schmid’s (2000) theory, discourse roles of shell nouns are analysed according to three aspects: noun frequencies, syntactic patterns where shell nouns occur, and lexicalisation of nouns. This thesis demonstrates that one source of different impressions in non-native speaker writing stems from their use of shell nouns. The findings show that each group of students uses shell nouns differently, most notably for anaphoric referring functions. Employing different lexicalisation patterns, Japanese students use nouns for these functions more frequently than American students. Different lexicalisations are correlated with preferred discourse construction and argumentation patterns in each of the corpora. This thesis describes the findings and discusses causes of difference that suggest a transfer of L1 cultural values and essay conventions. Aspects of shell noun usage that the Japanese students tend not to handle well are identified and implications for pedagogical practice are discussed.

The principal aim of this thesis is to seek answers to the two core research questions: how has popular nationalism been instrumental in China’s Japan policy vis-à-vis its domestic politics since the end of the Cold War? And, how and to what extent Chinese government has manage popular nationalism in foreign and domestic policy practices? Using Japan as an empirical subject, this thesis explores and investigates the complex interactive relations between popular nationalism, in particular emotions and sentiment, and foreign policy and domestic politics in post-Cold War China. The work takes a constructivist view, of which popular nationalism, foreign policy and domestic politics are seen as mutually constituted. Taking two recent diplomatic frictions between China and Japan as case studies, the thesis critically examines the mutually constitutive effects of popular nationalism on China’s Japan policy in respective to its domestic politics. In addition, the work’s pioneering studies on the new ‘inward outcry’ syndrome in Chinese nationalism further highlights the mutual constitutive relations among popular nationalism, foreign policy and domestic politics. This thesis argues that popular nationalism plays a dynamic role in shaping China’s Japan policy. On the one hand, popular nationalism may instrumentalise to serve China’s domestic and international objectives. On the other hand, popular nationalism has to be delicately managed in order to maintain social stability, amicable relations with Japan, and increasingly, China’s international image and reputation.

Intangible heritage is a growing concept of emphasis in international communities. This study will define intangible heritage and focus on the performing arts in Taiwan. Inasmuch as Taiwanese Opera and Hand Puppetry are two of the most significant manifestations among others, research methods of qualitative interviews and non-participant observations will be used to gain an insight into their practices through investigating certain practitioners. This study will in particular explore organisational management and training approaches that ensure their artistry and skills are transmitted, contributing to the dissemination of intangible heritage. Furthermore, this study will inspect how the competent authorities determine the designation and registration of intangible heritage. Governmental schemes and their implementation for the safeguarding intangible heritage will be thoroughly examined, revealing the integrity and effectiveness of administrative systems, especially as the competent authorities are confronted by certain problems in the interpretation of intangible heritage, interaction with practitioners and controversy. These are inter-related, inter-influencing, and restrictive. In responding to these existing predicaments, coping strategies will be proposed as research outcomes.

This thesis deals with Taiwan as a post-colonial nation, with an identity that remains somewhat ambiguous, from both internal and external perspectives. Specifically, in this thesis, the complexities of its Taiwan’s multicultural legacies are explored through the presentation in industrial heritage sites. Industrial heritage in Taiwan is mainly the product of the Japanese colonial period between 1895 and 1945, which spans the first half of the twentieth century. This fifty-year colonial industrialisation is arguably Taiwan’s most influential industrial heritage because it began a rapid process of modernisation that is continuing today. The key to this process is the industrialisation that led to the development of main parts of the island, catalysed new communities and social patterns and structured daily life. These industrial locations have now become heritage sites for tourism and creative development, Moreover, the interpretation of these sites highlights the re-contextualisation of the Taiwanese legacy from both political and economic perspectives. However, these sites also reveal some highly problematic place-related aspects of the colonial narrative. This thesis examines how this heritage is produced in a society that remains connected to Japanese culture, a society in which industrial heritage is influenced by the increasing convergence between cultural tourism, museumification and commercialisation Furthermore, new relationships are identified, which reflect the patterns and trends of wider economic, social and cultural changes. The thesis concludes by offering a deeper understanding of the valorisation of industrial heritage in Taiwan and its influence on broader Taiwanese narratives of geopolitics and global heritage agenda.

The Yuanshi (Yuan History)- a Chinese-language account of Mongol rule in East Asia compiled in haste between 1368 and 1370-presents hundreds of liezhuan biographical narratives on imperial subjects. Vital primary sources for reconstructing Mongol and Chinese history, these are viewed as chaotic texts receiving limited rhetorical input Taking the 4 7 subjects of an influential fourteenth-century biographical collection as a sample, this study demonstrates the considerable rhetorical fashioning undergone by some of these biographies, exposing narrative tools employed by the fourteenth-century Chinese historian-compiler. Starting from a case study on the biographies of Yelü Chucai (1189-1243), we identify three themes to the compilers' edits, which three thematic chapters follow across the sample texts. The first of these sees narrative scope narrowed, marginalizing non-'Chinese' elements of the imperium to impose a 'Yuan' shape on Mongol East Asia. The second situates bureaucratic governing institutions as a moral good, imposing a negative positioning on rival approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the characterization of the deserving populace as beneficiaries of moral rule. Though none of these themes emerge in full coherence across the work, the broad tendencies are clear, as is the all-embracing, shaping influence of the storytelling imperative toward vivid juxtaposition of ideal and deviant.