This thesis examines the most prolific emigration of any European peoples to the United States in the nineteenth century. From the close of the Napoleonic Wars to the turn of the twentieth century, some 5 million people left the area outlined by Bismarck’s Reich, headed for America.1 As a consequence of this migration, Germans represent the largest ethnic heritage group in the modern day United States. As of 2008, official German heritage in the U.S. (the lineage of at least one parent) was 50,271,790, against a total population of 304,059,728, a 16.5% share.2 By comparison, those of Irish heritage numbered 36,278,332, and those of Mexican heritage 30,272,000.3 During the nineteenth century, the mass movement of Germans across the Atlantic occurred in distinct phases. The period between 1830 and the mid-­‐1840s was a period of growth; the annual figure of 10,000 departures was reached by 1832, and by the time of the 1848 revolutions, nearly half a million had left for the USA. Then, between the late 1840s and the early 1880s, a prolonged and heavy mass movement took place, during which the number of departures achieved close to, or exceeded, three quarters of a million per decade. Then, from the mid-­‐1880s to the outbreak of the First World War, the emigration entered terminal decline. The last significant years of emigration were recorded in 1891-­‐2; by the turn of the twentieth century, it was all but over.

This dissertation is about how Jonathan Dickinson (1663-1722), a second-generation Anglo-Jamaican planter and early-Philadelphian merchant, made sense of the mercurial and uncertain Atlantic world around the turn of the eighteenth century. The following chapters examine Dickinson’s interactions with an extremely diverse group of European, Native American, and African peoples who collectively comprised a formative generation of colonial society in North America and the West Indies. The main purpose of this dissertation is to provide a counterpoint to the many tautologous, whiggish, and nationalistic interpretations of Anglo-Atlantic history that tend to deemphasise the obvious disconnections, disruptions, discord, and diversity apparent during the lateseventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. This dissertation further contends that individuals, driven by self-preservation and influenced by local circumstances, dictated the direction and the pace of many inter-colonial, inter-imperial, and trans-Atlantic developments familiar to the late-eighteenth century Anglo-Atlantic world. In short, new exigencies outweighed custom, and self-preservation, rather than directives from metropolitan governments, guided Atlantic peoples’ actions. By extension of individual actions, the nascent British Atlantic Empire began to take shape.

In one of his publications, the politician and merchant Anthony Bacon asked if ‘some honest Persons, of plain Understanding, and of tolerable Judgement and Experience, could be engaged, at the Government’s Expence, to make the general Tour of North America’. This person, he thought, would be able to forge a connexion between the metropolitan centre and the far-flung reaches of America and improve the relationship between mother country and colony by increasing the level of understanding of the other on both sides of the Atlantic. Bacon appreciated that this lack of knowledge of their American brethren meant that British politics and politicians were often working with limited, or biased, information when formulating imperial policy. This thesis analyses the ways six MPs with significant American connexions operated throughout the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s. It establishes that these men operated at the highest levels of British politics at this time and sought to create themselves as the predominant experts on the American colonies. In the debates on the nature of the British Empire throughout the 1760s and 1770s, these men were at the forefront of the political mind and, at least until the hardening of opinions in the 1770s, had an impact on the way in which the colonies were governed. More than that, however, this work has shown that – contrary to much earlier belief – the House of Commons in the later eighteenth century was not working in ignorance of the situation in the Americas: rather, there were a small but significant number of men with real and personal connexions to, and knowledge about, the colonies. As the imperial grounds shifted through the 1770s, however, even the most well-versed of these ‘American MPs’ began to appear to have suffered some disconnection from the colonial viewpoint. This thesis takes into account the Atlantic and imperial networks under which these MPs worked and formed their political theories and opinions. In addition, it seeks in some way to bring the politics of the American Revolution into the fold of Atlantic History and to assess the ways in which those with the greatest experience of working in the peripheries of empire sought to reshape and reorganise its structure from the metropole after the close of the Seven Years War.

This dissertation presents a fresh approach to the study of Haitian art through research conducted in the emerging interdisciplinary field of exhibition history. In a deliberate attempt to move away from existing notions of Haitian art as a formal or aesthetic style of art practice associated with primitivism – based on mid-twentieth-century art historical narratives – I have opted to explore the display of works by Haitian artists outside of conventional museum and gallery settings. Taking a broader cultural studies approach centred on three case studies, I examine the exhibition of artworks within the transitory sites of national cultural display at two world’s fairs and an art biennial: the Haitian pavilion at the World’s Columbian Fair of 1893; Haiti’s “Little World’s Fair” officially titled Exposition Internationale du Bicentenaire de Port-au-Prince of 1949-50; and the Haitian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. These exhibitions overlap in the sense that they all claimed to present an official representation of the Haitian nation-state and therefore an authoritative vision of Haitian culture. However, when we peer behind this veneer of official national rhetoric it becomes clear that at each of these sites there were numerous images of Haitian nationhood, as well as notions of a national cultural essence referred to throughout as Haitian-ness, being produced by various agents. Across the course of this study these include: Haitian and foreign state representatives, curators, artists, academics and cultural professionals drawn from Haiti, Haiti’s diasporas and elsewhere, as well as NGOs and other international collaborators. In each case those curating Haiti’s national displays at these events balanced assertions of national sovereignty against international marketability: delicate negotiations that, I argue, can be discerned through analysis of the forms, aesthetics, subjects and contextualisation of the artworks displayed. Across the course of this dissertation therefore I chart a shift in the substance of these Haitian cultural displays, and the artworks presented within them, from a fin de siècle expression of Francophile neoclassicism, through an uneasy post-war coupling of folkloric exoticism and western modernity, to a fragmented picture of contemporary Haitian-ness articulated with reference to poverty and cultural otherness as well as cosmopolitanism. Through an examination of these case studies I have sought to explore how the visual arts intersected with expressions of Haiti’s postcolonial nationhood at exhibitions staged within events scattered across the Atlantic World. Further, by charting shifts in the production and projection of Haitian nationhood and art across these three sites I have attempted to grasp a fuller picture of how entangled ideas of nation and culture have had a bearing on exhibition histories, international institutional engagement with and the marketing and perception of the work of Haitian artists through the long twentieth century.

Prior to September 11, 2001, a calculated image problem related to America’s defence strategy in the Near East and its foreign policy of exceptionalism culminated in its unfavourable perception in the Muslim world. To counter this setback, leading think-tanks recommended that US public diplomacy must lead the way in order for America to reclaim its positive image. During the Bush administration, this guidance was applied through the expansion of public diplomacy measures such as the State Department’s “Brand America” campaign and the “Shared Values Initiative”. Whilst they were successful at applying secular approaches to engaging international Muslim audiences, both campaigns failed to reach the core of Islamic society. This study contends that to reach this core, the crucial requirement must be to apply direct communicative engagement with local networks in order to restore trusted relations. In defining a new way forward, this study breaks new ground by examining the origin of this problem for America from the angle of communication. By acknowledging the many setbacks caused by various public diplomacy measures, we examine the prospects for the State Department in applying the post-secular communication strategy, Interfaith Diplomacy, to enrich political communication between US diplomats and key religious players in the Muslim world. Findings reveal that communication training under an Obama administration is essential for improving US-Muslim world relations, and this requires the recruitment of a Religion Attaché Officer Corps within the United States Foreign Service. A new Religion Attaché, equipped with a background in broad religious affairs and communication training in Interfaith Diplomacy, is likely to make significant headway in counteracting the tension caused by the US-Muslim world communication problem.

This thesis explores the origins and logic of the interplay between landscape and public policy in the Caribbean island of Tobago. Tobago is the location of the world's oldest protected tropical forest, established in 1763. This was the first but by no means the last occasion when particular policies have been formulated to regulate the relationship between land, commerce and people in Tobago. The thesis traces the emergence of particular ethics of land use and property in the Tobago from 1763 up to the present day and their interplay within the logic of policy. The central research aim was to analyse the disjuncture between the intention of government development plans in Tobago, and the actual outcome of those plans for the people and landscape. This was approached both by ethnographic field study, and by archival and oral historical work that could discern the historical development of the language of modern policy. The project involved the writing of an environmental history of Tobago and an ethnographic account of debates and trends in contemporary environment and development policy in Tobago. The fieldwork revealed many gaps in the existing literature with respect to Caribbean environmentalism and the history of Caribbean landscapes. The detailed archival research, coupled with a revised theoretical frame that it supports, should reframe and improve modern debates concerning environment and tourism. Drawing together the findings of the thesis research is intended to help form a new understanding of the origins of contemporary Caribbean policy processes, the beliefs from which they derive, the debates they generate and their interaction with the physical environment.

This dissertation assesses the degree of assimilation achieved by Irish immigrants in the US in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It employs a matching technique to link specific individuals in both the 1880 and 1900 US censuses. I use this technique to create matched samples of Irish immigrants and native born Americans, allowing me to capture significant information concerning these individuals and their families over this timeframe. Utilising these samples, together with other data, I assess the degree of assimilation achieved by Irish immigrants, in aggregate and in selected subsets, with native born Americans across a range of socio-economic characteristics over this period. Among my principal findings are that Irish immigrants did not assimilate quickly into American society in this period, nor did they achieve occupational parity with native born Americans. Younger Irish and those who immigrated to the US as children experienced greater assimilation and achieved higher levels of occupational mobility, as did those Irish immigrants who married a non-Irish spouse. Higher levels of geographic clustering were associated with lower degrees of assimilation and lower occupational outcomes. My research provides support for the argument that such clustering delays immigrant assimilation. My results also indicate continued cultural persistence by Irish immigrants as it relates to their choice of names for their children. Irish immigrants who gave their children a common Irish name closely resembled those who married an Irish-born spouse - they underperformed in the workplace and experienced a lower degree of assimilation. These results suggest that the flame burning under the Irish melting pot in the last decades of the nineteenth century was not very hot, and that the assimilation process for Irish immigrants into American society was a varied and multidimensional one.

This thesis, situated between literature, history and memory studies participates in the modern recovery of the long-obscured relations between Scotland and the Caribbean. I develop the suggestion that the Caribbean represents a forgotten 'lieu de mémoire' where Scotland might fruitfully ‘displace’ itself. Thus it examines texts from the Enlightenment to Romantic eras in their historical context and draws out their implications for modern national, multicultural, postcolonial concerns. Theoretically it employs a ‘transnational’ Atlantic Studies perspective that intersects with issues around creolisation, memory studies, and British ‘Four Nations’ history. Politically it insists on an interrogation of Scottish national narratives that continue to evade issues of empire, race and slavery. Moving beyond a rhetoric of blame, it explores forms of acting and thinking in the present that might help to overcome the injurious legacies of the past. Chapters include an examination of pastoral and georgic modes in Scottish-Caribbean texts. These include well-known authors such as James Thomson, Tobias Smollet, James Grainger, Robert Burns; and less well-known ones such as John Marjoribanks, Charles Campbell, Philip Barrington Ainslie, and the anonymous author of Marly; or a Planter’s Tale (1828). Chapters two to four highlight the way pastoral and georgic modes mediated the representation of ‘improvement’ and the question of free, bonded and enslaved labour across Scotland, Britain and the Caribbean in the era of slavery debates. The fourth chapter participates in and questions the terms of the recovery of two nineteenth century ‘Mulatto-Scots’, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. Bringing ‘Black Atlantic’ issues of race, class, gender, empire and rebellion to the fore, I consider the development of a ‘Scottish-Mulatto’ identity by comparing and contrasting the way these very different figures strategically employed their Scottish heritage. The final chapter moves forward to consider current memorialisations of slavery in the Enlightenment- Romantic period. The main focus is James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003) that engages with Walter Scott’s seminal historical novel Waverley (1814) to weave issues of racial slavery into the familiar narratives of Culloden. Robertson also explores forms of solidarity that might help to overcome those historical legacies in a manner that is suggestive for this thesis as a whole.

If one considers the fortunes of economic history in the 20th century U.S., the 1940s, 50s and 60s stand out as a particularly vibrant time for the field and economists’ contributions to it. These decades saw the creation of the main association and journals - the Economic History Association, the Journal of Economic History for example – and the launching of large research programs – Harvard’s history of entrepreneurship, Simon Kuznets’ retrospective accounts, cliometrics for example. Why did American economists write so much history in the decades immediately following WWII, and why and how did this change with cliometrics? To answer these questions I use interviews with scholars who were active in the mid 20th century, their publications and archival material. The bulk of the analysis focuses on the U.S., yet it relies in part on a comparison with France where economic history also experienced a golden period at this time, though it involved few economists. Instead it was the domain of Annales historians. This comparison sheds light on the ways in which the labels “economist” and “historian” changed meaning throughout the period of study. Economists’ general interest for history is best understood as a part of an ongoing debate on scientific method, specifically about whether and how to observe and what constitutes reliable empirical evidence. These debates contributed both to draw social scientists to history, and change the way they wrote history. In the U.S. the mid 20th century surge in economist-history was principally due to the post-war demand for knowledge about growth and development. The sense of urgency that came with this task increased scholars’ willingness to work with estimated (as opposed to found) data. This was reinforced by American economists’ experience in war planning and ensuing spread of an operations research mentality among graduate students. The issue of whether or not to estimate became a new demarcation line between “historians” and “economists”. By the late 1960s, scholars who wanted to turn to the past to observe economies evolve over several decades, and let these facts “speak for themselves” had largely been replaced by researchers who used modern economic theory to frame historical investigation, and relied on quantification and estimation as their main empirical inputs.

This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition.