Kladno used to be one of the symbols of industry in the period before 1989, with a long tradition in coal mining and steel processing. And so the whole Kladensko been several generations of labor associated with these activities either directly in the industry itself or sector services necessary for the operation of mines and steel mills. The beginning of the nineties meant for this area great bewilderment and incomprehension, metallurgical and mining operations gradually ceased operating and the region began to grapple with a hitherto unknown phenomenon of unemployment. This thesis deals with the "destiny" of the region during the second half of the 20th century to the present. Qualitative research methods in the form of oral history interviews will try to map out the life stories of individuals associated with the aforementioned changes, to adapt to new social circumstances and views about their life before and after 1989. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This dissertation attempts to integrate the household and children more fluidly into measures of well-being in the past. In part one, I develop a Monte Carlo simulation to test some of the assumptions of Allen’s welfare ratio methodology. These included his assumptions that family size was constant over time, that there were no female-headed households and that women and children did not participate in the labour force. After all of the adjustments, it appears that Allen’s welfare ratios underestimate the welfare ratios of a demographically representative group of families, especially if women and children’s labour force participation is included. However, the predicted distributions also highlight the struggles of agricultural labourers, who are given separate consideration. Even the average agricultural labourers’ family with women and children working would have had to rely of self- provisioning, gleaning, poor relief or the extension of the working year to make ends meet at the poorest point in their family life cycle. Part two adjusts Floud et al.’s estimates of calorie availability in the English economy from 1700 to 1909 for the costs of digestion, pregnancy and lactation. Taken together, these three additional costs reduced the amount calories available by around 15 per cent in 1700 but only by 5 per cent in 1909 because of the changing composition of the English diet. Part three presents a new adaptive framework for studying changes in children’s growth patterns over time and a new methodology, longitudinal growth studies, for measuring gender disparities in health in the past. An adaptive framework for understanding growth provides a more parsimonious explanation for the vast catch-up growth achieved by slave children in the antebellum American South. The slave children were only able to achieve this catch-up growth because they were programmed for a tall height trajectory by relatively good conditions in utero. Finally, impoverished girls experienced greater catch-up growth than boys in two schools in late-nineteenth century Boston, USA and early-twentieth century London, suggesting that girls were deprived relative to boys before entering these institutions.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.

This thesis examines Karen childhood transitions in a context of expansion of the cash economy, formal education and modern institutions. Since the 1960s, Thai state development has had a significant impact on the organisation of work and learning among highland populations. Today, household economies largely depend on cash income and children aspire towards an adult life in which paid work is central. Formal education is highly valued as a means to reach this goal. Children often migrate for education to better-resourced locations and access scholarships provided by national and international institutions. On the basis of 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between October 2007 and September 2009, the thesis seeks to understand the effects of globalisation on politically and economically marginalized children in northern Thailand through the lens of changing modes of production and learning. Findings indicate that children’s migration for education reflects broad political economic inequalities among Karen households as well as between them and mainstream Thai lowland populations. International dimensions of unequal relations are revealed in local peoples’ collective negotiations with Japanese and Catholic Christian NGOs. Although socio-cultural constructs like ‘gender’, ‘generation’, and ‘ethnicity’ shape Karen childhoods, this study found that their economic and political status are more fundamental in shaping all aspects of their social lives, including their socio-cultural identities. Childhood transitions emerge as multidimensional learning processes towards mastery of ‘translocal identities’, the skill to manage identities and relationships across multiple spaces and institutions. This is a culturally valued skill evidenced when minority children tactfully negotiate differing modes of compliance, resistance, and adaptation, especially in the domains of work and education. Thus, children participate in the moulding of local versions of the modern political economy of northern Thailand.

This thesis considers the burlesque literary forms in the work of the seventeenth-century writer, Cyrano de Bergerac. It challenges current scholarship by looking beyond libertinism to consider the importance of Cyrano's comic writing practices. While it does not deny the philosophical and scientific focus of Cyrano's oeuvre, it suggests that the burlesque is a defining characteristic. By taking into account the literary context in which Cyrano was writing – notably the querelle des Lettres and the rise of the histoire comique – as well as looking at other comic writers that could have influenced Cyrano, and through close textual readings, this thesis reveals that burlesque forms are often used in excess in Cyrano's work – forms compete against forms – producing destructive effects; burlesque forms can, in effect, be self-defeating. This project then asks whether it is possible to consider Cyrano a comic writer at all. It does demonstrate, however, that, in ridiculing everyone and everything, Cyrano too makes a mockery of the very idea of a dissimulative text. In questioning the literary gesture that Cyrano makes through his battling burlesque forms, this thesis suggests that libertinism can appear to be one of many playful masks the author assumes in his work. Is Cyrano a burlesque libertine? If so, this thesis raises the wider question of whether there are other imposters within the ranks.

From the 1880s, a new type of designed green space appeared in the industrial landscape in England and the USA - the factory pleasure garden or park. At the same time, industrialists began to enhance their office and factory buildings with landscaping and planting, and some opened allotment gardens for the children of factory workers. The making of gardens and parks around or near office and factory buildings, designed by professionals, was driven by belief in the value of gardens and parks to recruitment and retention of staff, to industrial welfare, and to advertising, corporate identity and public relations. The thesis will show how industrialists appropriated the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of gardens in a bid to redefine industry as progressive and responsible and to shift the image of factory labour from unhealthy and exploitative to healthy, caring, respectable and sociable. The thesis will argue that companies employed landscape professionals to contribute to a positive image of industry and industrial development in the suburban or rural landscape, and to harmonise industry and nature. It will show how the factory gardens and parks supported numerous and varied opportunities for outdoor recreation that in some districts would not have been so readily accessible to working people, particularly to women and young people. The thesis will show how companies exploited the social and cultural capital of gardens and recreation space through photography, illustration and film for promotional purposes. It will suggest that although the sporting and other outdoor recreational opportunities at factories were likely to be beneficial to many, the greater value to companies of factory pleasure gardens was in advertising and public relations. The thesis will build on existing research that highlights the valuable contribution of industry to sports and recreation provision in this period. It will also suggest that industry had more influence on gardens and gardening than is currently understood.

This thesis investigates the relationship between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations (LoN) during the interwar period, with a particular focus on the years from 1922 to 1935. This relationship was contradictory, shifting from moments of active collaboration to moments of open disagreement. The existing historiography on the Italian membership of the League has not reflected this oscillation in policy, focusing disproportionally on the crises Italy caused at the League. However, Fascist Italy remained in the League for more than 15 years, ranking as the third-largest power, and was fully engaged in the institution's work. This dissertation investigates the dynamics that developed between Fascist Italy and the LoN through a systematic study of the Italians involved. In so doing, it contributes to the historiography of the LoN and of the Italian foreign policy in the interwar period. The thesis argues that there was more to the Italian membership of the LoN than the Ethiopian crisis. It reveals the extent of the Italian presence and activity in the institution from the beginning, and demonstrates that the organization was more important to the Italian government than previously recognized. Membership of the League was essential to guarantee Italy international legitimation and recognition. Through an active appropriation of internationalism, the Italian government hoped to obtain practical benefits in the colonial sphere. The thesis uncovers the depth and variety of interactions between nationalism and internationalism in the case of Italy and the League, establishing that they did not oppose each other but rather interacted. This dissertation illustrates the complexity of being an Italian working in the League, as well as the grey areas between nationalism and internationalism evident within individual experiences. Finally, it shows the continuity of actors and expertise in Italy's international cooperation between the interwar and the post-1945 period.

A 1755 advert in the Gloucester Journal listed for sale, 'A MODERN-BUILT HOUSE, with four rooms on a floor, fit for a gentleman'. In the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 'gentlemen's houses' like the one described evolved as a cultural norm. This thesis offers a social and cultural reading of an under-studied group of small free-standing classical houses built in the west of England between 1680 and 1770. By developing a profile of eighty-one gentlemen's houses and one hundred and thirty-four builders and owners, this study unites subjects such as the history of architecture, landscapes, domestic interiors, objects and social development that are often treated separately. The design, spatial arrangement, and furnishings of gentlemen's houses precisely defined the position of their builders and owners in the social hierarchy. The 1720s marked an important shift in the location and meaning of building that corresponded to an alteration in the background of builders. Small classical houses moved from a relatively novel form of building for the gentry to a conventional choice made by newcomers often from commercial and professional backgrounds. Gentlemen's houses projected status in a range of settings for both landed and non-landed elites, highlighting the house as a form of status-enhancing property rather than land. Moreover, gentlemen's houses had adaptable interior spaces and were furnished with an array of objects that differed in number and quality from those lower and higher in society. The connections between gentlemen's houses and important processes of social change in Britain are striking. House-building and furnishing were measured strategic activities that calibrated social status and illustrated mobility. This thesis demonstrates that gentlemen's houses are one key to understanding the permeability of the English elite as well as the combination of dynamism and stability that characterized eighteenth-century English society.

This thesis examines the relationship between ethnicity and violent group mobilisation in Liberia’s civil war (1989-2003). It focuses on Gio, Mano and Mandingo mobilisation to investigate how and why internal dynamics about moral norms and expectations motivated leadership calls for violence and ethnic support. Much of the existing literature interprets popular involvement in violent group mobilisation on the Upper Guinea Coast as a youth rebellion against gerontocracy. I argue that such an approach is incomplete in the Liberian case, and does not account for questions of ethnic mobilisation and the participation of groups such as the Gio, Mano and Mandingo. At the onset of hostilities, civilians in Liberia were not primarily mobilised to fight based on their age, but rather as members of ethnic communities whose membership included different age groups. I explore constructivist approaches to ethnicity to analyse mobilisation for war as the collective 'self-defence' of ethnic groups qua moral communities. In the prelude to the outbreak of civil war, inter-ethnic inequalities of access to the state and economic resources became reconfigured. Ethnic groups—as moral communities—experienced external 'victimisation' and a sense of internal dissolution, or threatened dissolution. In particular, the understanding of internal reciprocal relations between patrons and clients within ethnic groups was undermined. Internal arguments about morality, personal responsibility, social accountability/justice, increased the pressure on excluded elites and thus incentivised them to pursue violent political strategies. Mobilisation took on an ethnic form mainly because individuals believed that they were fighting to protect the moral communities that generate esteem and ground understandings of good citizenship. Therefore, ethnic participation in the Liberian countryside differed from the model peasant rebellion that seeks to overthrow the feudal elites. Rather than a revolution of the social order, individuals regarded themselves as protecting an extant ethnic order that provided rights and distributed resources. Even though some individuals fought for political power and resources, and external actors facilitated group organisation through the provision of logistical support, the violence was also an expression of bottom-up moral community crisis and an attempt by politico-military elites to keep their reputation and enforce unity.

This thesis examines welfare provision in rural Oxfordshire after the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. The county had little industrial development, remained largely agricultural in nature, and the region had been perceived as a backwater of friendly society development. This thesis rectifies that view and places Oxfordshire as an important component of the movement with its independent nature and early rejection of affiliated order branches that emanated from urbanized and industrialized areas. There is no evidence of impetus given to friendly society formation after the implementation of the new poor law with the general increase in societies continuing. However, the relationship with poor law administration changed. A case study of Stonesfield demonstrates how the friendly society became the heart of village life and was integral to self help and support for the poor. A wider view is taken of welfare provision, with detailed assessment of a range of welfare instruments, such as coal and clothing clubs, soup kitchens, and medical clubs, together with an appraisal of their geographical spread. The range of welfare instruments available is compared to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, a model of human motivation. The case study of Whitchurch provides an in-depth assessment of one parish welfare system where after 1834 at least nine stands of welfare were available at all times to the poor who held a degree of selection in what was an increasingly a consumer market. The thesis is underpinned throughout by the use of extensive primary source material.