Roman emperors came to power through a hybrid dynastic/elective selection system that was never formally codified. This lack of codification has caused problems for modern scholars looking to identify and categorize those who were involved in selecting the next Roman emperor. This thesis believes that these problems exist because scholars are not distinguishing the names of key ancient institutions from the underlying types of power which backed their capability for action. This thesis seeks to solve this problem by creating a categorization system for imperial accessions based around a basic unit called the “political interest.” At its core, a political interest is a combination of the name of the individual or group as listed in the primary sources, the different types of power they possessed, and the level of decision-making authority they wielded during an imperial selection. Using this system, this thesis creates a database of Late Roman emperors with information on when they came to power, the various stages of their accessions, what political interests supported them, and where these interests were located. This thesis then analyzes the political and geographic trends from the database and supplies provisional explanations as to why changes in the Late Roman accession process occurred.

À la fin du Moyen Âge, la ville de Metz, située à l’extrême ouest de l’espace impérial et à la limite des aires linguistiques allemande et française, se définissait à la fois par son caractère gallique et impérial. Dans un contexte où l’empereur Maximilien Ier de Habsbourg mit en place plusieurs transformations à la fois administratives et linguistiques auxquelles les États de l’Empire durent s’adapter, nous nous sommes intéressée à étudier la place qu’occupait cette ville romane au sein d’un empire qui se définissait de plus en plus par son caractère germanique. L’historiographie de la Lorraine, empreinte d’un lourd passé politique, a dépeint Metz, à la fin de la période médiévale, comme une ville complètement tournée vers le royaume de France. Or, les sources messines de cette époque présentent plutôt une ville tournée vers le Saint-Empire et qui entendait déployer les moyens nécessaires pour garantir ses droits et privilèges. Par le biais de l’étude de la ville de Metz, nous avons mené une réflexion sur la nature de la ville d’Empire au tournant de l’Époque moderne. Cette étude nous a permis d’illustrer les moyens mis en place par la cité de Metz pour s’adapter aux transformations de l’Empire et d’en expliquer les motivations. Les magistrats de la cité durent s’entourer d’un personnel qualifié tant par sa formation et son expérience que par la maitrise de la langue allemande pour s’assurer de mener à bien leurs négociations diplomatiques, garantir leurs droits et privilèges et maintenir le dialogue politique avec l’empereur. En parallèle, le gouvernement urbain mit en place une activité de la traduction régulière des lettres impériales de l’allemand au français pour traiter la correspondance qui arrivait désormais essentiellement en langue allemande. Par l’étude des pratiques linguistiques, nous avons apporté des nuances au lien entre construction d’identité, langue et espace politique. En effet, à la fin du Moyen Âge, il ne saurait être question d’une équivalence entre unité étatique et unité linguistique dans l’espace du Saint Empire, une entité plutôt polycentrique et plurilingue. Cependant, la langue revêt bel et bien un rôle politique et identitaire. Par extension, cette thèse a également permis de porter une réflexion sur l’applicabilité des concepts de pays d’entredeux et de frontière linguistique pour la période médiévale.

L’essor de la photographie au milieu du 19ème siècle est contemporain de changements importants survenus au sein de la société française. A Paris sous le Second Empire, la forte hausse du pouvoir d’achat, due en grande partie aux travaux haussmanniens, influence l’image publique des citadins. La ville et ses grands boulevards offrent aux plus privilégiés la possibilité de se promener, de s’exhiber, de paraître selon certaines normes pour se mettre en lumière. Représentations qui seront ensuite fixées par les artistes : écrivains, peintres, sculpteurs, caricaturistes et photographes, ils concourent tous à immortaliser ce nouveau mode de vie et ses acteurs.Le portrait, ce moyen de représentation par excellence auparavant réservé à l’aristocratie, deviendra finalement accessible aux autres milieux sociaux. En comparaison avec les autres techniques, le portrait photographique gagnera davantage de succès et ce, grâce à de multiples critères : la baisse progressive de son coût, sa vitesse d’exécution, sa véracité reconnue par le public, sa capacité d’être reproduit à l’identique en grand nombre depuis l’invention du procédé collodion humide, sans oublier la naissance du portrait-carte de visite qui accélère sa démocratisation.Notre recherche repose sur un dépouillement minutieux d’archives photographiques. Elle aura comme objectif d’analyser le rôle joué par la photographie dans la procédure de représentation sous le Second Empire en répondant à un certain nombre de questions. / When portraiture was made accessible to French citizens in the nineteenth century, someconservative critics did not consider all individuals to be “portrayable”. This did notprevent people of means from hiring portrait painters to create their own “visiblememory”. In the process, they redefined the nature of the artist’s model. These newsitters, who were employers rather than employees, were not obedient: they insisted uponimposing their individual style and references. Photographic artists, on the other hand,persisted in directing their sitters—as artists did their paid academic models—and had toseek compromises that, without relinquishing their favoured styles, would satisfy theirdemanding clients. Some photographers published manuals and treatises explaining howto produce a good portrait without being unduly disturbed by the model’s whims andfancies. Furthermore, self-proclaimed experts in modern “etiquette” taught people how totalk, how to walk and how to appear in society. A careful examination of the conditionsbehind the production of photographic portraits, especially those representing fashionablecitizens taken during the era of the carte-de-visite, reveals the importance of the rolesplayed respectively by the model, the portrait photographer and the social codes ofconduct of the day.

This dissertation analyzes the means by which ritual traditions changed and spread throughout the Roman provinces in Gaul in the first two centuries CE. While numerous scholars have studied ritual shifts in Roman Gaul with a focus on material culture and imagery, this has not been accompanied by a focus on the negotiations involving the non-elite. By including non-elite Gauls in the analysis, my research creates a full picture of religious change that traces how the traditions evolved and how these adaptations spread across the region. This project argues that ritual sites, practices of ritual deposition, monuments depicting the gods, burial traditions, burial stelae, and some commercial production were all part of the cultural negotiation regarding ritual among Gauls of various levels in the social hierarchy. Communication of these cultural negotiations was transmitted along the trade and pilgrimage travel routes in Gaul, including both roads and rivers. Numerous individuals used these routes and discussed their own ideas and learned about other views of the gods on their journeys. As these ideas spread, they gradually standardized. This regional study, that covers a broad periodization, states that the provinces of Gaul adopted Roman ritual imports into their religion through a nuanced series of local cultural negotiations that were still part of a regional network connected by travel routes. This process takes into account communal choices in regional changes. By broadening the focus of the study of provincial societies, this dissertation shows that the changes brought into new areas by the Romans created a complex network of negotiation, which crossed social hierarchies and geographical boundaries.

The level of analysis undertaken in this study can only suggest the role that Nuzi Ware may have played in the signaling of political identity and relationships in the Kingdom of Mitanni. Yet, this study has brought to the spotlight aspects of Mitannian political organization that have been on the periphery of many analyses of Nuzi Ware as well as studies of the Mitanni Empire. This study used the known data about Nuzi Ware and placed it in an explicitly political as well as social framework, confinning the Empire' s decentralized nature, as well as the important role of local elites in the maintenance of this Empire.

L'organisation de la défense de l'Île Bourbon de 1665, date de son peuplement officiel, à 1810, année de la prise de l'Île par les Anglais. Comment et par qui l'Île est-elle défendu au cours de cette période ? Quelles stratégies sont successivement élaborées et mises en place ? De quels matériaux et matériels Bourbon bénéficie-t-elle pour sa défense ? La présente étude tente de répondre précisément à ces questions et inventorie tous les obstacles qui pénalisent cette organisation de la défense de Bourbon, sur le long terme comme sur le court terme, et qui favorisent la conquête de l'Ile par les Anglais. / The organization of the defense of the island of Bourbon in 1665, when its population official in 1810, the year of taking the island by the British. How and by whom the island is it defended during this period? What strategies are successiveley developped and implemented? What materials and equipment Bourbon she has for her defense? This study attemps to answer these questions accurately and inventory all barriers that penalize the organization for the defense of Bourbon, in the long term as in the short term, and promote the conquest of the island by the British.

Accession negotiations to the EU since 2004 brought significant changes to European enlargement customary law and exacerbated the reliance of the Commission on conditionality to impose its leverage on present and prospective member states. The subsequent development of European norms in the pre-accession phase was transposed onto current member states and led to the edification of a Normative Empire. This research reformulated the concept of Normative Empire while resting on factual and contemporary evidence. It investigated why the increasingly significant role in conditionality of the principle of independence of the judiciary contributed to the metamorphosis of the EU into a Normative Empire. The argumentation of this research rested on the study of Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. In addition to their geographical kinship, these three cases share issues of rampant corruption, notably in the political and judicial structures, which remain the main obstacles to their accession or full membership. The analysis of the Commission's influence in judicial reforms during the pre and post-accession phases was supported by a thorough study of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism and the progress reports from 2004 till present. In conclusion, the Commission's post-accession monitoring in Bulgaria and...

No description available.

Abstract Not Provided / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis advisor: Penelope Ismay / Monumental projects British social imperialists inaugurated at both Trafalgar Square and the Mall seem like the most obvious examples of imperial arrogance, examining the processes through which they were envisioned, planned, and realized reveals a deep insecurity, both about who Britons were as a people, and ultimately, where they stood in the world as a nation. It is exceedingly difficult to identify a specific, overarching vision from any one British official for either project’s realization precisely because there were so many competing interpretations of how social imperialists should monumentalize—not to mention the competing individuals themselves. Though this insecurity is probably not unique to Britain, I believe the ideological emptiness it betrays is unique to modern empire. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Scholar of the College. / Discipline: History.