The scale of the current global obesity epidemic and the implications of this for health, functionality and economics, dictates that assessing the origins of overnutrition must become a priority in all research fields. To date anthropometric historians have mainly utilised institutional sources providing height and occasionally weight data for a sample of the working class who experienced deprivation. Tailoring institutions offer new, innovative sources for the field; uniquely measuring body shape in its entirety and sampling the upper-middle classes and elites. Anthropometric data for waist circumference, hip circumference and leg length has been collected from Morris & Son tailoring establishment in Barmouth, North West Wales and from Henry Poole & Co. ‘Savile Row’ tailors in Mayfair, London. This data from the second half of the nineteenth century has been nominally linked to census and probate records and cross-referenced with contemporary medical tracts and modern epidemiological literature to highlight obesity related health risks within both populations. Results indicate that 'diseases of affluence' permeated many nineteenth century class groups. Both waist circumferences and hip circumferences increased over the life span. Furthermore, Barmouth’s economic transition from a port to a tourist destination appears to have placed individuals' health (when measured by early adult waist-hip ratio) at greater risk than the overall wealthier customers attending Savile Row. The Barker hypothesis may be relevant - an influx of wealth being of greater detriment to health in later life than consistent affluence. For Henry Poole & Co.’s customers an elite lifestyle enabled girths to expand, increasing the risk of chronic diseases but seemingly protecting them from infectious pathogens. In later life, during the second half of the nineteenth century, it would appear that optimal waist circumferences to reduce mortality were larger than current recommended levels.

Existing studies of this topic have not made enough use of the British archives. Nor have they analysed the American domestic response to UDI in sufficient depth. The policies of successive American administrations as regards the Rhodesian problem can only be fully understood as part of Washington’s attitude to Britain, to Africa in general, and to southern Africa in particular. And, because the issue of white minority rule in Africa raised powerful emotions both in the African American community and among white opponents of civil rights, the Rhodesian crisis became a part of the politics of racial equality within the USA, playing a key role in the developing ideologies of these two communities. This thesis is based on research in both American and British archives and aims to show that the prevailing interpretation, especially of the policies of the Johnson Administration once Rhodesia had made its illegal declaration of independence in November 1965, is mistaken. Scholars have tended to take at face value the oft-repeated claim of US policy-makers that Rhodesia was a British problem, that they wished to be no more than helpful bystanders, supporting British efforts to see the downfall of the illegal regime and the creation of a government based on majority rule, and that when they did intervene, it was merely to urge the British to be firmer in their resolve to end the rebellion. The central contention of this thesis is that the officials shaping African policy in the Johnson Administration were intimately involved in the management of the crisis and that, far from resisting a solution that legitimised the white minority regime, they actively encouraged the British to settle with the illegal government.

This thesis examines the experiences and attitudes of civilians in Essex during the First World War, 1914-1918. Through these it explores the reasons for people’s continued support for the war and how public discourse shaped conceptions of the war’s purpose and course and what sacrifices were needed and acceptable in pursuit of victory. This combination kept the war comprehensible and enabled people to continue to support it. Vital to getting a picture of how the war was understood is an account of the role of the local elites that sought to shape popular knowledge and attitudes about the war. The narratives of the war, the discourse of sacrifice, and elites’ roles evolved with events at home and at the front. Chapter 1 deals with the initial reactions to the war and growing acceptance of the major war narratives. The second and third chapters address two of their major features: attitudes towards the enemy and volunteering for the armed forces. The fourth chapter addresses the changes to the war's narratives and ideas of sacrifice as casualties and hardships increased from 1916, while Chapter 5 provides an in-depth case study of local military service tribunals. The final chapter deals with the crises of 1917-18, which covered both the expected course of the war and the image of equal sacrifice, and how local and national elites overcame these problems. The successful depiction of the Great War as necessary, just, winnable, and fought against an evil enemy allowed civilians to accept sacrifices in order to win. An evolving discourse of sacrifice framed what was expected of and acceptable to civilians. Local elites played an essential role: advocating sacrifice and endurance for the national cause while also working to ensure that sacrifices were minimised and borne equally. This combination of framing the war and mitigating its effects was vital in maintaining civilian support for the war effort.

The thesis aims to answer the following question: how did the relationships people had with Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford between 1275 and 1282, shape the nature of his posthumous cult? The thesis rejects the idea that the veneration of saints in medieval England was politically neutral, or that their cults represented a stable, uncontentious means of resolving social discord. Instead, it posits that the invocation and memorialisation of Cantilupe was an intrinsically political act, and one that was available to ordinary people; these memories were formulated through their personal experiences of life in thirteenth century Hereford, and the people and institutions that populated it. These arguments are primarily based on evidence drawn from Cantilupe’s canonisation proceedings, particularly records and testimonies of his purported miracles. The first chapter discusses the historiography of saints’ cults in medieval Europe, and how their social function has typically been characterised, and outlines the principal sources for the thesis and how they will be used. The second chapter of this thesis takes the form of a brief biography of Cantilupe’s life and career, with a particular focus on how his actions might have affected the ways different people perceived him after his death. The third chapter enumerates the principal institutions and individuals that exercised power alongside Cantilupe in the diocese, and situates miracle recipients for whom we otherwise have little evidence within these contexts. Chapter four deals with the perspectives generated by Cantilupe’s interactions with the other lay and ecclesiastical authorities that constituted the structures of power in the diocese. Chapter five concerns the attitudes generated through direct experience of Cantilupe himself, or the way in which these attitudes were mediated by someone who did know him personally. Evidence that helps us to establish how ideas about Cantilupe were memorialised is discussed in chapter six.

The rapid expansion in the size and effectiveness of the British fiscal-military state between 1689 and 1713 has been analysed by historians such as John Brewer and Michael Braddick as the outcome of increasingly impartial, rational and professional bureaucratic administration. Yet recent work on state formation in Britain and Europe has emphasised that effectiveness often arose from practices usually dismissed as inefficient or corrupt. This thesis provides a new paradigm by comparing fiscal-military structures to contemporary commercial enterprises, which functioned by coordinating the efforts of suppliers and buyers. Coordination was achieved in turn through mutual trust, which overcame principal-agent problems and reduced transaction costs. This thesis suggests that by analogy, those polities that could encourage cooperation and mutual trust between autonomous officials, agencies and private contractors enjoyed the greatest success as fiscal-military states. In the mercantile or financial world trust was created through kinship and friendship, as well as common religious, ethnic or national identities, which contained inbuilt informal mechanisms for policing behaviour. This thesis examines the financing and supply of the British army in Ireland and Europe between 1689 and 1713 to conclude that these elements also served to create trust within state structures, and that even political partisanship – normally dismissed as a disruptive, even destructive, influence – generated a community of shared political interests that encouraged trust and improved coordination. It also demonstrates that officials, politicians and financiers constructed politicised networks that interlocked efficiently with each other, permitting the improved coordination of public and private credit, and even informal financial intermediation intended to maintain the liquidity of the army’s fiscal structures. It therefore concludes that the success of the British fiscal-military state during this period was the product of improved informal coordination rather than institutional change and bureaucratic reform, and that political partisanship was integral to this process.

The thesis examines the relationship between reprobation fears and melancholic illness in puritan culture over a period of approximately ninety years. Reprobation formed part of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, by which God had chosen a few for salvation (the elect), and many for destruction (the reprobate). When a person came to believe that they were reprobate, this could give rise to symptoms of fear and despair similar to those associated with melancholy (an imbalance of black bile believed to affect the brain). The thesis shows how puritans used explanations based on melancholy in order to explain how otherwise godly people came to doubt their election. The first chapter shows how the Calvinist physician, Timothy Bright, incorporated ideas from medieval scholastic and medical texts into his Treatise of melancholie (1586), in order to explain how physiological causes could be at the root of reprobation fears. The second and third chapters examine the religious context in which Bright was writing. The second chapter shows puritan ambivalence about pronouncing a person to be reprobate through an examination of responses to the death of the apostate, Francesco Spiera. The third chapter shows how the Elizabethan puritan clergy developed a form of consolation for those suffering from despair of salvation based on the medieval idea that melancholy was the ‘devil’s bath’. The fourth and fifth chapters show the importance of physiological explanations for despair in defending the reputations of the dying. When a godly person despaired on their death-bed, or committed suicide, this was blamed on a combination of forces external to themselves – melancholy and the devil. The final chapter shows how Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy adapted puritan ideas about despair, to be more acceptable in the context of growing resistance to the preaching of double predestination in the 1620s and 30s.

This thesis addresses two key questions: First, how did those involved in the provision of public housing in twentieth-century England conceptualise the people who they were providing houses for? Second, how did their ideas change over time? These questions are important and need answering because, although there has been a great deal written about the history of public housing in England, there has up until now been very little thought given to the manner in which the council estate tenants themselves were actually identified and conceptualised as subjects in need of state-funded housing. My thesis begins to redress this imbalance by providing an overview of the changing forms and practices through which prospective tenants were conceptualised and acted upon by those in positions of power in England between 1920 and 1970. Using records from local authority archives, sociological surveys, architectural and town planning journals, central government publications, Mass Observation reports and tenant handbooks, and focusing primarily on council estates in London, Manchester and Sheffield, it shows how ideas about what prospective tenants needed from their homes changed dramatically over the course of this period, with the narrowly sanitary and biopolitical approaches of the 1920s and 1930s increasingly being challenged and complemented by a host of new ideas and discourses which placed far more emphasis upon the prospective tenant’s emotional, social and personal needs. As such, this thesis not only adds substantially to our understanding of the changes that took place in the English public housing sector between 1920 and 1970, but also adds to the burgeoning literature on questions of governmentality; contributing in the process to our understandings of modern modes of power.

A clash of generations occurred in the 1960s Probation Service when increasing numbers of university graduates entered the profession. They have been described as permissive by historians because they prioritised the welfare of the offender. This was in contrast to their older, and relatively untrained, colleagues for whom a reform project was premised on the disciplining of character. Due to a lack of sources, however, it remains unclear how these two generations differed in their attempts to persuade magistrates over sentencing outcomes. Fortuitously, a rare cache of over 2,000 Social Enquiry Reports (SERs) survives in the records of the City’s Justice Rooms. Written by probation officers from across the Metropolitan London area, the reports represent a cross section of the capital’s diverse population. Using a number of techniques including oral and secondary sources, this thesis identifies members of both generations and examines the way that they persuaded magistrates. Sorting the SERs into types of offender, the thesis shows that both generations ultimately persuaded magistrates by subtly indicating in reports whether or not the offender and their families conformed to conventional gender norms. The main reason why SERs by the permissive university graduates closely resembled those written by their older colleagues was due to their common perception of magistrates as being socially conservative. Regardless of how liberal or not Britain became in the sixties, the courtroom was not considered to be a place where a rethink of morality had occurred. The university graduates therefore invoked normative character ideals in SERs because they believed it was likely to be the best way to achieve the desired outcome in court. Finally, as responses to offending were shaped by gender ideologies rather than the nature of the offence or previous convictions, the concept of the probation officer as ‘the burglar’s mate’ is rendered problematic.

In his Hebrew encyclopaedic compendium Midrash ha-Ḥokhmah, the thirteenth-century Toledan scholar Judah ben Solomon ha-Cohen reports of a correspondence, held in Arabic, that he had with an unnamed philosopher who belonged to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Italy. The present work investigates the different ways in which this correspondence helped transmit knowledge between scholars from different cultural and geographical settings. First, a critical edition, translation, and analysis are rendered of the two problems discussed in the text, which concern the construction of the five regular polyhedra and the calculation of oblique ascensions. The correspondence is then placed within the framework of other accounts of scholars who reportedly received imperial inquiries. It is shown that its subject matter was of interest to both the court and the scholarly community, and can be linked to the work of Frederick's correspondents Leonardo Fibonacci in Italy and the school of Ibn Yunus in Mosul, and to the work of later scholars - Campanus of Novara and Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Maghribī. The unnamed philosopher, who is proved wrong in the correspondence, is in all likelihood Theodore of Antioch. An analysis of the terminology used in the Hebrew translation of the lost Arabic original shows that Judah created a unique mathematical and astronomical vocabulary, which changed during his working life. It is influenced by that of Jacob Anatoli, but Judah's terminology is generally much closer to that of his predecessor Ibn Ezra. It is then shown that the interreligious collaboration recorded in the correspondence is typical for the appropriation of Greek learning in the Middle Ages, but its placement within the framework of the Midrash ha-Ḥokhmah is influenced by interreligious polemics. Here, it serves to prove the superiority of the Jewish religion.

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