The thesis begins with a discussion of the literature on local working-class politics, which includes the work of labour historians, political geographers and locality-study writers. The latter have been especially keen to acknowledge the unique causal powers of the social formations of specific localities and to explore the implications of these for local political behaviour. Nonetheless, locality studies share with other approaches to local politics an interest in class to exclusion of other bases of social action, and a structuralism which denies human agency. The history of Poplar in the 1920s denies such explanatory logic. The Labour Party came to power in the borough in 1919. Yet although the class and economic structure of Poplar was very similar to that of the rest of east London, Poplar Labour Party was unique in the degree of its militancy. In order to explain this radicalism, the thesis turns away from structural analysis and towards cultural interpretation, exploring Poplar's politics in terms of local culture and civil society, focussing on five themes: the politics of class and of gender, the discourses of citizenship, the morality of the neighbourhoods and the religious faiths. The influence of these cultural 'communal sensibilities' on Poplar Labour Party are traced in order to stress the complexity and contingency of the relationship between a locality and its politics. That contingency is further emphasised in the conclusion, which describes the shift in Poplar Labour Party away from a left-wing and participatory form of politics and towards a right-wing and elitist mode as the 1920s progressed. It is concluded that both types of politics were closely linked to Poplar's culture and that, although local culture in all its complexity is vital for the understanding of local politics, there is no necessary relationship between a culture and the form of political expression it may take.

This thesis is concerned with understanding some of the social relations of property transmission among the middling-sort community of the northern industrial town of Stockport in the early-nineteenth century. Studies of the social relations of property in nineteenth-century England have often been written around the concept of class. The thesis begins with a brief, but critical, evaluation of recent theoretical and empirical studies of class. This is done in order to highlight some of the difficulties of using class as a conceptual framework for understanding the importance of property within the social worlds of those who owned it. An alternative approach is advanced which foregrounds the study of property itself. It is argued that by paying attention to the practices of property ownership and transmission it is possible to explore both the material and discursive significance of property to its owners. The following chapter reviews the literature on inheritance in order to demonstrate the range of issues that the study of property transmission can cast light upon. In addition, it sets out a methodology for studying property transmission practices, highlighting the importance of exploring inheritance within its legal, social, economic and local contexts. Accordingly, chapter three introduces Stockport as the local context for this study, examining the way in which economic opportunity, risk and uncertainty affected strategies of property accumulation, ownership and transmission. The remainder of the thesis investigates various spheres of the lives of the middling sort - including politics, professionalism, social networks, the family and business activity - through the lens of property transmission. Focusing on the national scale, chapter four begins this task by considering the reform of the legal machinery of succession. The protracted political debates that surrounded these reforms are examined in order to highlight the ways in which reformers aimed to create a legal system that guaranteed the rights of middling-sort, male property owners to securely and freely transmit all kinds of estate. Retaining an interest in legal matters, the next chapter moves the focus back to the local level by exploring the ways in which the making of wills and the disposal of estates forged a variety of social networks among Stockport's middling sort. As well as creating a demand for professional knowledge and expertise, such activities provided a source of status for those involved. It is also argued that such processes were central to the creation of gendered discourses of property transmission. Through a detailed examination of inheritance strategies recorded in the wills of Stockport's inhabitants, chapter six examines the role of property transmission in the social reproduction of middling-sort families. Particular attention is paid to the way in which inheritance strategies hinged upon gendered understandings of property and domesticity. The final chapter looks at inheritance and the family firm, demonstrating the close links between business survival and family provision. Resisting historiographical convention, it is argued that this evidence reveals the importance of considering the interconnectedness of the different spheres of the life of the middling sort rather than assuming their separation. The thesis concludes by restating the importance of property in disclosing the social worlds of the nineteenth-century middling sort. It also sets out the significance of the research in understanding the role of property and the middling sort in nineteenth-century Britain.

Little is known in detail of the chronology, magnitude and pattern of migration prior to 1800. This thesis examines Anglican Marriage Registers and the insight they can provide into past patterns of mobility in a county of early industrial development. After a discussion of the broad demographic context and a review of previous studies using these data,. three related themes are developed. - 1. Consideration is given to the annual variation in the numbers of marriages solemnised and to the contribution made by extraparochial alliances to this-overall pattern in places of different socio-economic structure and population size. This provides a temporal and structural setting, within which to examine mobility. 2. The locational information recorded in the registers is used to calculate marriage distances and the dimensions and orientation of marriage horizons. The spatial patterns are subsequently integrated with the temporal analysis and with the variety of additional evidence available in the marriage registers to provide a fuller context for evaluating the pattern. This provides an essentially descriptive overview of marriage patterns, but does also yield some explanatory insights. 3. The problems of interpreting these data to give precise information on migration paths are discussed and a model proposed in the light of the empirical evidence. This reveals that the marriage data may be directly related to sex-specific patterns of pre-marital mobility by a simple manipulation, of the marriage record. Throughout the study evidence is drawn from two sample populations. The first covers five hundreds and boroughs in south Shropshire, while the second sample is drawn from all rural parishes in Shropshire. Taken together, these two data sets provide a picture of marriage and mobility from, 1754-1810-which adds to existing understanding on this topic and points to factors which appear to control the pattern.

<p> This work is a geopolitical analysis of the Byzantine Empire's method of governance, expansion, and imperial administration over the lands it chose to inhabit. While no single scholar or then-contemporary Byzantine author has articulated a specific policy of geostrategy in the Byzantine Empire, this dissertation demonstrates an overt bias in Byzantine military and diplomatic operations toward coastal regions and maintenance of their physical control within the Mediterranean Basin. These imperial choices were fueled largely by: 1) the reigning geopolitical model of the Byzantine Empire; 2) the importance of the capital, today's Istanbul (then Byzantium, and later, Constantinople); 3) the distribution of other major cities of the Empire; and 4) the maritime-based trade economy of the Byzantine Empire.</p>

The coastal wetland, known as the Lincolnshire Marsh, is investigated in order to understand the ways in which people in the past exploited coastal zones. This research into a previously neglected area has tested the validity of' Rippon's (2000) three-part model ofcoastal strategies - exploitation, modification and transformation. The Lincolnshire Marsh, as considered in this thesis, covers a region from Cleethorpes in the north to Wainfleet in the south. The study area also encompasses areas of the adjacent dry land, of the Middle Marsh and the Wolds, to the west. A wide range of data are studied to help build a picture of the methods people have used to settle this region, from earlier prehistory through to the sixteenth century. It has been shown that the strategies adopted have varied over space and time, and that the region cannot be viewed as a single developmental unit. Four separate development zones have been postulated. showing differences in the visible Bronze Age reactions to rising sea-levels; in the concentration of salt production to specific regions, in certain periods; in the place-name evidence; in the Domesday landholdings; and in the settlement pattern. Following Rippon's (2000) three-part model it has been shown that for the majority of its history, people have been happy to exploit the natural resources on offer along the Marsh, whether they be salt or the natural havens or pasture. Although salt was important in this development, it is limited in specific periods, to specific areas. On occasion the occupants of the Lincolnshire Marsh have modified the coast to aid with settlement and exploitation; however, there were no large-scale attempts at reclamation, or transformation until the sixteenth century. In this respect the region is significantly different from many other coastal wetlands in north-west Europe which see large-scale attempts at transformation by the thirteenth century at the latest. A subdivision has also been apparent at the modification stage - in some cases this strategy was intentionally adopted, in other areas the modification was accidental, a by-product of the salt industry.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-102).

Thesis (M.S. in Education)--Shenandoah University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis provides a theoretical and historical examination of the production of contested colonial-geographical knowledge. Following a critical examination of recent 'contextual' histories of geography, it is proposed that treating geographical knowledge as colonial discourse is a more fruitful line of inquiry, and the emergence of post-colonial and colonial discourse theory is discussed. This leads on to a consideration of post-structuralist theories of textuality, discourse, and reading, as the preliminary to an analysis of the archive of the regular published knowledge of the Royal Geographical Society from 1831 to 1873. The racialised representation of non-European societies and subjects denies to them any status as active subjects of knowledge or history. It is found that the sanctioned geographical knowledge produced by the R.G.S. in the mid-nineteenth century depends for its identity on the construction of certain geographical knowledges, meanings, and practices as improper and inadequate. It is argued that the writing of geographical discovery thus involved the discursive dispossession of non-European societies of authority over geographical knowledge and territory.

No description available.

Orientador: Paulo Roberto Teixeira de Godoy / Banca: Bernadete Castro Oliveira / Banca: Julio Cesar Suzuki / Banca: Manoel Fernandes de Sousa Neto / Banca: Dante Flávio da Costa Reis Júnior / Resumo: O edenismo como ufania nacional é um fenômeno secular no continente americano, cuja origem se deu ainda nas fases iniciais das expedições de colonização do Novo Mundo. Com o Estado nacional brasileiro não seria diferente, e o espaço geográfico receberia igual carga canônica do imaginário ufanista sobre suas características naturais como advento para o orgulho de seu povo. Com o passar dos anos, governos e olhares sobre esta carga mítica fundacional surgiram, novas interpretações foram somando-se ao substrato maior da ufania telúrica, ganhando direções diversificadas, seja do ponto de vista econômico, político, imaginário ou cultural, sempre tendo o espaço geográfico como principal aporte para a reificação do edenismo secular, mantendo-o como ideologia espacial basilar, independente dos acréscimos e releituras que se faziam do mesmo. Por estas razões, a especificidade do Brasil neste cenário de ufanismo telúrico, inerentemente associado às características de seu território, por sua extensão e diversidade natural e social, faz com que a Geografia e o pensamento geográfico apresentem amplas possibilidades de análise e discussão dos significados atribuídos à natureza, ao território, à nação e à identidade no interior do discurso canônico da mística do paraíso terreal, através de uma ideologia geográfica que inventa e reinventa a história de sua formação econômica e territorial calcada em tais valorações edênicas. O objetivo central deste estudo é o desenvolvimento da análise geog... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Edenism as national pride is a secular phenomenon in the American continent, also initiated in the early stages of the New World colonization expeditions. And, with the Brazilian national state would be no different, receiving an equal canonical burden of vainglorious imagery of its natural features as coming to the pride for population. Over the years, governments and point of views about this foundational mythic emerged, new interpretations were adding to the larger substrate telluric pride, winning diverse directions is economically, politically, imaginary or cultural, always having the geographical space as main contribution to the reification of the secular edenism, keeping it as a basic spatial ideology, regardless of additions and reinterpretations that did the same. For these reasons, the specificity of Brazil in this telluric jingoism scenario is inherently associated with the characteristics of its territory, by its size and natural and social diversity, makes geography and geographic thought present huge opportunities for analysis and discussion of the meanings attributed to nature, territory, nation and identity within the canonical discourse of the earthly paradise, through a geographic ideology that invents and reinvents the history of its economic and territorial formation modeled on such edenics valuations. The main objective of this study is to develop the geographical analysis of the ideologies involving the founding myth of national identity in Brazil, from the historical identification, political, economic, spatial and social jingoism of permanence in relation to Brazil, in particular with respect the established time frame, the extension of the twentieth century. And together with this larger goal we list up particularities which will be sought throughout the development of research to analyze the historicity and spatiality of the edenic canonization discourse ... (Complete abstract electronic acess below) / Doutor