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Canada's post-Confederation economy was marked by a search for capital that was used to complete large infrastructure projects such as the Canadian Pacific Railway. Since Canada's small tax base could not pay for the transcontinental railway, financiers in the City of London were the first choice as a source for this capital by the Canadian government. As P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins explained in British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, however, the ability to tap this resource was dependent on the gentlemanly credentials of the government's representative because the City's social culture was dominated by ideals of "propertied wealth", family connections and social activity. Sir John A. Macdonald's Conservatives, therefore, installed a representative in London that possessed these gentlemanly qualities in the hopes of securing capital for the completion of the CPR and promoting Canada's interests in the London business community. Three men between 1869 and 1885 served as Canada's High Commissioner. Sir John Rose, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt and Sir Charles Tupper were all chosen for their apparent gentlemanly qualities. The men used these qualities with varying success to promote and eventually secure the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This thesis is devoted to an unsuccessful mission to Sofia undertaken in the fall of 1914 by Noel Buxton, a Liberal British M.P., who aimed to win Bulgaria over to the side of the Triple Entente. Although referred to on occasion in works having to do with the conduct of British foreign policy during the First World War, the affair has never before been described in full. Through a close examination of hitherto unexploited material from Buxton's own archive, it has been possible to reconstruct the evolution of the mission, analyze its contemporary significance, and suggest its relevance to current trends towards the moralization and democratization of diplomacy.

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This thesis explores the modern historical lineage of absolutism in Bahrain, and the history of challenges to absolutist state authority during the peak of British influence in the Persian Gulf, the period between the First World War to the Suez crisis of 1956. It rewrites the history of Bahrain and British colonialism in the Persian Gulf through two distinct narrative threads. First, it presents a new history of the colonial-dynastic state in Bahrain and the longer tradition of indirect rule from which its architects drew, and second, it retrieves the history of the popular movements that came to challenge it. This entails an examination of not only how colonial and dynastic authority was jointly exercised, but the ideas that justified such authority over a population conceived of as a set of cultural, and more specifically religious communities governed by their own 'custom' - the conceptual centerpiece of indirect colonial rule. Both these narrative strands constitute part of a broader history of the ideological clash between late colonial ideologies of rule and anticolonial nationalism in the twentieth-century Persian Gulf - a region that was never formally colonized, nor became the site of any successful popular nationalism. Yet both these forces exerted a profound influence on the nation-states that would emerge in the late twentieth century, especially on Bahrain. To chart that historical conjuncture, the thesis begins with the creation of the modern colonial-dynastic state in Bahrain in 1923. It ends in 1956 with the last and most important uprising in Bahrain's during the 20th century, one that was largely a revolt against the political and institutional structures that colonial reformers had established three decades earlier. At its broadest, the thesis argues that the process of state-building under indirect colonial rule in Bahrain derived from a body of colonial thought on native political life and behaviour, and particularly, on the prevention of rebellion that has its origins in mid nineteenth century North India. In Bahrain and the Persian Gulf, as elsewhere in the late colonial world, ideas about empire, the state, authority and rebellion are the intertwined threads that shaped political life and the prose of history.

This thesis examines an important but understudied phenomenon in international politics: the role of amity in foreign policy. The core research question is "how have American friendships for specified others been made possible?" Drawing on the logic of securitization, this thesis employs Aristotle's notion of character friends as Other Selves and Judith Butler's concept of performativity to elaborate an international process of friendship or amitization. In doing so, the thesis employs critical discourse analysis of presidential rhetoric and popular culture to elucidate the process through which discourses of similarity become naturalized frames of reference within the conduct of foreign policy. It argues that friendship emerges when a state comes to see itself in an other and that this similarity (re)produces a certain form of state identity that enables and forecloses certain policy options vis-à-vis friends. Friendship manifests in a habitual, or naturalized, disposition to treat friends better than others. As such, it can account for how certain policies and postures, such as uncritical and often unconditional support for subjects positioned as "friends," have come to be pursued as common sense. Amitization is illustrated by assessing three case studies: the Anglo-American "special relationship;" the US-Israel "unbreakable bond;" and America's membership of "the Atlantic Community." Specifically, the thesis similarly demonstrates the ways in which amity accounts for how supererogatory commitments such as vast financial assistance, diplomatic support, information sharing, security guarantees and concern for the welfare of these specified others have come to be seen as unquestionably legitimate policies in the broader trajectory of American foreign policy. Amity matters and the practices of amitization are inseparable from intelligible foreign policy.

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During the third year of the Great War 1914-1918 Russia experienced the upheaval of revolution, precipitating the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and installation of the Provisional Government in March, and culminating in the Bolshevik takeover of November, 1917. Due to the political, military, and economic chaos which accompanied the revolution Russia was unable to continue the struggle on the eastern front. Russia was not fighting the war against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary alone, however, and her threat to capitulate was of the gravest concern to her Allies, Great Britain and France. In fact the disintegration of Russia's war effort was the pivotal issue around which Anglo-Russian relations revolved in 1917. Britain's war policy was dominated by the belief that the eastern front had to be maintained to achieve victory. It appeared that any interruption to the eastern front would allow Germany to reinforce her lines on the western front, then to win and control the economic destiny of Europe. Britain could not allow this to happen. This study focuses on the reportage from British diplomats and representatives in and outside of Russia to their superiors at the Foreign Office in London from December 1916 to December 1917. A vast wealth of documentation is available in the Foreign Office Correspondence. Analysis of these notes reveals certain trends which were dictated by the kaleidoscopic turn of events in Russia and the national ethos of these representatives. A minute analysis demonstrates a great diversity of opinion regarding the situation in Russia, ranging from optimism to pessimism and objectivity to prejudice in all phases of the year 1917. To a limited degree this diversity can be correlated with the geographical location and diplomatic status of the individual representatives. Above all it is clear that when historians quote from these sources, they choose the quotations which support the conclusions they have already reached because they know the outcome of the developments that they are describing. The individuals on the spot at the time were far less prescient and insightful. They were much more affected by their own historical prejudices and rumours, as well as the vagaries and short-term shifts of their immediate environment. Many of them believed in the great-man theory of history; a number attributed all developments and difficulties to some aspect of the Russian national character; some explained certain events during the year by conspiracies, especially of the Jews, with whom they tended to equate the Bolsheviks. Only a few were consistently solid and realistic in their appraisal of events, attributing them to factors favoured by our most respected historians. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate