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This thesis engages with two prominent themes in eighteenth-century British historiography, examining Anglo-American relations after the American Revolution and the influence of economic theory on policy during this period. It considers traditional ideas, often labelled 'mercantilist,' about the nature of economy and the manner in which free trade theories were related to those beliefs. It argues that free trade was fundamentally influenced by 'mercantile' thought even while rejecting it. The influence of both 'mercantile' and liberal economic thought on policy is evaluated by examining the commercial negotiations associated with the 1783 Treaty of Paris and Parliamentary investigations into West Indian-United States trade relations in the mid-1780s. It concludes that policymakers subscribed to a mixture of 'mercantile' and liberal economic thought; moreover, although their decisions were responses to particular economic circumstances, their frames of reference were coloured both by economic theory and by aspirations for a post-revolutionary British Empire.

This paper adopts a political and class-based approach to examine three different British newspapers, The Times of London, The Manchester Guardian, and The Daily Herald in terms of their treatment of Austria-Hungary and Serbia in the month prior to the First World War. It questions how a newspaper's particular bias affects the way it discusses a topic, disseminates news, and relates with its audience. It examines the influence a newspaper has on shaping public opinion concerning friendly and enemy nations in the lead up to a war. At the same time this paper also examines how a newspaper's class and political background determines the level of support the paper demonstrates for war or for pacifism.

Throughout the 1990s, several observers of the post-communist transformation in East Central Europe viewed the Slovaks as a non-historic nation hastily modernized during the communist era. Since it had been mostly invisible in Austria-Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Slovak history appeared as ruptured and fragmented. Following the fall of the communist regime and the creation of the independent Slovak Republic, the country's image was primarily associated with radical nationalism, intolerance towards its minorities and an unstable domestic political scene. These were seen as major reasons for the detour in Slovakia's transformation to democracy in the mid-1990s. In the 2000s, western scholars re-examined the earlier interpretations of Slovak history that had stressed the compliance of Slovak society with Communism and its missing tradition in the state and institution-building processes. They came to the conclusion that stereotypes in the interpretations of Slovakia's transformation in the 1990s stemmed from unfamiliarity with the facts and preconceived methodological approaches. This dissertation examines Slovakia's evolution from the downfall of Communism (1989) to the accession of the independent Slovak Republic (1993) into the European Union (2004) from a broader historical perspective. It challenges the assumptions of political inexperience and passivity of Slovak society as major hindrances in the more recent phase of its evolution. It argues that the building of the Slovak political nation had started in Austria-Hungary and continued in Czechoslovakia under all its regimes. As a result, Slovak political parties and institutions as the main carriers of democratic transformation did not emerge in the early 1990s in a political and institutional vacuum. After the creation of the independent Slovak Republic, the focus of Slovak political elites switched from national emancipation to integration with the ED. In the 1998 parliamentary elections, the political parties in opposition, supported by the nongovernmental sector and western democracies, defeated an illiberal regime ruling over Slovakia. In spite of the alleged historical deficits of Slovak society, this change was seen by many as a result of its sudden awakening. This dissertation suggests that Slovakia's transformation from a post-communist state to a democratic one, marked by the country's accession into the ED, can be better understood as a continuation of the processes that had begun in the mid-1960s, rather than as a result of the change of government in 1998.

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The dissertation explores the intellectual history of the interconnection of European and African ideas about race and space in 19th-century European imperialism. I examine German colonial geographies of East Africa, meaning not only cartography, but the new discipline of human geography, which studies the relationship between people and their environment. Germans and East Africans together produced a hybrid geography that combined precolonial conceptions of race and space and race from both Europe and Africa, and race explicitly entered German governance for the first time. By analyzing changes in how both Germans and East Africans imagined geographical relationships, I argue, we can better understand the ways in which they developed new conceptions of themselves and the world at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The project traces the history of German racial thinking to a specific, earlier colonial context than other scholars have argued. It also brings a spatial dimension to studies of the colonial state in Africa in order to understand the ways in which spaces have become imbued with racial and ethnic meaning over the last century and a half. / History