The planned language Esperanto achieved popularity in early twentieth century Japan, inspiring a national movement which was the largest outside Europe. Esperanto was designed to facilitate greater international and inter-cultural communication and understanding; the history of the language in Japan reveals a rich tradition of internationalism in Japan, stretching from the beginnings of the movement, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, through the end of the Pacific war, when, for a brief period, organised Esperanto in Japan ceased. Building upon existing studies of internationalism amongst elite opinion makers in Japan, this history of Esperanto reveals unexpected examples of internationalism amongst the broader Japanese public, a number of competing conceptions of the international world, and their realisation through a range of transnational activities. Esperanto was at once an intellectual phenomenon, and a language which could be put into immediate and concrete practice. The diversity of social groups and intellectual positions within the Japanese Esperanto community reveals internationalism and cosmopolitanism, not as well defined, static concepts, but as broad spaces in which different ideas of the world and the community of mankind could be debated. What linked the various different groups and individuals drawn into the Japanese Esperanto movement was a shared desire to make contact with, and help to reform, the world beyond Japan's borders, as well as a shared realisation of the vital role of language in making this contact possible. From radical socialists to conservative academics, and from Japanese diplomats at the League of Nations to members of rural communities in the deep north of Japan, although their politics often differed, Japanese Esperantists came together to participate in the re-imagining of the modern world; in doing so they became part of a transnational community, one which reveals insights into both modern Japanese history, and the nature of internationalism.

U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal (1230-1309) was a great adept of the bKa' brgyud school of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly renowned for his knowledge of the Kālacakra tantra and the unique teaching known as the Approach and Attainment of the Three Vajras (rDo rje gsum gyi bsnyen sgrub), said to have been given to him in his vision by Vajrayoginī (rDo rje rnal 'byor ma) in the Miraculous Land (sprul pa'i zhing) of U rgyan. He was the student of the 2nd Karma pa, who entrusted him with the Black Hat, which he passed to the 3rd Karma pa. He was also a great traveller who journeyed widely across and beyond Tibet. He met Qubilai Khan in the capital of Yuan China and visited sacred Buddhist sites in South India. He has been aptly described by van der Kuijp as "the great Tibetan yogi, thaumaturge, scholar, alchemist, and traveler". Thanks to the availability of a large amount of hitherto unknown materials from eleven biographies, the thesis has put considerable weight on the bibliographical comparison and analysis of the different works in an attempt to establish the possible relationship between them. This is supplemented by summaries of the biographies, to give an overview of the protagonist's life in Part One of the thesis. Part Two consists of a critical study of the different phases and aspects of U rgyan pa's life in the unique historical, political and religious context of each phase, drawing materials from the corpus of biographies and in the light of other primary and secondary sources in Tibetan, Chinese and Western languages. In Chapter I, U rgyan pa's family lineage, childhood and early studies are discussed in order to find out how his innate propensities and early studies are represented as having influenced his character. In Chapter II, the account of U rgyan pa's journey to West Tibet and U rgyan is studied. A sixteen-stanza song in his own words epitomising this journey, supplemented by route maps, will be used as a framework to illustrate and reconstruct his journey to the Land of the Ḍākinīs. In Chapter III, the teachings he received and the subsequent transformation of his character and status, are explored. In Chapter IV, his career as a tantric master, his other pilgrimages and benediction trips, and his conflicts with various religious and political authorities, are examined. The materials will be scrutinised in the hope of separating as far as possible fact from fiction.

The research attempts to explain the character of Malaysia’s political economy. By adopting a historical institutional analysis it explains that British colonial administration persistently made rational choices within a short-term horizon that encouraged the growth of two autonomous groups – Malays and Chinese - whose political, economic and social organisation, at the point of Malaya’s independence in 1957, had made it inevitable for them to embark on some form of consociational arrangement. British policies engendered two processes; first, a less-than-full incorporation of Chinese as new actors in Malaya’s political economy and second, a less-than-full retrenchment of Malay political dominance by preserving Malay de jure power. In sum, British decision to preserve Malay de jure power while at the same time incorporate Chinese economic and political presence created two communities with mutually exclusive institutions that increasingly competed for access to political and economic resources. The self-reinforcing nature of these exclusive institutions and the flux that came with the demands for Malaya’s independence made it necessary for these two communities to attempt various institutional options that could best reconcile exclusive institutions and negotiate competing political and economic demands. Three institutional options were tried: consociationalism, integration and partition. The research will explain that among the three, the path-dependent nature of Malaya’s political economy had necessitated a particular institutional logic, the consociational logic. Integration failed because attempts to establish common institutions and do away completely with longstanding mutually exclusive ones proved over-ambitious. Partition also did not materialise as it proved politically and financially costly. In sum, the research highlights Malaysia’s consociationalism as a product of small incremental policy steps which proved to be no less transformational in the long run that gives Malaysia’s political economy a quite different character than it had had at the start of British official rule in 1874.

This thesis investigates the emergence of Medina in the Ḥijāz as a widely-venerated holy city over the first three Islamic centuries (seventh to ninth centuries CE) within the appropriate historical context, with special attention paid to the town’s ḥaram. It focuses in particular upon the roles played by the Prophet Muḥammad, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, and early Islamic legal scholars in this development. It shows that Medina’s emergence as a widely-venerated holy city alongside Mecca was a gradual and contested process, and one that was intimately linked with several important developments concerning legitimate political, religious, and legal authority in the Islamic world. The most important sources for this study have been Medina’s local histories, and Chapter One investigates the development of a tradition of local history-writing there. The Prophet Muḥammad first created a form of sacred space, a ḥaram, at Medina, and Chapter Two seeks to provide the context for this by investigating some forms of sacred and protected space found in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. Chapter Three then examines a rare early document preserved in the later Islamic sources, which deals in part with Muḥammad’s creation of Medina’s ḥaram, the so-called “Constitution of Medina”, and investigates why and how Muḥammad created that particular form of sacred space at Medina. The remaining two chapters deal with the history of Muḥammad’s ḥaram at Medina after his death as its original raison d’être disappeared. Chapter Four analyses some aspects of Muslim legal scholars’ discussions concerning Medina’s ḥaram, and demonstrates that certain groups disputed its existence. Chapter Five then seeks to understand why caliphs and other scholars invested so heavily in actively promoting its widespread veneration and Medina’s status as a holy city. It concludes that caliphs from the late first/early eighth century patronised Medina to associate themselves with legitimate political authority inherited from Muḥammad, and that from the late second/eighth century certain legal scholars argued for the continued existence of Medina’s ḥaram because of its association with the Prophet and his Companions who had come to be for them the ultimate source of legal authority.

This study considers the history of trauma, both as a psychiatric concept and as a diagnosis, and its social and cultural representation from a transnational perspective after WWII. The intellectual evolution of trauma was determined by various medical, social and cultural variables, institutions, and people who wielded influence in the postwar world order as well as diverse local contexts. This thesis focuses on the globalisation and localisation of such concept and diagnosis shaped by international and local mental health experts at the World Health Organization and the National Taiwan University Hospital. Through the efforts of these experts, trauma not only became one of the most globally diffused psychiatric diagnoses, but also a hyperbole appropriated by Taiwanese psychiatrists to account for extreme forms of social suffering. Studies have criticised the universality and the Anglo-American-centred approach to the history of traumatic psychiatry. Scholars have also begun to explore transnational histories of psychiatry by systematically comparing or tracing the diffusion routes of psychiatric topics. Their methods of enquiry and problems solved, however, differ. My research analyses a disparate collection of evidence at the level of international organisations and from local aspects, allowing not only a critical reconsideration of trauma in the trend of global medicine, but also its reception, contestation and appropriation in the non-Western contexts. Guided by the works of medical historians, literary critics and cultural anthropologists, this project combines archival research with oral history interviews to challenge the existing historical accounts of trauma, and provide evidence of the limited capacity of globalised psychiatric norms and their reception and appropriation beyond the imagination of world citizenship. It argues that such scientific artefacts were not only produced through mutual reference between Eastern and Western experiences, but also measures of instrumental rationality employed by postwar internationalists to engineer their modernity in the Global South.

This thesis is concerned with the construction and uses of miniature buildings in the Liao (907-1125) and the Northern Song (960-1127) periods in China. These miniature buildings exploited the components of Chinese traditional architecture on a small or greatly reduced scale. To date no work has taken the position of this thesis to examine this corpus of miniature buildings that were used widely in tombs and temples as containers to provide coverings for coffins, and to hold images of deities, Buddhist relics and sutras, as seen in both archaeological discoveries and textual resources. The purpose of the thesis is to define this corpus and to consider its significance in the light of the functions that these tiny buildings fulfilled. This thesis proposes that these miniature buildings contributed a unique and indispensable part in presenting the positions of their owners in society. Made as containers, miniature buildings particularly emphasize decoration, which enabled viewers to make a connection with life-size buildings, in the ways of which they were fitted into an existing architectural hierarchied system in the deeply rooted tradition of the Liao and the Northern Song. The thesis makes considerable use of the concepts of reception, for the reaction of viewers to these miniature buildings defined also their reactions to the contents. Several types of analogies were achieved between full-scale buildings and miniature representations, as well as between their contents, which allowed specific types of interpretation of the miniature buildings as taking the roles of actual buildings and fictional structures. The thesis considers the use of miniature buildings as one of the ways in which complex ideas can be reinforced by material forms. A wider discussion on miniature models presents that the significance of miniaturization lies in the power of control that can be achieved by creating and using the miniature.

This dissertation aims to analyze the transformation of Pusan by examining the social, political, economic, and cultural changes during the open-port period (1876-1910). Prior to annexation, Pusan, as the first open port in Korea, reflected features of the colonial urban development in which alien power achieved and sustained a hegemonic domination on socio-cultural-economic dimensions of people’s lives. Colonial history in Korea has been divided and moving on parallel lines. The ‘nationalist school’ and the ‘socioeconomic school’ have failed to come together and move us into a deeper understanding of the Japanese colonial period. In order to narrow the gap between the two schools of thought, this thesis suggests looking at ‘colonial modernity’ through the analytical lens of the colonial city of Pusan. The approach examines changes in the social, economic, and cultural life of people rather than through the traditional binary construction of ‘victim versus victimizer’ or ‘colonial repression versus national resistance.’ In particular, I pay close attention to the fact that colonization is a process of imperial expansion by means of colonialists. In the end, the process of colonization in Pusan was a process by which the Japanese settlers expanded in wealth, population, influence, and power. The cluster of factors – enlargement of settlement (living space), the expansion of the economy (economic opportunity), improvement of public enterprises, such as transportation infrastructure, water supply and hygiene (improving quality of life) – were catalysts for the Japanese settlers to take up residence in Pusan. Based on the transformation of the urban space of Pusan at this micro level, I discuss a hierarchy of power relations within the spatial boundary of Pusan. In other words, I focus on human aspects of these changes rather than on systemic changes. I attempt to demonstrate how studying a city can offer a useful category of analysis for the question of ‘modernity’ in Korea.

This thesis casts a new light on the role of Southeast Asia in the ancient Indian Ocean World. It brings together data and approaches from archaeology and historical linguistics to examine cultural and language contact between Southeast Asia and South Asia, East Africa and the Middle East. The interdisciplinary approach employed in this study reveals that insular Southeast Asian seafarers, traders and settlers had impacted on these parts of the world in pre-modern times through the transmission of numerous biological and cultural items. It is further demonstrated that the words used for these commodities often contain clues about the precise ethno-linguistic communities involved in their transoceanic dispersal. The Methodology chapter introduces some common linguistic strategies to examine language contact and lexical borrowing, to determine the directionality of loanwords and to circumvent the main caveats of such an approach. The study then proceeds to delve deeper into the socio-cultural background of interethnic contact in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean as a whole, focusing on the oft-neglected Southeast Asian contributions to the cultural landscape of this region and addressing the nature of pre-modern contact between Southeast Asia and the different parts of the Indian Ocean Word. Following from that, the last three chapters look in-depth at the dispersal of respectively Southeast Asian plants, spices and maritime technology into the wider Indian Ocean World. Although concepts and their names do not always neatly travel together across ethno-linguistic boundaries, these chapters demonstrate how a closer examination of lexical data offers supportive evidence and new perspectives on events of cultural contact not otherwise documented. Cumulatively, this study underlines that the analysis of lexical data is a strong tool to examine interethnic contact, particularly in pre-literate societies. Throughout the Indian Ocean World, Southeast Asian products and concepts were mainly dispersed by Malay-speaking communities, although others played a role as well.

How the world of experience, text-based medicine, and the social world came to interact with each other in a historically situated way is the subject of this doctoral thesis, which studies what I shall call zhang ("miasma") medicine in Song China (960-1279 CE). By the phrase "the world of experience," I refer to the bodily experience of the environment in a given region as well as to experiences of medical practices. "The social world" broadly refers to concomitant social, intellectual, and political events or trends. This thesis proposes a new approach to the study of the environment within the history of medicine in Imperial China (around 202 BCE-1911 CE), an approach which is inspired by anthropological analytical concepts. It highlights individuals' world of experience, treating their knowledge about environmental medicine as the culmination of a dynamic collaboration of their experiential world and existing culture-specific concepts, such as those deriving from scholarly medicine. This new approach dictates a re-examination of the sources that have received intensive attention in the history of medicine in Imperial China: texts up to the thirteenth century on the aetiology, therapies, and prevention methods of zhang as disorders endemic in Lingnan (in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces). Based on this re-examination, I contend that the Song period witnessed the emergence of a pronounced explanatory mode among authors of writings about zhang medicine about how their world of experience informed and affirmed their medical knowledge and practices relating to zhang. This Song explanatory mode embodies, I argue, the endeavor of Song scholar-officials and physicians to extend the proliferation of scholarly medicine at that time to zhang medicine, which lacked widely acknowledged textual references and therapies of medicinal effectiveness. The findings in this thesis firstly broaden our understanding of the development of environmental medicine in Imperial China and, secondly, extend our knowledge of the expansion of scholarly medicine into southern China in Song times.

This thesis traces the settlement and history of an East Delhi resettlement colony, and the everyday and associational lives of its residents. Settled by the state at the height of the Emergency in 1976, from jhuggies demolished at the centre of the city, Punarvaspur sits within a longer history and politics of planning by the colonial and postcolonial developmental state. As such, Punarvaspur and neighbourhoods like it have long been, and continue to be the site of debates and anxieties about the place of ‘the urban poor' in the city, and of much NGO and political work. As the subjects of large-scale demolitions of housing and livelihood in the course of resettlement, residents' experience of these debates has been far from abstract. Even after 30 years, the aftermath of the resettlement still shapes social relations in the close physical spaces of Punarvaspur. For residents their frequent designation as ‘slum dwellers' makes them the subject of much development work, while by extension also labelling them as ‘illegal' ex-squatters. Drawing on the work of social theorists and geographers, particularly the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, the main aim of this thesis is to explore the spatial dimensions of the politics of development, through the lived experiences and spatial practices of its residents. By tracing how the socio-historical roots of planners' dominant ‘representations of space' are neither fixed, static, nor uniform, it can be seen how they are modified by the ‘spatial practices' and lived experiences of city dwellers as they are traced out over the fabric of Delhi. For instance, the space of the neighbourhood becomes a medium for the organisation and articulation of social relations in its public spaces. This can been seen in the marking of public spaces by groups through speech, organisational affiliations and concrete devotional shrines. Similarly, residents, NGOs, local politicians and others deploy ideas of morality, respectability, and difference to limit and enhance the agency and ability of themselves and others to act in the public space of the neighbourhood. In this way certain locales are understood as being in need of development as relationships around development are inscribed in space.