Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-214). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

[Ng Kam-yuen]. / 題名據卷端. / 呈交日期: 2003年12月. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2004. / 參考文獻 (p. 224-260). / 中英文摘要. / Ti ming ju juan duan. / Cheng jiao ri qi: 2003 nian 12 yue. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / [Ng Kam-yuen]. / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao. / Lun wen (Zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2004. / Can kao wen xian (p. 224-260).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-231).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Simon Greenleaf School of Law, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-184).

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 302-318). Also available via World Wide Web.

This study examines the expression and patterns of alternate history in nineteenth-century Britain and France. “Alternate history” refers to the presentation of events that did not happen in order to consider historical trajectories that might have been and the consequent displacements of present and future. The central chapters of this thesis correspond to the three fields of writing in which these texts are clustered: in narratives of undefeated and resurgent Napoleons, which I trace from the rival journalistic claims made about Napoleon and his historical significance; in accounts that re-imagine the transition from antiquity to modernity, for example by delaying the passage of Christianity from the Middle East to western Europe; and, as part of the plurality-of-worlds debate, in the popular-astronomical imagination of variant versions of human history upon other planets. Three patterns of alternate history are discernible: the romantic-utopian, the critical-reflexive and the linear-chronological. I attach to these patterns the figures of the garden, the map and the dial. These models do not correspond to the three temporal fields of the recent, antique and planetary past, and there is not a straightforward development of these patterns or modes across the nineteenth century; they rather represent a spectrum of purposes for the fictional alteration of the past which occur at various moments and contexts in the century. Alternate history in this period has never been the subject of in-depth analysis. The approach of this study will not absorb such transformations of history into a tradition of futurist writing, as some critics have done. Maintaining alternate history’s distinctness from futurism makes it possible to avoid framing the texts as precursors to science fiction’s historical anticipations. This study will argue that alternate history should instead be recognised as a category of writing that is aware of and concerned with the way that history is written and received, in particular with history’s interactions with other literary forms and the relationships between writing history and other disciplinary fields. More broadly, alternate history should be interpreted in the context of the often described formation of History as a positivist discipline by the late nineteenth century; but far from indicating a steady progression toward scientific historiography, alternate-historical texts reflect upon that transformation and its consequences in other literary fields (journalism, political theory, popular Astronomy, the romance novel) in the century whose “great obsession” is said to have been history.

Originally presented as the author's thesis--Universität Witten/Herdecke, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 775-856) and indexes.

In this study, I examine the New Institutionalist Economic History (NIEH) of Douglass C. North from a historiographical and philosophical perspective. As a point of departure for this purpose I take North’s critical engagement with the primitivism-modernism debate in premodern economic history, as represented in his early work by the ‘challenge of Karl Polanyi’. This challenge, I argue, has given shape to the development of the NIEH in its various stages of theoretical elaboration. Therefore, understanding its contextual significance is indispensable for making sense of North’s oeuvre as a whole. On my reading, North interpreted the challenge of Polanyi to mean combining two methodological conceptions previously not united in one work. On the one hand, North’s NIEH extends the scope of economic theory to the study of the longue durée of economic history; while on the other hand North seeks to theorize the importance of historical variation in sociocultural institutions for understanding why there are rarely complete or well-functioning markets in most of economic history. North considers neoclassical economics suitable for neither of these purposes. Yet his critique of Polanyi’s substantivist-primitivist approach is primarily based on the absence of an integration of his project with the tools of economic theory. For this purpose, North therefore adopted the theory of transaction cost economics, also called New Institutional Economics (NIE), to this new ambitious end. More than perhaps any other author North has been responsible for extending the scope and sophistication of this economics based approach in the study of economic history. In the present work, I discuss to what extent this approach has been successful in its own aims, internally consistent, and to what extent it is plausible as a historiographical approach from an ‘external’ point of view. I do this by combining a close reading and interpretation of a variety of North’s writings, focusing in particular on the most contemporary version of his work - which has not been much studied - with a methodological and theoretical discussion of various major themes in or aspects of his work from the viewpoints of historiography, anthropology, and philosophy of social science. These themes include (among others) North’s understanding of the functioning of markets in politics and economics, his approach to choice theory, rationality, and game theory, his use or neglect of evolutionary concepts, the meaning of embeddedness in his work, and North’s contractarian anthropology. As this work shows, North’s NIEH is situated in a difficult intermediate position within larger debates in economic thought: between primitivism and modernism, between substantivism and formalism (in the anthropological sense), and most significantly, between the ‘new mainstream’ of economic theory and the quest for successive endogenisation of the institutional context of economic behavior. This certainly speaks for the ambition and sophistication of North’s historiographical approach, something which has only increased with the further development of his theory. But in his quest to unite the best insights of choice theory with New Institutionalist economics as well as incorporating the ‘anthropological’ level of fully socialized beliefs, preferences, and how they give rise to institutional variation in history, North frequently seeks to have his cake and eat it. The persistent methodological ambiguities in his work give rise to problems of internal consistency and external plausibility, which are present from the very inauguration of his NIEH research programme. The subsequent development of his work has not, I argue, been able to overcome this fundamental problem. For this reason, while much of North’s toolset and his overarching ambitions are valuable developments in economic historical theory, he does not achieve his aim of overcoming the challenge of Karl Polanyi. Without a more decisive break with his original economic microfoundations, North’s NIEH project cannot ultimately live up to its grand ambitions.