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My dissertation examines the cultural, political, and economic relationship between Haiti and the United States in the early nineteenth century--a key period in the development of both young nations. Most scholarship on this relationship has revolved around either the Haitian Revolution or later periods, from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Through trade, migration, and politics, the two countries had a more substantial role in one another's formative years than the literature currently suggests. Haitian leaders actively sought to attract African Americans to the island and believed they were crucial to improving Haiti's economic and political standing. African Americans became essential players in determining the nature of Haiti and U.S. relations, and the migration of thousands to Haiti in the 1820s proved to be the apogee of the two countries' interconnectedness. Drawing on a variety of materials, including emigrant letters, diary accounts, travelers' reports, newspaper editorials, the National Archives' Passenger Lists, Haitian government proclamations, Haitian newspapers, and American, British, and French consulate records, I analyze the diverse political and social motivations that fueled African American emigration. The project links Haitian nation building and Haitian struggles for recognition to American abolitionism and commercial development. / text

[Typewritten] Includes bibliography.

Based on archival work in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada and Australia, my dissertation expands the traditional purview of diplomatic history into the international dimensions of the social and cultural realms. My study treats doomed attempts to reconstruct previously-held notions of hierarchy and deference as encapsulated in the Empire Settlement Act (ESA) in the wake of the dramatic changes to the world order resulting from World War I. To counter the emergence of Japan as a world power, under the auspices of the ESA, British Columbia and Western Australia, the two most distant outposts of the “white” British Empire in the Pacific, imported poor Celtic farmers and militiamen from northern Scotland in an attempt to retain their “British” identity, which they felt was threatened by Japan on the one hand, the Japanese in their midst on another, and local “nationalisms” on a third. This dissertation argues that such schemes were undermined by the conflicting priorities of Britain and the Dominions, the tensions between laissez-faire and excessive centralized control, the disconnect between government, capital and labor, the valuations of self-help within highly circumscribed situations, the conflict between the themes of rejuvenation and permanent regression, the fight between an idiosyncratic rural ideal and the reality of the urbanized and industrialized world of the twentieth century, and the inconsistent application of supposedly inviolable Social Darwinist ideals. The birth and death of plans to recruit Hebridean crofters to British Columbia and Western Australia in the 1920s reveals a great deal about the fluidity surrounding concepts of identity and security in a very unstable time. The debates surrounding the status of the Hebridean Scots, especially vis-à-vis their British compatriots and the Japanese, are an extreme window through which the much wider dialogues taking place regarding the status of the British Empire both internally and on the global stage, on the changing role of race as the final determinant of one’s identity and status, and the clashes between the Victorian and the modern ways of defining and conceiving of Empire, can be viewed and debated. / text

The movement in India to abolish indentured emigration to tropical colonies (particularly Fiji, Trinidad, British Guiana and Natal) had its origins in the "Moderate" era of Indian nationalism and the politics of G. K. Gokhale. It began with the concern of the Indian middle class that their status in the British Empire was denigrated by that of their "coolie" compatriots. However, as the details of the indenture system were brought to light, the anti-indenture movement came to encompass almost every group in India, from village to metropolitan centre, from the conservative, orthodox Marwaris of Calcutta to the westernized Parsi elite of Bombay. The issue joined the era of Gokhale to the era of Gandhi, and was the vehicle for Gandhi's transition from overseas politician to a major political figure in India. The issue came to be seen by most Indians--and many imperialists--as a direct struggle between Indian national honour and the capitalist interests of colonial entrepreneurs. When indentured emigration was finally halted in 1917 it was in response, not to a moderate constitutional effort, but to India-wide political agitation and a threatened satyagraha movement. In the process, the confidence of Indian citizens in both imperial equality and the efficacy of constitutional methods was undermined at a crucial point in the development of Indian nationalism and the evolution of Empire into Commonwealth.