This dissertation excavates the multifaceted intricacies surrounding the socioeconomic transformations of southeastern Syria, which subsequently was named Transjordan, from the late Ottoman period (circa 1840s) to the 1930s. Through a rigorous engagement with Marxism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theor(y/ies), and studies of “economic theology,” it reinterprets capital, not as a thing or as an illusion, but as the performative effect of the capitalization of networks of knowledge-power, or, in other words, as an intersubjectively (i.e., ideologically) agreed upon symbolization of the power relations that enable the bringing of future revenue into the present.The dissertation unfolds in three parts. The inaugural section, “Deconstructing Fantasies; (Re)Conceptualizing Capital,” problematizes foundational economic theories, scrutinizes capital’s ontological and theological underpinnings, and juxtaposes capitalization to sharīʿa’s moral cosmology. In doing so, it destabilizes conventional dichotomies between the economic and the political, probing deeply into capitalization’s metaphysical affinities with the metaphysics of modernity. The second part, “Explicating Capitalification,” foregrounds the structural transformations of the Ottoman Empire, dissecting its evolution in response to capitalistic imperatives. The narrative delves into the moral cosmologies that underpinned the Empire’s existence and the subsequent structural transformation of the empire, focusing particularly on fiscal centralization, the interplay of debt and power, and technologies of capitalification. This section interrogates the Ottoman Empire’s projects in southeastern Syria, excavating its endeavors in controlling the Bedouin, the implementation of education policies, and its intricate land codes and registration policies. In the third and final part, “Post-Ottoman Legacies,” the narrative transitions to spotlighting the residual colonial imprints on Transjordan’s emergent state structures and its intricate class formations. This part of the exploration takes a critical view of the Jordanian state’s production as an effect through colonizing mechanisms, mechanisms of colonization that limited production, and the performative aspects of class as an effect of citational practices. By focusing on different stratifications such as shaykhs, soldiers, and workers, this section demystifies the intricacies of class within the Transjordanian context, particularly in relation to the capitalization of land and debt-induced expropriation.

This dissertation investigates the constitutive effects that practices of large data collection and knowledge production have upon states and subjectivities. It does so by tracking the career of the oldest genre of colonial reports in India, titled the ‘Annual Administration Reports’(AARs). For an 80-year period (1855-1935), every province was required to produce an ‘annual report’ organized under sixteen broad topics. I argue that these AARs played an instrumental role in shaping both the modern Indian state and colonial subjectivity in three ways. First, the heavily statistical mode of narrative that came to be employed by the AARs turned India, and Indian labor, into what Heidegger terms a ‘standing reserve’, available for ready capitalist expropriation. It is through these reports that India came to be rendered available externally as a ‘colony.’ Second, shortly after the launch of the AARs, and because of its design, it began to appear that a singular, standardized state existed across the entire territory of India, engaged simultaneously in the same activities. Third, the uniform space of the state that these reports rendered, facilitated the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia. The earliest nationalists across South Asia rose to prominence by reflecting on, comparing, and critiquing the information contained in these regional reports. In developing these arguments, my dissertation presents both a novel site and a new approach for inquiry into knowledge production, state formation and colonial subjectivities.

The British Empire was the largest empire the world has ever seen, and as such, has significantly impacted many of the countries it formerly held as colonies. Imposing a Western style of governance would change the political operations of a nation and would fundamentally shift power dynamics within the country. Through a review of the existing literature on the subject, this thesis examines the effects that British imperial rule had on four different countries in both their social and economic development in the post-colonial era. Overall, the results indicate that Britain failed to set their colonies up for long-term development and success, instead creating a culture of dependency that would maintain the global balance of power. However, these impacts were much harsher in majority-minority countries and disproportionately affected marginalised populations around the world.

This essay aims to ask and answer two questions: to which extent is South American colonialism represented in textbooks used in the current swedish curriculum, and furthermore can those textbooks enable intercultural teaching in swedish classrooms? To this end, the theory of intercultural teaching provided the framework and cultural discourse analysis was used as the tool by which the texts were analysed. The results showed that textbooks alone might not be enough to enable intercultural teaching, rather complimentary sources would be needed to buttress the teacher in their teaching. This opens up two main problems, the first being what resources does the teacher have available? By this I include time management and financial factors. Secondly, what level of interculturalism is considered correct and how many perspectives need to be taken into consideration? The answer to these two apparent problems has much relation to the amount of hours the teacher has to work with within the framework of a school year. The course History 1b, which has the broadestand most amount of classroom hours, has therefore been the subject of myexamination.

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This dissertation examines how Antiochian Greek Orthodox Christians in the Levant and diaspora navigated turbulent political and social upheaval from the late Ottoman era, through the formative years of French colonialism (1920-1946), and into the early postcolonial period of Lebanon and Syria. To highlight communal heterogeneity, I follow a diverse cast of characters, including diplomats, intellectuals, merchants, migrants, journalists, poets, clergy, and political activists to show how sharply Orthodox Christians disagreed about how best to secure a place for themselves in a rapidly changing world of empires and nation-states. I rely on a polyvalent and transnational collection of sources in Arabic, French, and English including colonial reports, consular files, petitions, largely untapped Arabic language newspapers, memoirs, interviews, personal papers, and literature to show how the production of identity is a fluid, historically contingent, and continual process of construction. First, I argue that Orthodox Christians pursued greater autonomy within an Ottoman framework which simultaneously created new expectations of what it meant to belong to a modernizing Orthodox community. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, innumerable religious and lay leaders claimed to speak on behalf of their community and offered different visions of how to protect and advance Orthodox interests during the French Mandate. The lack of a single shared social habitus combined with colonial partition, a fractured church hierarchy, and the intensification of sectarian politics all contributed to intense divisions within the Orthodox community. This, in turn, fueled efforts by Orthodox Christians to transcend social division through various influential political movements from the 1930s to the 1950s.

This dissertation argues that the Anglo-Egyptian colonial encounter of 1805-1954 colonized Ottoman Egypt through the introduction of Western calculative technologies such as the census, accounting and auditing. These calculative technologies reorganized the community by usurping its powers and endowing it in the state. They replaced prior negotiated forms of enumeration in which the community organized itself and its information gathering apparatuses such as collective taxation, cadastral surveys and pious philanthropic endowments. The first chapter tracks the birth of the census in Egypt and the introduction of a new modality of power. The second chapter shows that pious Muslim endowments were once the predecessor to the joint-stock corporation, but without its surplus extracting mechanism and accumulation ethic. For the state to be born, these endowments had to be seized – usurping the community’s enumerative powers. The third chapter argues that Egypt was granted sovereignty in 1840 based on its ability to pay its colonial financial obligations and financial reform. The fourth chapter explores a court case filed in 1924 by Nathan Rothschild, who sued to guarantee that Egypt continued to pay its debt obligations, making Egypt subservient to a colonial form of sovereignty even after independence in 1922. Chapter five closes by reflecting on postcolonial sovereignty after British evacuation of Egypt in 1954. It argues that Britain set the terms of decolonization by using Egyptian financial obligations and sterling balances deposited in London as bargaining chips.

Assigned Disaster at Birth is the scifi surrealist autofictitious diary and scrapbook of a queer space alien stuck in a humanoid body, a trans transhuman, written mostly in verse. The space alien speaker of these poems moves through multiple marginalized human identities ultimately remembering it isn't human at all. Through these poems, the speaker forms solidarities with nonhuman kin, reclaiming the memory lost to colonialism and civilization of what it means to be nonhuman and more-than-human. / Master of Fine Arts / Assigned Disaster at Birth is a poetry collection that takes the form of a queer and trans space alien's diary and scrapbook. This queer space alien is stuck in a humanoid body amidst humans who are violent towards the alien and the planet, on a planet that is a capitalist hellscape. As the alien survives physical violence, emotional abuse, alienation, it begins to remember it isn't human at all. In doing so, the alien opens itself up to connection with nonhuman life.