Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2009-07-20 14:36:15.104 / The thesis is an interdisciplinary history of the crowd in late-Victorian London. It examines the crowd using novels, newspapers, and periodicals, Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and Parliamentary records, and the personal papers of politicians and city officials. The thesis focuses on riots, demonstrations, and processions beginning in 1848 through to the Trafalgar Square mle in 1887 as well as the way novelists imagined the crowd at the fin de sicle. In the process, it re-evaluates the urban environment that gave rise to the crowd and it explores the crowds influence on space, geography, and movement. The thesis rethinks crowd activity after mid century as the coming together of crowds and new concerns with modernity. It brings together the Marxist tradition of interpreting the crowd with writing on cultural and intellectual history as well as sociological and geographical theory in order to assess the crowds experience at street level. It aims to expand the traditional crowd model to include the spatial attitudes and practices that shaped the crowds relationship to the city and the citys relationship to the crowd. The thesis shows that the crowd, through its struggle for space, was not only a condition of the city, but one of the compelling features of urban modernity after mid century. The thesis traces the crowd in London in six chapters. An introductory chapter first locates the crowd historiographically. Chapter two focuses on the extent to which Londons improvement project mobilized the crowd. Chapter three describes the crowds battle for private space, after huge swathes of the urban population were dis-housed, and the challenges this posed to spatial ordering. Chapter four examines the battle for public space in the form of the radical political crowds occupation and production of space, between 1848-1868, as well as the states heavy-handed response. Chapter five describes the culmination of earlier issues in Trafalgar Square in 1887. Finally, chapter six explores the way novelists imagined the crowd in late-Victorian slum fiction. / Ph.D

The scale of the current global obesity epidemic and the implications of this for health, functionality and economics, dictates that assessing the origins of overnutrition must become a priority in all research fields. To date anthropometric historians have mainly utilised institutional sources providing height and occasionally weight data for a sample of the working class who experienced deprivation. Tailoring institutions offer new, innovative sources for the field; uniquely measuring body shape in its entirety and sampling the upper-middle classes and elites. Anthropometric data for waist circumference, hip circumference and leg length has been collected from Morris & Son tailoring establishment in Barmouth, North West Wales and from Henry Poole & Co. ‘Savile Row’ tailors in Mayfair, London. This data from the second half of the nineteenth century has been nominally linked to census and probate records and cross-referenced with contemporary medical tracts and modern epidemiological literature to highlight obesity related health risks within both populations. Results indicate that 'diseases of affluence' permeated many nineteenth century class groups. Both waist circumferences and hip circumferences increased over the life span. Furthermore, Barmouth’s economic transition from a port to a tourist destination appears to have placed individuals' health (when measured by early adult waist-hip ratio) at greater risk than the overall wealthier customers attending Savile Row. The Barker hypothesis may be relevant - an influx of wealth being of greater detriment to health in later life than consistent affluence. For Henry Poole & Co.’s customers an elite lifestyle enabled girths to expand, increasing the risk of chronic diseases but seemingly protecting them from infectious pathogens. In later life, during the second half of the nineteenth century, it would appear that optimal waist circumferences to reduce mortality were larger than current recommended levels.

The general historiography of Stuart diplomacy has, by and large, argued that those who were tasked with carrying out foreign policy were ineffective, amateurish and, in some cases, incompetent. This harsh view is in need of reassessment in the light of a number of incidents, which suggest that much effective foreign policy and general diplomatic work was carried out by lower-ranking diplomats, who were titled agents. These agents have attracted little historical comment or study. This thesis sets out to redress this by considering the agents employed from 1603 to 1688, when the title disappeared due to rank inflation, duties transferred to consuls, and other factors. The texts of the period on the perfect ambassador leave clear omissions in descriptions of diplomatic work, which therefore suggests a role for another type of diplomat, the agent. The initial chapter looks at background and education and offers a portrait of an average agent as typically a well-educated member of the lower gentry. The terms under which agents served are compared with other professional groups of comparable social rank and those in other government positions. Agents’ work in information gathering, including where and from what sources they obtained material and how it was transmitted, is investigated. The existence of an efficient international network is uncovered. Agents’ role in negotiations, unconstrained by protocol, allowed them a greater degree of freedom than ambassadors. This and the element of deniability are key to understanding their importance to Stuart diplomacy. The task of protecting merchants’ rights is demonstrated by a case study in France which shows all the usual stages involved in resolving a dispute. Involvement in buying naval supplies and cultural transfer are also discussed in chapters concerned with agents’ practical activities. Finally, the careers pursued after their agencies are outlined, showing how some, such as Cottington, used their skills and knowledge to their advantage. Having demonstrated the differences amongst, and the utility of, agents it is possible to suggest that some of the criticism of Stuart diplomacy comes from a misunderstanding of the use of both agents and ambassadors, and how, when and why each could be employed for a specific task.

Existing studies of this topic have not made enough use of the British archives. Nor have they analysed the American domestic response to UDI in sufficient depth. The policies of successive American administrations as regards the Rhodesian problem can only be fully understood as part of Washington’s attitude to Britain, to Africa in general, and to southern Africa in particular. And, because the issue of white minority rule in Africa raised powerful emotions both in the African American community and among white opponents of civil rights, the Rhodesian crisis became a part of the politics of racial equality within the USA, playing a key role in the developing ideologies of these two communities. This thesis is based on research in both American and British archives and aims to show that the prevailing interpretation, especially of the policies of the Johnson Administration once Rhodesia had made its illegal declaration of independence in November 1965, is mistaken. Scholars have tended to take at face value the oft-repeated claim of US policy-makers that Rhodesia was a British problem, that they wished to be no more than helpful bystanders, supporting British efforts to see the downfall of the illegal regime and the creation of a government based on majority rule, and that when they did intervene, it was merely to urge the British to be firmer in their resolve to end the rebellion. The central contention of this thesis is that the officials shaping African policy in the Johnson Administration were intimately involved in the management of the crisis and that, far from resisting a solution that legitimised the white minority regime, they actively encouraged the British to settle with the illegal government.

This thesis presents an analysis of the political discourse and strategies of the MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi-Nationalist Movement Party) between 1965 and 1980. It particularly focuses on the role of young militants in the development of the nationalist movement in Turkey during this period. The 1960s and 1970s in Turkey saw military coups, street clashes, violence perpetrated by university students, and the rapid proliferation of civil organizations. Yet this turbulent period in modern Turkish history has received no systematic historical investigation. The MHP was one of the principal actors of this period. The study argues that the change in the profile of the CKMP-MHP leadership and the recruitment of young nationalist students, who became increasingly involved in physical confrontations with the socialists, had multiple effects on nationalist discourse and strategies. Retired soldiers involved in the 27 May 1960 military coup sought to develop a nationalist party based on secular-Kemalist principles, but those people who held conservative views of nationalism started to join the CKMP-MHP. The anti-Republican discourse of this current of thought involved the re-appropriation of Ottoman history and culture and certain religious themes into nationalist discourse. This ideological orientation appealed to most of young nationalists organized around the ülkü ocakları. However, the thesis demonstrates that there were various channels of ideological indoctrination in the nationalist movement, a diversity of positions that sometimes stirred conflicts among the nationalists themselves. The question of political strategy involved paradoxical aspects as well. Young nationalists were willing to take on the mission of becoming the future elites of the country yet were simultaneously involved in violent confrontations with socialists. Most of the party leadership, on the other hand, was preoccupied with parliamentarian goals and the long-term administrative success of nationalist activists in the state apparatus. The thesis shows that viewing the party activities and paramilitary operations in the same framework gave rise to serious tensions within the nationalist movement. The findings of this study also shed light on the institutional and ideological evolution of the nationalist movement after 1980.

This thesis reconstructs and interprets the evolution of legal culture in the Saxon city of Freiberg in the sixteenth century. It challenges the notion that early modern state institutions were punitive and disciplinary; and instead posits that in Saxony, they were flexible and sought to maintain social harmony. While previous scholarship has favoured a sociological approach, based on the concept of social control, this thesis employs a legal anthropological optic to study the interaction of state institutions and social life holistically. The focus is not just on how state institutions sought to regulate social life, but also on how ordinary people used institutions for their diverse purposes. The goal of this methodological approach, based on Lawrence Friedman’s concept of legal culture, is to assess the relative position and interaction of the people, the judiciary, and the law in early modern Germany. Probing the interactions of the court and the residents of Freiberg reveals that the court was primarily a record-keeper and a mediator. For the former, it logged and transcribed all manner of transactions: peace pacts, loans, and house purchases; and Freibergers readily turned to the court to get a formal record of an obligation. For the latter, the court was rarely a site of punishment, rather it was a place where conflicts were regulated, and bonds forged. At court, Freibergers fostered ties to one another. Neither of these roles, record-keeper or mediator, are ones traditionally ascribed to early modern courts. Only by considering by the culture of a court does either become apparent.

The Macedonian Question has attracted much attention since the 1990s due to the emergence of the dispute over the name of Macedonia between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. In Greece there is a prolific literature on this subject, but some basic questions remain unanswered. In particular, the role of the government, and of government institutions – especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – have attracted little or no attention: on the contrary, historians have focused on the „heroes‟ of the conflict, the fighters themselves, the result being that the Macedonian Question is understood as a military fight of good versus evil. In this D.Phil. thesis, we examine how the government got involved with the Macedonian Question and second, in what ways it was involved, especially given that an official acknowledgement of the government‟s involvement with the paramilitary operations was diplomatically impossible. We approached these questions by examining the personal archives of Greek politicians and diplomats (most notably of the Dragoumis family) and the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially the Archives of the Greek Embassies in London, Paris and Constantinople, which have only recently become available. The key finding is that the Greek government, despite its declarations to the opposite effect, was involved heavily with the paramilitary fighting in Macedonia, but also that the official involvement with Macedonia was constrained and influenced by electoral concerns and by the powerful Macedonian lobbies in Athens. Decisions were rarely made in a rational, bureaucratic way, but were more often reached after consultations with journalists, military officers and intellectuals and always bearing domestic political realities in mind. These findings suggest that future research should move away from understanding the „Macedonian Struggle‟ solely as a military issue, and put it into the wider context of early twentieth-century Greek political and diplomatic history.

From the campaign waged by Revolutionaries like Barère and the Abbé Grégoire against those regional languages they referred to pejoratively as 'patois', to the educational policies of Jules Ferry a century later, successive governments of France engaged in a broadly successful struggle to force the French to speak French. Inverting the logic of cultural nationalists like Herder, who claimed a shared language as the legitimate basis of national polities, French legislators sought to impose French as a common language on a linguistically diverse population that had already been constituted as a state. Recent historical work has shown the particular significance of such projects during the Napoleonic period. Historians have begun considering how far the Napoleonic regime was characterized by cultural imperialism. While the ideological nature of such projects- the 'view from the centre', so to speak- is now well understood by historians, this thesis is concerned with the practice of Napoleonic imperialism in one sphere of action: language. By focusing on the practice of linguistic imperialism under Napoleon this thesis makes an important contribution to understandings of the cultural politics of the period as well as Napoleonic state-building policies more generally.

This thesis examines the experiences and attitudes of civilians in Essex during the First World War, 1914-1918. Through these it explores the reasons for people’s continued support for the war and how public discourse shaped conceptions of the war’s purpose and course and what sacrifices were needed and acceptable in pursuit of victory. This combination kept the war comprehensible and enabled people to continue to support it. Vital to getting a picture of how the war was understood is an account of the role of the local elites that sought to shape popular knowledge and attitudes about the war. The narratives of the war, the discourse of sacrifice, and elites’ roles evolved with events at home and at the front. Chapter 1 deals with the initial reactions to the war and growing acceptance of the major war narratives. The second and third chapters address two of their major features: attitudes towards the enemy and volunteering for the armed forces. The fourth chapter addresses the changes to the war's narratives and ideas of sacrifice as casualties and hardships increased from 1916, while Chapter 5 provides an in-depth case study of local military service tribunals. The final chapter deals with the crises of 1917-18, which covered both the expected course of the war and the image of equal sacrifice, and how local and national elites overcame these problems. The successful depiction of the Great War as necessary, just, winnable, and fought against an evil enemy allowed civilians to accept sacrifices in order to win. An evolving discourse of sacrifice framed what was expected of and acceptable to civilians. Local elites played an essential role: advocating sacrifice and endurance for the national cause while also working to ensure that sacrifices were minimised and borne equally. This combination of framing the war and mitigating its effects was vital in maintaining civilian support for the war effort.

In the seventeenth century, news of the Transylvanian princes in weekly newspapers and biannual Messrelationen rarely comes from the principality itself, but from the cities which are the Transylvanians' allies, enemies and invaded neighbors. This thesis examines the German language periodicals of four periods: István Bocskai's rebellion against the Habsburg Emperor (1604-5), Gábor Bethlen's first march into Hungary (1619-21), György I Rákóczi's Hungarian offensive (1643-5) and György II Rákóczi's incursion into Poland-Lithuania and the subsequent Ottoman invasion of Transylvania (1657-8). Between these periods, political developments and postal improvements shift the reporting networks which carry the news of Transylvania. As a result, each prince is reported on by a different set of reporting regions altering the language of the news. Bocskai's rebellion is presented in the Messrelationen as an alliance of the unchristian Protestants and Ottomans, dependent on military success rather than political legitimacy and causing devastation in the region. This perspective continues in later periods in news from Vienna, the most consistent reporter on Transylvania, as the princes are shown to be capable of upsetting the Emperor's position in Hungary, but more feared for their association with the Ottomans. Bethlen's march is also reported on by Transylvania's allies in Prague, who present the prince with greater diplomatic importance, and supporters in Hungary, who detail the diet meetings where he is elected king, proving his legitimacy. György I's march does not benefit from a breadth of perspectives, and Vienna’s dominates the news with its concern for quick peace. György II’s invasion of Poland is largely reported from the new news centers along the Baltic, presenting him as a military commander with precedent for his claim to the Polish throne. With the Ottomans' invasion the following year, Vienna’s fears for the safety of Christendom once again dictate Transylvania’s portrayal in the news.