This thesis has concentrated on one period of the historical relations which began over three centuries ago. Great Britain, or rather Englan~ during the 1620s when the Portuguese were still the lords of Muscat, was trying to explore the eastern coast of Oman. They made friends in the Masseera Island, but their relationship with the Portuguese was not a friendly one. They were welcome, indeed, by the local powers as rivals to the Portuguese in India and in Persia as well as in Oman. But despite the generosity of their help, they tried to strike a balance between the ambitions of the local powers and those of the Europeans. The English, for example, were reluctant to assist the Persian projects in Muscat against the Portuguese. In fact, if the Portuguese were expelled from there by the Persians, then it would be too difficult for the Omanis to occupy it. At the same time they offered evacuation for the wounded and the surrendered Portuguese garrison with their women and children. The English observed that, after all the people of South Persia and of Hunnuz, Arabs or Persians alike, revolted. against Shah Abbas and wanted. the Portuguese back, having discovered. them to be the lesser evil. English interest in Oman and the Persian Gulf during the seventeenth century seems to have been purely commercial. For example, during the sixteen thirties and forties stable relations with the Portuguese were maintained., partly no doubt a reflection of the marriage between their two royal families, but also because the English saw commercial value in establishing good relations with both the Omanis and the Portuguese. After the expulsion of the Portuguese, the English witnessed the establishment of the first known Omani sovereign in the modem world, and the establishment of an Omani Afro-Asian Empire. They established good relations with the Ya,aarribeh family; but for some reason they were reluctant to establish themselves in Muscat. Probably the Dutch were seen to be in a better position while the English were ~stracted. by civil war. But during the first half of the eighteenth century English policy seems to have changed, probably due to the struggle between various local and European powers which took the form of piratical activities on the seas, in which the Omani Ya,aaribeh took part. By the second half of the eighteenth century the English had witnessed the downfall of the Ya,aaribeh and Greater Oman, and the establishment of another dynasty in the interior of Oman under Albu Sa,eed with the Omani Coast in the Gulf ruled by EI-Qawaasem, highlighting the division of Oman. The English found it in their interest to support Ahmed bin Sa,eed in East Africa, against El-Mazaree,a, and to keep East Africa under the Yal-bu-Sa,eed rule. They found a mutual interest in challenging the Qawaasem of Rasel-khaymeh in the Gulf, and their allies the EI-Wahabyeen in Arabia., during the first half of the nineteenth century.

<p> The emergence of South-South relations in politics and economics refracts strangely through the literature produced in these postcolonial regions. Two primary worldviews emerge in these texts. The first focuses on the continued presence of imperial powers in the South and their culpability in eruptions of violence. The second shifts to modes of domination emerging within South-South interactions. Salman Rushdie's canonical <i>Midnight's Children</i> examines the Bangladeshi genocide through a variety of literary strategies, especially hyperbole, to produce a crisis of history to indict the Cold War arms trade on equal terms with a war criminal. Similarly, Boubicar Boris Diop's novel <i>Murambi, The Book of Bones</i> helps contextualize the Rwandan genocide within the circuits of international attention&mdash;weapons supplies, political support and humanitarian aid&mdash;that put the lie to the world's supposed "indifference." On the contrary, <i> Murambi's</i> fragmented and polyvocal form evinces the multiple and contradictory investments Rwandans suffered through. East Africa is also home to a South Asian diaspora that arrived before the European powers and now advance India's exponential trade relations with Africa. M.G Vassanji's <i> The In-Between World of Vikram Lall</i> caricatures one of these "Asian Shylocks" to critique the diaspora's class politics and, simultaneously, the racism and xenophobia that led to their 1969 mass deportation from Uganda by Idi Amin. Vassanji's focalizer weaponizes capital accumulation to claim that it protects against such racism, even if it confirms racist caricatures. This argument is not unlike that made by emergent economies from the postcolonial South, which have turned to neoliberal developmental policies to guarantee their independence. Despite the unsustainability of such policies, both Vassanji's novel and Aravind Adiga's <i>The White Tiger</i> take seriously capitalism's ability to nullify old hierarchies even while building new ones. Adiga's focalizer breaks free of his place in the caste system on the strength of capitalism's ability to profane this scared hierarchy. Such anti-caste politics challenge the category of 'radical politics' as espoused by anti-capitalists and adherents of Gandhi, who fought feverishly for the preservation of caste. Taken together, these two novels represent emergent Southern businessmen who fight local antagonisms through international capital, producing a complicated situation that helps us understand the allure of accumulation in emergent economies and its impact on South-South relationships.</p>

The following thesis is an examination of the professionalization of the British line infantry officer corps from 1870 to 1902. Beginning with a discussion of the extant theories of professionalization, it then looks at civil military relations and its relationship to the international situation in general. The deployment of the line infantry at home and abroad is then analysed. Finally, the organisational changes made to produce professional structures for education, remuneration and promotion are discussed.

Thesis examines the spread of socialist ideas and the growth of the socialist movement in Wales in the period 1880-1914. It pays particular attention to the way in which socialists related to Welsh national identity, and analyses the processes through which the universalist ideals of socialism were related to the particular and local conditions of Wales. It examines the interplay between Wales and the wider world that occurred through the medium of the socialist movement, and balances this against the internal dynamic and organic growth of socialism within Wales itself. Having surveyed and commented upon existing British and Welsh labour historiography, the thesis opens with a discussion of the first „modern‟ socialists to undertake propaganda in Wales in the 1880s. It then examines the way in which socialist societies began to put down roots in the 1890s, through case studies of the Fabian Society in Cardiff and the Social Democratic Federation in south Wales. The central part of the thesis is concerned with the rise of the most important of the socialist organisations, the Independent Labour Party. Attention is given to the way in which the ILP used the south Wales coal strike of 1898 to gain its ascendancy in Welsh socialist politics, and the nature of the political culture that was created by the party in south Wales. The remainder of the thesis discusses the nature of socialist growth beyond south Wales, and pays particular attention to indigenous Welsh forms of socialism. The thesis concludes with an examination of the rapid growth of the socialist movement in Wales after 1906, and the consequent debate that occurred about the relationship of socialism, Welsh nationalism and the Welsh language.

<p>Police is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.</p> / Dissertation

<p> The "Macron Law", liberalizing French Sunday shopping hours, created great controversy in the French media in the winter of 2014-15, with particular opposition coming from the political left and the religious right. The controversy seemed to symbolize deeper issues for French society, appearing to some as a watershed, to others a threat. Some citizens expressed concern that the &ldquo;European way of life" was disappearing, being replaced by a more materialist, consumerist, extreme capitalist economic model that posed an overt threat to the traditional social protection system. Were these fears real or only imagined? To an observer, shops open on Sundays might only be a convenience, not an encroachment of &ldquo;jungle capitalism&rdquo;, and the French welfare state, even with changes in recent years, still appeared quite generous. Was the Macron Law a simple adjustment of business hours, or was it an existential moment for the nation? Focusing on French socialism, the social welfare system, and the pivotal presidential years of Fran&ccedil;ois Mitterrand, this thesis argues that the evolution of the meaning of Sunday in France can be seen as a metaphor for the nation&rsquo;s political and economic development in the late twentieth century. The thesis contends that following the turbulent 1970s, as the neoliberal paradigm became dominant globally, France forged a unique approach, an acceptable path between that model and the nation&rsquo;s traditions, just as an accommodation was found in the Sunday shopping controversy, when aspects of religious and socialist traditions were compromised to meet the demands of modern life.</p>

In the early 17th century Christian IV of Denmark created a highly impressive navy. This thesis investigates the uses to which the navy was put, and assesses the ships that were built to meet these needs. It shows that the Danish navy was for a time the largest state-owned navy in Europe and that the dockyard used to build and maintain these ships was one of the finest in Europe. The administration of the navy is analysed in detail. It is shown that the lower administration of the dockyards and the seagoing navy was highly organised, but Christian IV's failure to reform the higher levels of administration seriously hampered the effectiveness of the navy. The navy grew beyond the bounds of what the state of Denmark-Norway could afford and naval finance became a highly contentious issue in the modernisation of the state. To build the navy's ships Christian IV brought in master shipwrights from England and Scotland. The organisation of naval ship-building is examined in detail and the design of Danish warships is analysed. The Scot David Balfour is shown to be one of the most innovative and successful shipwrights of the early modern period. The figure of Christian IV dominates the Danish navy in the early 17th century. He was involved in all aspects of its organisation from its use as a political force to the design of specific vessels. He created a highly impressive navy in terms of ships and dockyards but failed to see that it also needed an efficient administration to operate effectively.

The Kindertransport – the government facilitated but privately funded movement that brought 10,000 unaccompanied mostly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to the UK by 1940 – has been celebrated as a humanitarian act of rescue by the British government and people. The existing literature on the movement has been dominated by a reductionist and redemptive narrative emphasising the children’s survival, minimising their less positive experiences and outcomes and erasing the parents from the story. The administrative details of the programme centred on the Refugee Children’s Movement have been well covered in existing academic studies that have utilised publicly available archival records, but the examination of Kindertransportees’ experiences in the UK has depended almost entirely upon the memoirs and testimonies of former child refugees, largely because of restrictions on their after-care records. Archival gaps and the extensive use of Kinder memory have resulted in a historiography that has not adequately addressed the complexity and range of the children’s experiences. This study challenges the dominant memory of the Kindertransport using newly discovered archival sources. The case files of more than 100 German-born children who were brought to England from Poland are the basis for an investigation of both the particularities of their lives and the universalities of their experiences to the Kindertransport as a whole. The perspectives of the major Kindertransport actors – the refugee organisations, the everyday carers, the children and their parents – inform this analysis, contributing new insights on their interactions, motivations, attitudes and actions. Particular attention is paid to issues of religion, agency, gender, identity and writing the parents back into the Kindertransport narrative. In addition to contesting the memory of the Kindertransport, the documentation facilitates a critical investigation of Kinder memory. Using both recorded testimony from this group of Kinder and interviews with many of the still-living Kinder and their families, Kinder memory and archival documentation are interrogated, resulting in a synthesis that challenges both sources and produces new understandings of the Kindertransport and its legacies.

This thesis tells the story of Shetland knitted lace. It is a history that comprises more than a series of chronological events which illustrate the development of a domestic craft industry; it is also the story of a landscape and the people who inhabited it and the story of the emergence of a distinctive textile product which achieved global recognition Focusing on the material culture of Shetland lace opens up questions about the relationships between the women who produce it, the men and women who sell it and the women who consume and wear it. In acknowledging these connected histories and by following Shetland lace over time and across, often wide, geographical spaces, Shetland knitted lace can be shown to epitomize and signify social relations. This research takes a life cycle, or biographical, approach to Shetland lace in which consideration is given not only to the circumstances surrounding its production, but also to recognising the different stages in its development and how it moved through different hands, contexts and uses. Shetland lace exists within a set of cultural relationships which are temporally, spatially and socially specific and it carries shifting historical and cultural stories about its makers, traders and wearers and the worlds that they inhabited. Recognising these relationships as an integral element in the formation of historical and cultural narratives it is possible to see the role Shetland lace played in defining self and community within Shetland while acknowledging difference in an expanding national and international market. This understanding of the production, marketing and consumption processes demonstrates the multiple relationships between Shetland lace and its market and between the producer and consumer. The focus on the highly skilled Shetland lace producers demonstrates the development of female enterprise and entrepreneurship in the Shetland lace industry in which local networks operated in an exchange of labour and goods, both as a barter and monetary economy. Identifying the economic and symbolic place of Shetland lace within Shetland society highlights the impact of external influences on the success, and perceived decline of this industry. From this perspective this research engages with many of the key questions concerning a specialised form of textile production dominated by women, its place within the female economy, and its position within the world of trade and fashion. In this it aims to make a new contribution to our knowledge of women's work, of the operation of markets, and the perception of skill and value in the past and the present and provide an understanding of an industry which was a crucial element of household economics and female autonomy in these islands. It acknowledges the community of unknown Shetland women who, over generations, introduced, produced and sustained the Shetland lace industry and where possible identifies, and gives a voice to, previously unknown individual producers.

Apart for a few episodes such as the battle of Cravant (1423), the defence of Paris (1429) and especially the capture of Joan of Arc at the siege of Com-piègne (1430), the military aspect of Anglo-Burgundian alliance in 1420-1435 war is little known to general audience. This stage of the Hundred Years War is presented largely as a series of English successes in the 1420s followed by the defeats and setbacks after 1429. The present study aims to uncover this large-ly ignored aspect of one of the most dramatic stages of the Hundred Years War, which at a certain point brought the English to the walls of Orléans – an undoubted peak of their centuries-long efforts to subdue the French kingdom. For the aims of research, the course of the Hundred Years War in the 1420s-early 1430s has to be considered not in the terms of the English fighting against the French but as a struggle of two alternative claims to the French throne, both of them relying on certain support among the French pop-ulation. One of these suggested that the French crown remained with the Va-lois dynasty represented by Charles VII, the other tried to introduce the Dual Monarchy of England and France under the governance of the House of Lancas-ter, as formalised by the Treaty of Troyes (21 May 1420). The role of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, the most high-ranking French partisan of the Dual monarchy, as the pillar of the Lancastrian power in France becomes the subject of study. This raises the question of the system of obligations between the duke and the Lancastrian government, the modes of its practical exploitation and the significance of the duke’s contribution to the Lancastrian war efforts. With this in mind, this study provides a chronological reconstruction of Anglo-Burgundian military cooperation in its development by placing it in a wider military and diplomatic context. Having assembled the evidence on the practice of military assistance it proceeds to discussing the most widely em-ployed models of cooperation and interaction between the allies eventually leading to a certain reconsideration of the whole nature of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. What the research reveals is the scale and continuity of the alliance which retained its importance from December 1419 to September 1435, the significance of the allies’ efforts in supporting each other and variety of its models and, finally, the crucial influence of the military power or weak-ness factor on the diplomacy and politics in France.