In the late 1300s and early 1400s, when firearms made their arrival in the lands of Islam, the various dynasties exhibited differing responses. While the Ottoman sultanate wasted no time in incorporating firearms into their formidable military machine, both the Mamluks of Egypt and the Safavids of Persia were far more reluctant in adopting the new weapons. David Avalon, investigating the question of Mamluk reluctance, identified the rigid sense of pride in the traditional forms of warfare to be found in the ruling class; however, the same attention has not yet been paid to the Safavids. A paucity of relevant references in the accounts of European travellers combined with a tendency in the Safavid sources to apply identical terms to both gunpowder and non-gunpowder weapons made the relative abundance of firearms difficult to quantify. In all, the same stubborn attitude found in the Mamluks was also found in the Safavid elite, but in the case of Persia, this cannot be considered the sole answer. Instead, the historical background and military situation also played an important role.

The age of Gandhian resistance left a substantial mark on the landscape of colonial Nigeria. Until the emergence of the Zikist Movement in 1946 Nigerian nationalists were content to talk and write, going no further than superficially criticizing the colonial government. The emergence of the Zikists marked the beginning of "Direct Action," as Nigerian nationalists were pressed to support their words with action. Based on the ideological formulations of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Nwafor Orizu, the Zikists sought effective techniques to actualize their desire for national independence. Following in the footsteps of Gandhi, the Zikist Movement attempted to achieve independence through the use of non-violent civil disobedience, boycotts and politicized strikes. Despite the significant role they played in the Nigerian nationalist movement, the Zikists have been largely overlooked in the extant literature.

Modern, Western, secularist legal systems are, in actuality, religious legal systems. The religious bedrock underlying secularist legal systems is the same as the transmuted, and therefore immanentist, faith and creed that underlies the essential mindset and spirit of modernity. Secularist legal systems may be conceived of as semeiotic prisms that refract modernity's relocation, within the phenomenal world, of the transcendence and divine presence of Ultimate Reality. As prisms that bring to light secularist law's customarily unrecognized and unacknowledged, immanentist religious foundation, secularist legal systems express modernity's faith. Further, secularist law acts to validate, enforce, and propagate modernity's religious orthodoxy. Among modernist polities, the United States functions as a bellwether in the modern, Western, civilizational drive to globally proselytize, through the bringing to bear of state power, modernity's worldly religious tradition. Secularist law's unspoken, religious import is powerfully intimated by two interdependent signs that are interwoven within the semeiotic texts comprised by secularist legal systems. Each of these signs embodies one in a pair of reciprocally reinforcing ideas that are avatars of the secularist juridical mind. First is secularist law's idea that all existents - corporeal and non-corporeal; biological and non-biological; human and non-human - are subject to one or another property holder's personal, proprietary claim. Second is the idea that humans, who are in their ontological essence proprietors, have a rightful, transactional power over all existents (inasmuch as all things that exist can be conceived of as property). As these two ideas presuppose that all existing things are reducible to a tangible, proprietary form that is subject to human ownership, ordering, and exchange, they elevate to a presumed level of metaphysical absoluteness both the human proprietary claim and transactional power over existing things, and the things, themselves. The inquiry construes the underlying, religious significance of the two ideas - that is, it reads these two signs - as they occur within the following, ontologically all-encompassing, areas of secularist law: environmental jurisprudence; intellectual property law; and legal doctrine governing the ownership and alienation of human, biological property.

"Setting the Standard" examines over one hundred years in the existence of a British Columbia coastal community: Sointula "place of harmony ". From its beginnings as a socialist utopia settled by Finnish immigrants, to its place in the 1960s as a seemingly typical fishing community, peopled by a diverse ethnic mix. this thesis traces the ideological changes of the island's inhabitants over a six decade period. In doing so, this work uses Sointula as a case study to see how an ideological base first forms in a community and then how that ideology forms a standard that influences all succeeding community developments. Through this case study, particular historical events in the province surrounding the mining, logging and fishing industries, as well as the co-operative, labour union, and socialist movements are examined.

Some scholars, in examining the debate which led up to the Midwives Act of 1902, have portrayed the conflict as a struggle between the monolithic medical profession and midwives. However, this thesis demonstrates that the late nineteenth-century medical profession was still very much divided on the issue of midwifery. There were tensions between various branches and between elite members and general practitioners. Further, the British Medical Association, the General Medical Council, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal all competed for the right to speak for the profession as a whole. In the course of the debate the medical profession caricatured the "mythical" untrained midwife while seeking to impress upon the public their own identity as skilled and caring practitioners. The 1902 Midwives Act, which reveals that Parliament, accepted some, but not all, of the medical profession's claims, signifies both the extent and the limits of the medical profession's influence.

How can museums, which have been critiqued as colonial spaces to house the curiosities of disappearing races and to show the superiority of the colonizers, be redeployed as assertions of alternative (aboriginal) worldviews? I argue that while Stó:lō Nation and Stó:lō individuals have redeployed museum techniques to serve their own purposes they are still constrained by external and internal factors. Throughout this study I note where the Stó:lō have worked with existing museums, constructed their own interpretive centres, and changed their interpretive centres to differ from and be similar to non-aboriginal-run museums. I also explain how these different museums/interpretive centres are actually coming closer together ideologically. I examine three museums/interpretive centres: the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, located in Vancouver, and the Stó:lō-owned Shxwt'a:selhawtxw (The House of Long Ago and Today), located in Sardis, and Xa:ytem Longhouse Interpretive Centre, just outside of Mission.

In the early years of the twentieth-century, the British Columbia government used game law and conservation as a pretext for the establishment of an alternative, liberal order land regime in the northern reaches of the province. A. Bryan Williams, the first Provincial Game Warden (1905-1918), implemented this new order through legal strictures, promotion of tourism and settlement, and the operation of a wildlife conservation agenda designed to secure control over land managed by Indigenous peoples. The Tahltan of the Stikine Plateau, aided by the activism of ethnographer, hunting guide and Indigenous rights advocate James A. Teit, resisted the encroachment of their hunting territory by emphasizing connections to their land and resources. I analyse the correspondence between these two men to determine the extent of their contributions to the imposition of a new wildlife management agenda, resistance to it, and the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into a wage economy. In addition, I make preliminary attempts to integrate Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, complemented by Ian McKay's understanding of the liberal order as a `project of rule', into the historiography of British Columbia. I contend that an analysis of colonial hegemonies and local counter-hegemonies can contribute to an understanding of the historical dimensions of power and resistance, both actual and discursive.

France's Third Republic, which was in place from 1871 to 1940, saw the establishment of the nation's first state-run primary school system. This school system was far from politically neutral: it was designed to strengthen the Republic by wresting control of education away from religious orders and by encouraging the use of a universalized French language. The implementation of French education encountered significant resistance in rural provinces and overseas colonies, where linguistic and religious traditions clashed with the secularizing and universalizing tendencies of Republican France. This thesis explores how education was imposed and resisted through a case-study analysis of French schooling in Alsace and Algeria between 1918 and 1940. The experience in colony and metropole are examined on the same plane, in order to see how France sought to control the cultural identity of its citizens and subjects and how local populations in both locations resisted this imposition.

An analysis of three poor people's movements in twentieth century Canada serves to wrest the ideas and activist tradition of Canada's poor people from historical obscurity. Between 1932 and 1935, the Communist-inspired Vancouver unemployed councils engaged in direct actions to challenge Depression-era social policy, capital and the police. The arrival of the modern post-war welfare state did not end poverty; however. Vancouver antipoverty activists were circumscribed by society's relative affluence and organizational and sectarian debates within labour councils and the antipoverty movement. Finally, since 1989 the Toronto-based Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has extended antipoverty activism to include the issues of immigrants, First Nations, women and children. Drawing on theorist Antonio Gramsci and the socialist-anarchist tradition, this thesis posits that direct action and a subsidiarity relationship between activists and their community are essential to the success and longevity of poor people's movements.

This dissertation is a history of humanitarianism in Canada in the 1870s and 1880s. It examines the rise of the first Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1869 in Montreal and the destruction of the buffalo on the Canadian prairies by 1879. These two case studies on the historical treatment of animals are complemented by two other case studies which explore "man's humanity to man" in these years. One chapter examines how Montrealers responded to the indigent poor on their city streets, focusing particularly on the nature of humanitarian child-saving efforts which led to the removal of many poor children from their families. The last chapter investigates the nature and limits with which central and eastern Canadians responded to reports from the prairies of "starving Indians" following the destruction of the buffalo. The dissertation makes sense of the seeming contradictory contemporary impulses which led to the protection of the domestic animals of the "uncivilized" urban poor on the one hand and the destruction of the buffalo (as a free roaming species) to make way for "civilization" on the other. It shows how both the SPCA movement and the destruction of the buffalo were the result of "civilization," signs of the emerging capitalist and colonial order. It demonstrates that contemporaries recognized and were dismayed by the central role played by civilized white hunters in the destruction of the buffalo. Once the buffalo disappeared, a new narrative emerged that blamed the Indians for the destruction, helping to justify Canadian domination of the prairies. The thesis also demonstrates that as dominant culture took on the mantle of humanity to animals, through the establishment