Current historiography on French empire building in the early modern period rests on a host of unexamined terms, including colony, empire, monopoly, company, and trading privileges. Yet, these terms were anything but fixed, certain or uncomplicated to contemporaries. This dissertation takes as its subject the exercise of authority in New France through proprietorships and companies to get to the political, legal, and ideological heart of French empire building. Organized chronologically, each chapter corresponds to a different constellation of authority, ranging from a proprietorship in which the titleholder subdelegated his trading privileges and administrative authority to two separate parties to a commercial company that managed both jurisdictions. Engaging with cutting-edge international literature on sovereignty, empire formation, and early modern state building, this thesis resituates the story of the colonization of French North America in an Atlantic framework. It relies partly on civil suits that arose in France during the first three decades of the seventeenth century over powers and privileges in New France. This frequent litigation has traditionally been ignored by historians of New France; however, my research suggests that it was an integral part of the process of colonization. On the ground, claimants fought for ascendancy using instruments of legal authority and personal power. These contests in New France often had a second act in the courts of France, where parties’ actions exposed preoccupations quite removed from the colonial enterprise, particularly jurisdictional rivalries, both personal and institutional. New France became part of the admiral’s efforts to consolidate and extend his authority, thereby incorporating the colony into an existing French institution. Royal ambitions to control maritime commerce and navigation conflicted with the admiral’s growing jurisdiction, leading to plays for power in New France. Domestic challenges to exclusive trading privileges overseas were intimately connected to concerns over royal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. Such examples highlight both the intimate connections between the construction of sovereignty in the colonial realm and the process of state formation in France and the contingency and contestation associated with these processes in the early seventeenth-century Atlantic.

This project studies the paradoxical juxtaposition of the modern nation-state's guarantee of life and security to its citizenry, along with the spectacular (encounter killings, torture chambers and cells) and banal (border control practices, population policies) forms through which it exercises the power over life and death in the sphere of everyday life in particular borderland areas. I argue that a study of exceptional locales like India's eastern borderlands elaborates the paradox of state sovereignty in two ways: first, it illustrates that so-called "margins," like colonies and borderlands, are necessary for the institution of modern state sovereignty, and second, it enables a critical scrutiny of the function of forms of violence as essential tools of modern governmentality. India's eastern borderlands are a crucial locale for such an inquiry because they lie at the crossroads of the three area-studies formations of South, Southeast and East Asia. The institutionalization of the official borders of the nation-states that rim this region--India, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan--are comparatively recent historical developments. Specters of pre-nation-statist spatial connections still survive in the region, and often come into conflict with modern state technologies such as citizenship laws and statutes regulating cross-border socioeconomic contacts among people. The central focus of my project is on post-1980 Anglophone and local language literary fictions by Amitav Ghosh, Siddhartha Deb, Parag Das and Raktim Xarma. These fictions demonstrate how the eastern borderlands are figured in popular Indian discourse as a "state of nature" that occupy a position of being both inside the rationalized territorial body of the nation-state and outside the regime of normalized law and order. Focusing on figures as diverse as bureaucrats, army officials, journalists, guerrillas and refugees (among others), they show how socio-historical changes over a longue durée, and the practices and policies employed by the state apparatus, coalesce to produce new modalities of subjectivity and politics in these zones of exception in the Indian nation-state.

This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

In the industrialized world, sustainable agriculture has remained a fringe agricultural experiment, unable to provide a large-scale alternative model. Cuba provides a case study of a massive agricultural shift to sustainable farming brought about by economic crisis. In 2009, 31 farmers and 6 key informants from 4 provinces in Cuba were interviewed and 12 women participated in a participant driven photography project about their involvement in small-scale agroecological farming. The research found that the inability to purchase imported chemicals and fertilizers has encouraged farmers to innovate their own solutions to maintaining soil, plant, animal and ecosystem health. Institutional support through academic institutions and non-government organizations is facilitating the spread of agroecological education through farmer-to-farmer exchanges. Economically, farming as a profession provides a fair income; although, farmers’ wealth was tied to other industries in their respective regions, and influenced by tourism. The need for housing and land tenure are large barriers, but the government’s opening up of land for farming in usufruct has been a successful strategy for encouraging new farmers. Allowing for subsistence growing, has been historically and is currently an important incentive. Cooperatives allow for the distribution of scarce inputs, provide educational and social opportunities for farmers and can provide retirement benefits, administrative and legal help. However, women tend to participate less in cooperatives, and traditional household roles and machismo are still an undercurrent in the Cuban countryside. Cuba’s agricultural story is rich in lessons that can be applied globally, learned from its requirement to respond quickly to change during economic crisis. These lessons are simple; productivity and happiness increase with worker autonomy, support from government and institutions works better when it is participatory, and social groups whether cooperatives, family or neighbourhoods, provide an essential human support system. / Graduate / 0366 / 0453 / 0473 / 0733 / lisawillott@gmail.com

This thesis analyses the power relations operating within the field of Canadian national identity, the permissible subject positions within it, and the political claims enabled by such positions. It contributes to a field of interdisciplinary study on these questions by arguing that national identity in Canada is a problem animated by the logic of the sovereign form of authority. An analysis of state-authorized discourse demonstrates the power relations between the Normative Canadian and National Other subject positions, which reduce Indigenous peoples, the Québécois, and ethnoculturalized individuals into intelligible subjects of recognition and sovereign decisions. An account of those limits and conditions of possibility of Canadian national identity susceptible to modification and transgression is offered to conclude. / Graduate / 0615 / tchartrand@gmail.com

This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

The treatment of Internet jurisdiction ordinarily looks to how the laws of a local jurisdiction apply to the Internet. Less examined is the underlying jurisprudence that may create the basis for legitimate Internet jurisdiction in light of the ambiguity that the Internet creates for establishing sovereignty. This thesis thus takes recent decisions of the Quebec courts that apply the province's Charter of the French Language to the Internet as a point of departure for an in-depth analysis of the nature of sovereignty as an increasingly indeterminate principle of law in the emerging discipline known as Internet Law. Ultimately, the chaos that the Internet initially provoked may be resolved by the return to ethical principles based on the theoretical approach of legal pluralism and the philosophical treatment of ethical responsibility as proposed by Emmanuel Levinas' "humanism of the other".

This thesis examines the influence of contemporary approaches to biodiversity conservation on conceptions of state sovereignty over natural resources. Traditional approaches to state sovereignty have emphasized the right of states to exploit natural resources. Contemporary approaches to biodiversity conservation, however, have given rise to a more flexible and dynamic understanding of state sovereignty over natural resources: one encompassing sovereign rights of exploitation along with corresponding conservation responsibilities. Founded upon this premise, the thesis focuses on the emergence of a 'balanced' approach to state sovereignty over natural resources and examines its effects on the role of states in managing natural resources. While addressing it as the basis of the emergence of the recognition of a duty of environmental protection, inter alia, in the form of biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of biological resources, the author suggests that the balanced approach to state sovereignty has been instrumental in redefining the role of states, and the role of the sovereignty principle itself in achieving the goal of biodiversity conservation.

In most texts about Hawaiian history, the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893. Hawai'i, as a result, was then governed first by a Provisional Government, then by the Republic of Hawai'i. Such texts further note that in 1898, Hawai'i was annexed to the United States and, subsequently, became the State of Hawai'i through a vote of the people in 1959. This dissertation examines Hawaiian history from a different perspective, one based on the issue of 'legality', and on documentation that surfaced in the 1990s that challenges the United States' claim to annexation of Hawai'i. The illegality of the takeover by haole businessmen, the resistance of Queen Lili'uokalani and her loyal subjects to the takeover, statements by then-President Grover Cleveland referencing the overthrow as an "Act of War," in many ways set the tone for the present-day sovereignty movement. Highlighted are some of the activities within the Hawaiian sovereignty movement during the 1990s and the first few years of this century that are turning points in the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty. Identified spokespersons for the movement are extensively cited, as well as individuals with strong but thoughtful opinions. Many of the citations used were gathered and saved from emails or from relevant websites. Prophecy, and the acknowledgement of spirituality as a grounding force in a unified movement, is a significant element, and serves to remind activists, and especially Hawaiian activists, that the work to re-establish the nation can only succeed if it is based in Hawaiian cultural concepts that are pono (correct or in proper relationship). Maintaining 'right relationships' between the people, the heavens and the earth is necessary to successfully carry forward the reclaimed Hawaiian nation and the identity of the people as Hawaiian nationals, as the Queen directed a century ago. Most importantly, it allows those involved in the struggle to see themselves, not as victims, but as masters of their own fate.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1993 / Pacific Islands Studies