This project analyzes the intersections between representations of female sovereignty used to promote and rethink feminine virtue in both early modern English and Spanish advice literature and literary texts published in the decade after Queen Elizabeth I’s death. I suggest that the question of women’s sovereignty prompted by the rise of ruling queens in Spain and England influences the prominence of regal women as models of feminine virtue in advice literature and reconceptualizes feminine virtue as a political discourse, forming a new category I term “princely feminine virtue.” Scholarship analyzing the relationship between advice literature and literary works has not recognized England and Spain’s shared indebtedness to princely models to advise and represent feminine virtue. By examining the interplay between feminine virtue, tropes of sovereignty, and the advisory mode in both types of texts, this project emphasizes the widespread potential for women’s exemplary virtue across the social spectrum. In addition to recasting feminine virtue through a princely lens, these texts reveal a shared vision of how performances of feminine virtue are invested with agency and power.

This dissertation is a study of the codification of empire and its unexpected consequences. It returns to the constitutional history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — a subject whose heyday had passed by the late 1920s — to offer a new history of sovereignty in Central Europe. It argues that the imperatives of imperial constitutionalism spurred the creation a rich jurisprudence on the death, birth, and survival of states; and that this jurisprudence, in turn, outlived the imperial context of its formation and shaped the “new international order” in interwar Central Europe. “Law, Time, and Sovereignty” documents how contemporaries “thought themselves through” the transition from a dynastic Europe of two-bodied emperor-kings to the world of the League of Nations. The project of writing an imperial constitution, triggered by the revolutions of 1848, forced jurists, politicians and others to articulate the genesis, logic, and evolution of imperial rule, generating in the process a bank or archive of imperial self-knowledge. Searching for the right language to describe imperial sovereignty entailed the creative translation of the structures and relationships of medieval composite monarchy into the conceptual molds of nineteenth-century legal thought. While the empire’s constituent principalities (especially Hungary and Bohemia) theoretically possessed autonomy, centuries of slow centralization from Vienna had rendered that legal independence immaterial. Seeking conceptual means to manage the paradox of states that existed in law but not in fact, legal scholars and regional claim-makers alike cultivated a language of “historical rights” to serve as a placeholder for the suspended sovereignty of these sleeping states, swallowed up but not dissolved in the python of empire. Remarkably, “historical rights” became a kind of Trojan horse that smuggled the specter of international law into the internal workings of imperial constitutional law: the line between the two orders grew porous long before the formal sovereign rupture of 1918. Drawing on nineteenth-century legal studies and government legislation as well as parliamentary debates and other public statements, I thus show how imperial constitutional law — closely intertwined with the new academic discipline of constitutional law that emerged coterminously — provides an extraordinarily powerful vantage point from which to observe the construction of “modern” notions of statehood, rights, and sovereignty out of the raw materials of dynastic law. What is more, I reveal how the intellectual products of this constitutional tradition survived the empire’s dissolution in 1918: bodies of legal knowledge designed to capture and codify the fractured nature of imperial sovereignty eventually served as intellectual tools for managing its absence. When the empire collapsed under the pressure of four years of total war, a carefully cultivated discursive terrain lay waiting, well-stocked with tropes, arguments, and claims concerning the pre-existing statehood of many of the empire’s component parts. At the Paris Peace Conference and beyond, claim-makers redeployed the rhetorical arsenal of imperial constitutional debate on the world stage, arguing for the survival of these historic polities and their rights over the rupture of imperial collapse. The interwar settlement in Central Europe, I contend, cannot be understood outside a broader sweep of legal ideas forged in the cradle of imperial law. In this way, my dissertation offers a new pre-history of the interwar international order (often narrated as a Central European “year zero”), as well as a history and post-history of the empire’s legal worlds. Sensitive throughout to the co-implication of political and epistemological questions, this dissertation is not only a history of sovereignty but also a history of knowledge about sovereignty. At its heart lies a preoccupation with the relationship between law and time. By tracking law’s “persons” and their survival through time — especially their talent for both reinvention and continuity, and their capacity to carry rights through history — it sketches a more anthropological portrait of the particular tools and logics by which legal thought sets itself in history and resists the effects of time’s passing. In offering a new account of the transfer of rights and their subjects between old world orders and new, “Law, Time and Sovereignty” doubles as a study of the temporal life of states.

This dissertation explores how members of sovereignty movements in politically-dependent nations respond to transnational influences in their social, economic, and political lives. My research explores Puerto Rico's independence movements on the island and the U.S. mainland with the intent to uncover how transnational influences in Puerto Ricans' social and economic lives may filter into their political activities. I look specifically at how the prolific use of cultural nationalism within the Puerto Rican political community contributes to the characterization of Puerto Rico as a transnational community, and I investigate how this affects their political activities. I conducted research for this dissertation between 2003 and 2005 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and New York City, New York. I used a variety of ethnographic methods, including semi-structured interviews, participation and observation, and archival research. I conclude that any transnational experiences Puerto Ricans may undergo in their daily experiences do not directly impact their political agendas and activities. Instead, I highlight each independentista community as distinct and illustrate the localized political goals and practices of both. I discuss the significance of spatiality to both pro-independence Puerto Rican communities, specifically as it relates to the traditional nation-state structure and the multiplicity of boundaries affecting national membership and access to citizenship and rights that it entails. Ultimately I argue that neither has the cultural eclipsed the political, nor has the transnational eclipsed the local, in Puerto Rican nationalist movements. Instead, I contend that the nation-state is still a powerful influence on contemporary definitions of national membership and belongingness, and locality and spatiality are significant motivators in today's sovereignty movements.

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The concepts of sovereignty and legal personality in Islamic Law and Western Law are fundamentally different. Under Islamic law sovereignty belongs to Allah and the ruler is the agent of the Ummah. His function is to implement, rather than make the law. Western law assigns sovereignty to the state. The state has complete monopoly over the law making process, giving validity to which under Islamic law was the domain of the doctrinal schools. Furthermore, the birth of the nation-state has changed the structure in which traditional Islamic law operated which has now been forcefully restricted in its scope. The concept of ‘asabiyya is different from the concept of nation. The former is a natural phenomenon while the latter has been imposed upon the Ummah. If certain changes are made to the way that the modern state operates, it can function as an administrative tool that serves the Ummah.

The concepts of sovereignty and legal personality in Islamic Law and Western Law are fundamentally different. Under Islamic law sovereignty belongs to Allah and the ruler is the agent of the Ummah. His function is to implement, rather than make the law. Western law assigns sovereignty to the state. The state has complete monopoly over the law making process, giving validity to which under Islamic law was the domain of the doctrinal schools. Furthermore, the birth of the nation-state has changed the structure in which traditional Islamic law operated which has now been forcefully restricted in its scope. The concept of ‘asabiyya is different from the concept of nation. The former is a natural phenomenon while the latter has been imposed upon the Ummah. If certain changes are made to the way that the modern state operates, it can function as an administrative tool that serves the Ummah.

Territorial Sovereignty has been treated as a presupposition without the perspective of history in the study of international relations. This paper aims at tracing back the relationship between authority and space in the Middle Ages, finding it was defined by feudatory¡¦s fealty and alliance rather than by boundaries. Therefore, authority space in the Middle Ages could overlap and coexist above one land. On the contrary, modern national boundary excludes other authorities from its territory; territory serves as a container to reify power in the modern time. Besides, this paper shows that processes of re-scaling of authority space, which include sub-national spatial scales of global cities and supra-national spatial scales of the European Union, constitute the current round of globalization. This development of overlapping authority spaces could be conceived as a sign of arrival of Neo-Medievalism.

The practice of Iraq and Kuwait in treaty succession has significantly contributed to the development of the concept of state succession not only in Islamic law but also in international law; a contribution which advocates the paramount importance of distinguishing between succession in fact and succession in law. Greatest attention is given to the latter in this study which is divided into the following four parts: Part 1. Survey of the development of the concept of succession in fact under Islamic law and throughout the practice of the Islamic State until the advent of the latter's territorial disintegration into many political entities, whereby various Arab territories developed independent factual identities. The practice of Iraq and Kuwait have been selected from among these entities in order to examine the maturity of certain Islamic legal rules governing succession in fact, upon which the rules governing succession in law are based. The second, third and fourth parts of this treatise survey the development of the concept of succession in law under Islamic law and its relationship to international law through five stages. A. Outline of the Islamic legacy in treaty succession according to the primary sources of Islamic law. B. Analysis of the selective practice of two of the evolving Arab states, namely Iraq and Kuwait, in order to throw some light on the application of the primary sources of Islamic law to treaty succession and the resort to principles embodied in the secondary sources where no provision is found in the former. This will help to explain the practice of these states with regard to certain controversial matters where no precedent existed. C. Study of the concept of state succession in Islamic legal theory from which the Iraqi doctrine of devolution and the Kuwaiti doctrine of non-devolution evolved. (A, B and C constitute part 2). D. (Part 3) The adoption of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti legal doctrines on treaty succession by other Arab political entities and the resulting evolution of Arabic public law. E. (Part 4) Interaction between principles and doctrines that have evolved from the secondary sources of Islamic law, such as Arabic public law, on treaty succession and international law by means of the codification process through the work of the U.N.I.L.C. and the 1978 Vienna Convention on State Succession in Respect of Treaties in which the Arab states made an important contribution to the development of the international legal order. This contribution will be further substantiated in the conclusions.