No description available.

This thesis’ original contribution to knowledge is to indicate the unique contribution of qasbah­‐based Urdu newspapers to the emergence of an Urdu public sphere in early 20^th century South Asia, using as a primary lens the Urdu newspaper Madīnah. In doing so, this thesis will shed light on debates relating to Muslim religious identity, urban life, social status, and gender reform. Madīnah newspaper was published in Bijnor qasbah in Bijnor district, UP, from 1912 onwards. By the early 20^th century, elite, literate qasbah dwellers increased their attachment to their ashrāf identity, even as the definition of that social status group was being transformed. The nature of ashrāf conceptions of the qasbah in the Urdu newspaper conversation sheds light onto the nature of the Urdu public sphere, complicating existing narrative explanations of UP Muslim identity transformations. In the 12 years that constitute the span of the study, international developments such as the Italo-­‐Turkish War, the Balkan Wars, and World War I, with domestic transformations in municipal policies and the activism of some Hindu groups motivated Muslims to redefine their place in early 20^th century society. At the same time, the early 20^th century saw the rising prominence of the qasbah as a centre of spiritual and cultural life among ashrāf Muslims. World War I and the non-­‐cooperation movement threatened the British Empire’s hold on South Asia. In the midst of these shifting sands stood the city of Bijnor, a backwoods qasbah in the district of the same name. Bijnor’s publication Madīnah provided a regional platform for scholars, laymen, and poets to discuss their place in the new order. As part of a network of literary publications exchanged between qasbahs in the first half of the twentieth century, Madīnah shaped and complicated gender boundaries, religious identity, social status, and political alliance, all in the service of the Muslim ummah, or community. This thesis places Madīnah in the context of the broader Urdu newspaper market and the incipient newspaper culture of qasbahs, which both reflected the broadened geographic horizon of the qasbatī ashrāf and placed a premium on the qasbah as a place set apart from the city. After laying this foundation, the thesis turns to the place of Islam in qasbah newspapers and Madīnah. Newspapers reflected a division among ashrāf regarding the centrality of Islam in elite culture, revealing an ideological division between the qasbah and major urban centres Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta. Madīnah and other newspapers sought to establish an indelible link between Islam and ashrāf identity, in contrast to some urban newspapers, which sought to lay the groundwork instead for a secular, nationalized Muslim identity. This thesis then turns to the expanding geographic horizons of Madīnah newspaper, both enabled by novel technology and neutralized as a threat by careful framing of international and trans-‐regional content. The subsequent chapter deals with Madīnah's Women’s Newspaper, which demonstrated a trend toward gender ventriloquism in reformist approaches to gender. Many articles penned ostensibly by women had male authors; Madīnah's articles expressed a complex set of reactions to intimate female experiences, including curiosity, fascination, and anxiety. Qasbah newspapers offer new avenues for insight into the tensions that characterized the Urdu public of the early 20^th century. This thesis highlights the character of qasbatī ashrāf's engagement with the broader literary conversation via newspapers during a time of dramatic social transformation, in the process contributing to the form of the Urdu public sphere.

This thesis analyses the nation-building work that the Indian Army undertook during the military administration of Malaya, 1945-6. This was a two-part process, taking in military-led relief work and a political reform scheme. Historians have conducted little work on the Indian Army’s role in the British return to empire in Malaya, thus the army’s crucial and nuanced role has been overlooked. This limits the understanding of the army’s institutional development and role in Malayan nation-building between 1945-6. This thesis redresses this. It argues that the military administration of Malaya encapsulated the culmination of wartime changes to the role of the Indian Army fighting soldier. Whereas before the war the Indian Army found it expedient to keep its soldiers isolated from current affairs, British experience during the Second World War instead suggested that soldiers educated in current affairs could be very effective. Concurrently, British military leaders began to think on the role of the Indian Army and its men after the war. They concluded that the Indian Army’s soldiers could become catalysts of national political and social development, and initially identified this as a role for the army in post-war India. Furthermore, it was felt that the Indian Army could contribute both to the Commonwealth and United Nations ideals. The return to Malaya encapsulated these changes to the conception of the Indian Army soldier and was a practical expression and measure of these. The soldiers became agents of political change, imperial re-entrenchment and administration – which this thesis terms ‘soldier-administrators’. The Indian Army, it is argued, was deployed consciously as a nation-building force, using the new thinking on the role of Indian Army soldiers. In so doing, the Indian Army partook in targeted schemes for military relief, political reform and nation-building to try to build the new Malayan nation.

In the decade following the Asian-African Conference of 1955, the communist government of the People’s Republic of China took unprecedented interest in its relations with countries in the Middle East. China’s leaders formed particularly strong ties first with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, then, beginning in 1958, with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which at that time was engaged in a bitter struggle for independence from France. The bonds that developed between China and Egypt and between China and Algeria were strengthened by a shared commitment of the governments of these countries to carry out “revolutions” that would challenge Western preeminence in global affairs and establish their own societies as independent voices on the world stage. The common ideological heritage of these three revolutionary countries allowed their leaders to forge connections that went beyond mere expressions of mutual support. Sino-Arab relations in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be explained by a realist narrative of attempts to exert power or influence through high-level diplomacy; rather, the evolving relationships between China and its Arab allies demonstrate how three countries could co-opt one another’s experiences to define and articulate their own nationalist identities on behalf of domestic audiences. This thesis pays particular attention to two constituencies that played a central role in mediating the development of Sino-Arab relations: Chinese Muslims and Arab leftists. Focusing on publications about Sino-Arab relations written by or intended for members of these two groups makes clear the manners in which domestic ideological concerns shaped the development of international relationships. Sino-Egyptian and Sino-Algerian relations between 1955 and 1965 were primarily symbolic. The perception of international amity gave journalists, policymakers, intellectuals, and religious figures free rein to expound their own distorted interpretations of Chinese and Arab society in order to promote their own ideological causes. These causes, which varied over the course of the decade, included the incorporation of Chinese Muslims into Chinese politics, the conferral of revolutionary legitimacy on Nasser’s government, the celebration of China as a champion of global revolution, the legitimization of the FLN, and the presentation of China as a fully anti-imperialist country in contrast to the Soviet Union. Each of these projects had in common the enduring goal of transforming how citizens of China, Egypt, and Algeria perceived their own national identity.

The planned language Esperanto achieved popularity in early twentieth century Japan, inspiring a national movement which was the largest outside Europe. Esperanto was designed to facilitate greater international and inter-cultural communication and understanding; the history of the language in Japan reveals a rich tradition of internationalism in Japan, stretching from the beginnings of the movement, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, through the end of the Pacific war, when, for a brief period, organised Esperanto in Japan ceased. Building upon existing studies of internationalism amongst elite opinion makers in Japan, this history of Esperanto reveals unexpected examples of internationalism amongst the broader Japanese public, a number of competing conceptions of the international world, and their realisation through a range of transnational activities. Esperanto was at once an intellectual phenomenon, and a language which could be put into immediate and concrete practice. The diversity of social groups and intellectual positions within the Japanese Esperanto community reveals internationalism and cosmopolitanism, not as well defined, static concepts, but as broad spaces in which different ideas of the world and the community of mankind could be debated. What linked the various different groups and individuals drawn into the Japanese Esperanto movement was a shared desire to make contact with, and help to reform, the world beyond Japan's borders, as well as a shared realisation of the vital role of language in making this contact possible. From radical socialists to conservative academics, and from Japanese diplomats at the League of Nations to members of rural communities in the deep north of Japan, although their politics often differed, Japanese Esperantists came together to participate in the re-imagining of the modern world; in doing so they became part of a transnational community, one which reveals insights into both modern Japanese history, and the nature of internationalism.

U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal (1230-1309) was a great adept of the bKa' brgyud school of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly renowned for his knowledge of the Kālacakra tantra and the unique teaching known as the Approach and Attainment of the Three Vajras (rDo rje gsum gyi bsnyen sgrub), said to have been given to him in his vision by Vajrayoginī (rDo rje rnal 'byor ma) in the Miraculous Land (sprul pa'i zhing) of U rgyan. He was the student of the 2nd Karma pa, who entrusted him with the Black Hat, which he passed to the 3rd Karma pa. He was also a great traveller who journeyed widely across and beyond Tibet. He met Qubilai Khan in the capital of Yuan China and visited sacred Buddhist sites in South India. He has been aptly described by van der Kuijp as "the great Tibetan yogi, thaumaturge, scholar, alchemist, and traveler". Thanks to the availability of a large amount of hitherto unknown materials from eleven biographies, the thesis has put considerable weight on the bibliographical comparison and analysis of the different works in an attempt to establish the possible relationship between them. This is supplemented by summaries of the biographies, to give an overview of the protagonist's life in Part One of the thesis. Part Two consists of a critical study of the different phases and aspects of U rgyan pa's life in the unique historical, political and religious context of each phase, drawing materials from the corpus of biographies and in the light of other primary and secondary sources in Tibetan, Chinese and Western languages. In Chapter I, U rgyan pa's family lineage, childhood and early studies are discussed in order to find out how his innate propensities and early studies are represented as having influenced his character. In Chapter II, the account of U rgyan pa's journey to West Tibet and U rgyan is studied. A sixteen-stanza song in his own words epitomising this journey, supplemented by route maps, will be used as a framework to illustrate and reconstruct his journey to the Land of the Ḍākinīs. In Chapter III, the teachings he received and the subsequent transformation of his character and status, are explored. In Chapter IV, his career as a tantric master, his other pilgrimages and benediction trips, and his conflicts with various religious and political authorities, are examined. The materials will be scrutinised in the hope of separating as far as possible fact from fiction.

The research attempts to explain the character of Malaysia’s political economy. By adopting a historical institutional analysis it explains that British colonial administration persistently made rational choices within a short-term horizon that encouraged the growth of two autonomous groups – Malays and Chinese - whose political, economic and social organisation, at the point of Malaya’s independence in 1957, had made it inevitable for them to embark on some form of consociational arrangement. British policies engendered two processes; first, a less-than-full incorporation of Chinese as new actors in Malaya’s political economy and second, a less-than-full retrenchment of Malay political dominance by preserving Malay de jure power. In sum, British decision to preserve Malay de jure power while at the same time incorporate Chinese economic and political presence created two communities with mutually exclusive institutions that increasingly competed for access to political and economic resources. The self-reinforcing nature of these exclusive institutions and the flux that came with the demands for Malaya’s independence made it necessary for these two communities to attempt various institutional options that could best reconcile exclusive institutions and negotiate competing political and economic demands. Three institutional options were tried: consociationalism, integration and partition. The research will explain that among the three, the path-dependent nature of Malaya’s political economy had necessitated a particular institutional logic, the consociational logic. Integration failed because attempts to establish common institutions and do away completely with longstanding mutually exclusive ones proved over-ambitious. Partition also did not materialise as it proved politically and financially costly. In sum, the research highlights Malaysia’s consociationalism as a product of small incremental policy steps which proved to be no less transformational in the long run that gives Malaysia’s political economy a quite different character than it had had at the start of British official rule in 1874.

This thesis investigates the emergence of Medina in the Ḥijāz as a widely-venerated holy city over the first three Islamic centuries (seventh to ninth centuries CE) within the appropriate historical context, with special attention paid to the town’s ḥaram. It focuses in particular upon the roles played by the Prophet Muḥammad, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, and early Islamic legal scholars in this development. It shows that Medina’s emergence as a widely-venerated holy city alongside Mecca was a gradual and contested process, and one that was intimately linked with several important developments concerning legitimate political, religious, and legal authority in the Islamic world. The most important sources for this study have been Medina’s local histories, and Chapter One investigates the development of a tradition of local history-writing there. The Prophet Muḥammad first created a form of sacred space, a ḥaram, at Medina, and Chapter Two seeks to provide the context for this by investigating some forms of sacred and protected space found in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. Chapter Three then examines a rare early document preserved in the later Islamic sources, which deals in part with Muḥammad’s creation of Medina’s ḥaram, the so-called “Constitution of Medina”, and investigates why and how Muḥammad created that particular form of sacred space at Medina. The remaining two chapters deal with the history of Muḥammad’s ḥaram at Medina after his death as its original raison d’être disappeared. Chapter Four analyses some aspects of Muslim legal scholars’ discussions concerning Medina’s ḥaram, and demonstrates that certain groups disputed its existence. Chapter Five then seeks to understand why caliphs and other scholars invested so heavily in actively promoting its widespread veneration and Medina’s status as a holy city. It concludes that caliphs from the late first/early eighth century patronised Medina to associate themselves with legitimate political authority inherited from Muḥammad, and that from the late second/eighth century certain legal scholars argued for the continued existence of Medina’s ḥaram because of its association with the Prophet and his Companions who had come to be for them the ultimate source of legal authority.

This study considers the history of trauma, both as a psychiatric concept and as a diagnosis, and its social and cultural representation from a transnational perspective after WWII. The intellectual evolution of trauma was determined by various medical, social and cultural variables, institutions, and people who wielded influence in the postwar world order as well as diverse local contexts. This thesis focuses on the globalisation and localisation of such concept and diagnosis shaped by international and local mental health experts at the World Health Organization and the National Taiwan University Hospital. Through the efforts of these experts, trauma not only became one of the most globally diffused psychiatric diagnoses, but also a hyperbole appropriated by Taiwanese psychiatrists to account for extreme forms of social suffering. Studies have criticised the universality and the Anglo-American-centred approach to the history of traumatic psychiatry. Scholars have also begun to explore transnational histories of psychiatry by systematically comparing or tracing the diffusion routes of psychiatric topics. Their methods of enquiry and problems solved, however, differ. My research analyses a disparate collection of evidence at the level of international organisations and from local aspects, allowing not only a critical reconsideration of trauma in the trend of global medicine, but also its reception, contestation and appropriation in the non-Western contexts. Guided by the works of medical historians, literary critics and cultural anthropologists, this project combines archival research with oral history interviews to challenge the existing historical accounts of trauma, and provide evidence of the limited capacity of globalised psychiatric norms and their reception and appropriation beyond the imagination of world citizenship. It argues that such scientific artefacts were not only produced through mutual reference between Eastern and Western experiences, but also measures of instrumental rationality employed by postwar internationalists to engineer their modernity in the Global South.

This thesis is concerned with the construction and uses of miniature buildings in the Liao (907-1125) and the Northern Song (960-1127) periods in China. These miniature buildings exploited the components of Chinese traditional architecture on a small or greatly reduced scale. To date no work has taken the position of this thesis to examine this corpus of miniature buildings that were used widely in tombs and temples as containers to provide coverings for coffins, and to hold images of deities, Buddhist relics and sutras, as seen in both archaeological discoveries and textual resources. The purpose of the thesis is to define this corpus and to consider its significance in the light of the functions that these tiny buildings fulfilled. This thesis proposes that these miniature buildings contributed a unique and indispensable part in presenting the positions of their owners in society. Made as containers, miniature buildings particularly emphasize decoration, which enabled viewers to make a connection with life-size buildings, in the ways of which they were fitted into an existing architectural hierarchied system in the deeply rooted tradition of the Liao and the Northern Song. The thesis makes considerable use of the concepts of reception, for the reaction of viewers to these miniature buildings defined also their reactions to the contents. Several types of analogies were achieved between full-scale buildings and miniature representations, as well as between their contents, which allowed specific types of interpretation of the miniature buildings as taking the roles of actual buildings and fictional structures. The thesis considers the use of miniature buildings as one of the ways in which complex ideas can be reinforced by material forms. A wider discussion on miniature models presents that the significance of miniaturization lies in the power of control that can be achieved by creating and using the miniature.