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This dissertation explores the influence of late eighteenth-century British imperial and global paradigms of thought on the formation of British policy and strategy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It argues that British imperial interests exerted a consistent influence on British strategic decision making through the personal advocacy of political leaders, institutional memory within the British government, and in the form of a traditional strain of a widely-embraced British imperial-maritime ideology that became more vehement as the conflict progressed. The work can be broken into two basic sections. The first section focuses on the formation of strategy within the British government of William Pitt the Younger during the French Revolutionary Wars from the declaration of war in February 1793 until early 1801. During this phase of the Anglo-French conflict, British ministers struggled to come to terms with the nature of the threat posed by revolutionary ideology in France, and lacked strategic consistency due to acute cabinet-level debates over continental versus imperial strategies. The latter half of the work assesses Britain’s response to the challenges presented by Napoleonic France. Beginning with the debates surrounding Anglo-French peace negotiations in late 1801, the British increasingly came to define Napoleonic France as a regime harboring imperial aspirations that represented an explicit threat to British imperial interests. By defining the Napoleonic regime as an aspirational imperial power, British opponents of the Peace of Amiens provided the intellectual framework for the hegemonic struggle between land and sea powers that would define the Anglo-French struggle until its conclusion in June 1815. While Britain ultimately proved successful in defeating France in Europe, the expanse of the conflict also exposed the strengths and weaknesses of British force projection outside of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. / History

This dissertation investigates the reasons behind combined military and naval offensive expeditions that Great Britain conducted outside of Europe during the Great War. It argues that they were not unnecessary adjuncts to the war in Europe, but they fulfilled an important strategic purpose by protecting British trade where it was most vulnerable. Trade was not a luxury for the British; it was essential for maintaining the island nation's way of life, a vital interest and a matter of national survival. Great Britain required freedom of the seas in order to maintain its global trade. A general war in Europe threatened Great Britain's economic independence with the potential of losing its continental trading partners. The German High Seas Fleet constituted a serious threat that also placed the British coast at grave risk forcing the Royal Navy to concentrate in home waters. This dissertation argues that the several combined military and naval operations against overseas territories constituted parts of an overarching strategy designed to facilitate the Royal Navy's gaining command of the seas. Using documents from the Cabinet, the Foreign and Colonial Offices, the War Office, and the Admiralty, plus personal correspondence and papers of high-ranking government officials, this dissertation demonstrates that the Offensive Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defense drafted the campaign plan. Subsequently, the plan received Cabinet approval, and then the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, and the Colonial Office coordinated with allies and colonies to execute the operations necessary to prosecute the campaign. In Mesopotamia, overseas expeditions directed against the Ottoman Empire protected communications with India and British oil concessions in Persia. The combined operations against German territories exterminated the logistics and intelligence hubs that supported Germany's commerce raiders thereby protecting Britain's world-wide trade and its overseas possessions. / History

In the age of imperialism the British Empire imposed multiple projects of water management,like the Aswan Dam, on its colonies. These projects had to bring economic benefits to the colonies and coloniser while British politicians and engineers saw these projects also as an instrument to modernise and civilise the local people. This study explores the motivations behind the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt within the public discourse. Previous research has primarily relied on several political documents and technical reports about the Aswan Dam and has thus focused on the political and economic motivations behind the construction of the dam. Through economic and political perspectives these studies have characterised the dam as an economic project not only for the beneficence of Egypt, but also for the British Empire. This study, however, investigates newspaper articles from The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail between 1894−1902 from the planning to the completion of the dam. This is carried out through a discourse analysis to explore how the Aswan Dam was justified towards the public to add a new social-cultural perspective. Findings indicate that newspapers represented the dam within different social imaginaries as an achievement of British engineers, the British monarchy and the British Empire. The Aswan Dam was thus not only justified through economic purposes. The dam was rather represented in the newspapers as a way of bringing back the glory of Egypt and as “England’s greatest enterprise” that would make the British Empire surpass the great empires from the past.

This thesis investigates several previously neglected networks of imperial tropical medicine (ITM) in Britain and its tropical colonies at the turn of the twentieth-century. It argues for the need to bring back the ‘imperial’ to the study of medicine in colonial localities; and, in doing so, redefines the ‘imperial’ in relation to tropical medicine during this period. To accomplish this, the first part of the thesis considers largely ignored popular networks of ITM, including the 1900 London Livingstone Exhibition; guidebooks and manuals for tropical travel, health and hygiene; and commodities such as Burroughs Wellcome & Co.’s (BWC) Tabloid brand medicine chests and tropical clothing. The second part of the thesis investigates important, but under researched professional networks of ITM, including the training and experiences of non-medical missionaries educated at Livingstone College, London and the London Missionary School of Medicine (LMSM); and the formation and reform of the West African Medical Staff (WAMS). All of the popular and professional networks discussed in this thesis were, for the most part, a response to the urgency generated by domestic and international high politics to ‘improve’ and ‘develop’ Britain’s tropical possessions. While representing a diversity of individuals and interests, one concern that they all shared was the supposed need to preserve Anglo-Saxon health in tropical climates. Such a disparate set of ‘agents of empire’, connected through a common interest, led to a complex set of ideas and practices of ITM, which were informed as much by the environment and climate, as new disciplines such as parasitology. This thesis also demonstrates that a significant fissure existed — within and outside the imperial state — between ideas of ITM and their practice. Ideas of ITM were often aggressively imperial in rhetoric but in practice they generally were not. Therefore, at the start of the twentieth-century ITM was not always working — directly — as a ‘tool of empire’. Nonetheless, this thesis demonstrates that the ‘imperial’ is still the most useful analytical category and organising principle for understanding Western medicine’s relationship to Britain’s tropical possessions during this period. By focusing on both the colony and the metropole, and the uneven power relationship that existed between them, it demonstrates that ideas and practices of medicine and hygiene intended for Britain’s tropical empire were neither colonial nor metropolitan, but imperial.

The unusual way in which Britain's empire in Arabia was connected politically and constitutionally to the metropole, and the perceived – in some instances exaggerated – view of its strategic and economic importance, created both an opportunity and a justification for the British disengagement from the region to happen differently than in most of the rest of the empire. Strong personalities – in the metropole, amongst the men on the spot, and among local elites – played a crucial role in decision-making, and this thesis argues that informal networks from among these three constituencies worked in parallel to the established formal channels, impacting policy and driving the decision-making process. These networks initially contributed to a break in the political consensus within the metropole, but eventually also helped to restore it. The manipulation of local elites was the tool of choice, used by Britain (under both Conservative and Labour Governments) and its "men on the spot", in their endeavour to secure a lasting privileged position in Arabia. How key actors adapted to change, both in their own societies and in the international system, often determined the success or otherwise of their endeavours. This tangled tale of Britain’s last imperial stand in Arabia is far from being a unique case of how modern empires have handled unusual episodes of imperial retreat. The story has echoes in two other imperial exits of the late 20^th century – the French disengagement from Algeria from 1954 to 1962, and Russian efforts to maintain a privileged position in Georgia, immediately before and after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and since. Even if it is too early to draw firm conclusions, similar patterns – as the ones discussed in this thesis with regards to the end of the British Empire in Arabia – can also be observed in the other two cases, allowing us to draw some observations and lessons.

This thesis explores the construction and use of the hijra figure in fictional literature. It argues that hijras are utilised as both symbols of deviance and central points around which wider anti-sociality circulates. In order to contextualise these characters and offer a deeper understanding of the constructed nature of their representations, this thesis works with four frames of reference. It draws respectively on Hindu mythology (chapter one), the Mughal empire and its use of eunuchs, which the authors of fiction use to extend their representations of hijras (chapter two), British colonialism in India and its ideological frameworks which held gender deviance to be a marker of under-civilisation (chapter three) and the postcolonial period, in which hijras continue to fight for their rights whilst attempting to survive in an increasingly marginal social position (chapter four). Examining the literary material through the lens of these four frameworks shows, historically, the movement of the hijras in the public imaginary away from being symbols of the sacred to symbols of sexuality and charts the concurrent shift in their level of social acceptance. In terms of their literary representations, it is seen that authors draw upon material informed by each of the four frameworks, but never in simple terms. Rather, they work imaginatively but often restrictively to produce an injurious or detrimental image of the hijras, and they apply multiple historical frameworks to the same narratives and individual characters, with the result of marking them as timeless figures of eternal otherness. The image of hijras as sacred beings in Hindu mythology is recast as them being terrifying figures who are liable to curse binary-gendered citizens if their extortionate demands are not met (chapter one). The political prominence of Mughal eunuchs and their position as guardians of sexual boundaries and purity become treasonous political manipulation through the enactment of secret plots, often involving sexual violence, to impact on political events (chapters two and three). The criminalisation of hijras as a means of pushing them out of public visibility becomes naturalised anti-sociality and a shadowy existence at the social margins (chapter three). Finally, in a public environment which has both seen a major increase in campaigns for hijra rights and acceptance, but which has met with fierce opposition, the hijras are overburdened with associations which render them as hyperbolic and ultimately unsustainable figures (chapter four). Ultimately, these constructions facilitate sensationalised storylines set in the criminal underworld. Whilst the thrilling nature of these stories has the potential to capture a readership, this comes at the expense of the hijra characters, who are rendered as inherent criminals, sexual aggressors and wilfully anti-social. Campaigns to protect hijras as a third-gender category, guarantee their legal rights and end their criminalisation for the first time since 1860 have been publicly prominent since 2001; these campaigns are now coming before parliament and formal decisions are expected imminently. Examining understandings of hijras outside of their communities is thus politically timely and necessary for disrupting the cycle of overburdening them as society's gendered scapegoats, contributing to a project of more nuanced understandings necessary for their social integration.