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.

This dissertation aims to analyze the transformation of Pusan by examining the social, political, economic, and cultural changes during the open-port period (1876-1910). Prior to annexation, Pusan, as the first open port in Korea, reflected features of the colonial urban development in which alien power achieved and sustained a hegemonic domination on socio-cultural-economic dimensions of people’s lives. Colonial history in Korea has been divided and moving on parallel lines. The ‘nationalist school’ and the ‘socioeconomic school’ have failed to come together and move us into a deeper understanding of the Japanese colonial period. In order to narrow the gap between the two schools of thought, this thesis suggests looking at ‘colonial modernity’ through the analytical lens of the colonial city of Pusan. The approach examines changes in the social, economic, and cultural life of people rather than through the traditional binary construction of ‘victim versus victimizer’ or ‘colonial repression versus national resistance.’ In particular, I pay close attention to the fact that colonization is a process of imperial expansion by means of colonialists. In the end, the process of colonization in Pusan was a process by which the Japanese settlers expanded in wealth, population, influence, and power. The cluster of factors – enlargement of settlement (living space), the expansion of the economy (economic opportunity), improvement of public enterprises, such as transportation infrastructure, water supply and hygiene (improving quality of life) – were catalysts for the Japanese settlers to take up residence in Pusan. Based on the transformation of the urban space of Pusan at this micro level, I discuss a hierarchy of power relations within the spatial boundary of Pusan. In other words, I focus on human aspects of these changes rather than on systemic changes. I attempt to demonstrate how studying a city can offer a useful category of analysis for the question of ‘modernity’ in Korea.

This thesis casts a new light on the role of Southeast Asia in the ancient Indian Ocean World. It brings together data and approaches from archaeology and historical linguistics to examine cultural and language contact between Southeast Asia and South Asia, East Africa and the Middle East. The interdisciplinary approach employed in this study reveals that insular Southeast Asian seafarers, traders and settlers had impacted on these parts of the world in pre-modern times through the transmission of numerous biological and cultural items. It is further demonstrated that the words used for these commodities often contain clues about the precise ethno-linguistic communities involved in their transoceanic dispersal. The Methodology chapter introduces some common linguistic strategies to examine language contact and lexical borrowing, to determine the directionality of loanwords and to circumvent the main caveats of such an approach. The study then proceeds to delve deeper into the socio-cultural background of interethnic contact in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean as a whole, focusing on the oft-neglected Southeast Asian contributions to the cultural landscape of this region and addressing the nature of pre-modern contact between Southeast Asia and the different parts of the Indian Ocean Word. Following from that, the last three chapters look in-depth at the dispersal of respectively Southeast Asian plants, spices and maritime technology into the wider Indian Ocean World. Although concepts and their names do not always neatly travel together across ethno-linguistic boundaries, these chapters demonstrate how a closer examination of lexical data offers supportive evidence and new perspectives on events of cultural contact not otherwise documented. Cumulatively, this study underlines that the analysis of lexical data is a strong tool to examine interethnic contact, particularly in pre-literate societies. Throughout the Indian Ocean World, Southeast Asian products and concepts were mainly dispersed by Malay-speaking communities, although others played a role as well.

This thesis focuses on the application of electromagnetic inverse source techniques to characterize antennas using phaseless (amplitude-only) near-field (NF) measurement data. Removing the need to measure phase reduces the overall cost of the measurement apparatus since simple power meters can be used instead of expensive vector network analyzers. It has also been shown in the literature that a phaseless approach can improve the accuracy of the calculated far-field (FF) pattern in the presence of probe positioning errors compared to the amplitude-and-phase approach. A brief discussion on the state-of-the-art methods for characterizing antennas using phaseless near-field measurement data is presented. Two general approaches used most often to perform near-field to far-field (NF-FF) transformations, namely modal expansion and source reconstruction, are explained in detail for scenarios with and without phase information. A phaseless source reconstruction method (SRM) is the primary focus of this work. The SRM is an application of an electromagnetic inverse source technique and therefore, the complexities of solving the associated ill-posed inverse source problem are discussed. The application of the SRM to spherical and planar measurement geometries are presented along with the concerns regarding regularization resulting from discretizing the ill-posed system. A multiplicative regularization (MR) scheme originally developed for inverse scattering is adapted to suit the nonlinear cost functional for the phaseless planar measurement case and the mathematical framework is derived in detail. The resulting MR-SRM is fully automated and incorporates adaptive regularization. The developed algorithms are evaluated using several examples with synthetic phaseless NF data demonstrating the benefits and limitations of the source reconstruction method and the multiplicative regularization scheme. The application of the SRM to antenna diagnostics using phaseless NF data is also shown. Finally, the developed planar algorithms are tested with experimentally collected phaseless measurement data to demonstrate their potential as suitable antenna characterization techniques that can be of interest to the antenna measurement community. / October 2016

How the world of experience, text-based medicine, and the social world came to interact with each other in a historically situated way is the subject of this doctoral thesis, which studies what I shall call zhang ("miasma") medicine in Song China (960-1279 CE). By the phrase "the world of experience," I refer to the bodily experience of the environment in a given region as well as to experiences of medical practices. "The social world" broadly refers to concomitant social, intellectual, and political events or trends. This thesis proposes a new approach to the study of the environment within the history of medicine in Imperial China (around 202 BCE-1911 CE), an approach which is inspired by anthropological analytical concepts. It highlights individuals' world of experience, treating their knowledge about environmental medicine as the culmination of a dynamic collaboration of their experiential world and existing culture-specific concepts, such as those deriving from scholarly medicine. This new approach dictates a re-examination of the sources that have received intensive attention in the history of medicine in Imperial China: texts up to the thirteenth century on the aetiology, therapies, and prevention methods of zhang as disorders endemic in Lingnan (in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces). Based on this re-examination, I contend that the Song period witnessed the emergence of a pronounced explanatory mode among authors of writings about zhang medicine about how their world of experience informed and affirmed their medical knowledge and practices relating to zhang. This Song explanatory mode embodies, I argue, the endeavor of Song scholar-officials and physicians to extend the proliferation of scholarly medicine at that time to zhang medicine, which lacked widely acknowledged textual references and therapies of medicinal effectiveness. The findings in this thesis firstly broaden our understanding of the development of environmental medicine in Imperial China and, secondly, extend our knowledge of the expansion of scholarly medicine into southern China in Song times.

Les nanocavités à cristal photonique ont été largement étudiées au cours de la dernière décennie du fait de leur aptitude à fortement confiner la lumière (faible volume modal) et de leurs faibles pertes optiques (grand facteur de qualité). Parmi le grand nombre de géométries proposées, nous nous intéressons ici au cas de la cavité L3 étudiée par Noda et al. (trois trous manquants dans la direction K du réseau triangulaire sous-jacent) utilisée dans plusieurs applications et notamment pour la réalisation de nano-lasers et d’interrupteurs optiques. Cependant, l’injection ou l’extraction de lumière dans de telles nanocavités s’avère extrêmement difficile du fait de la diffraction importante dont souffrent ces structures. Différentes approches en champ proche ont été récemment développées et notamment le couplage évanescent utilisant des guides d’onde nanostructurés ou des fibres optiques étirées. Dans le but de pallier à la faible efficacité de couplage à l’espace libre, nous développons une conception récemment proposée par De Rossi et al. afin de changer radicalement le profil du diagramme de rayonnement. Cette approche utilise la méthode de repliement des bandes qui consiste à introduire au sein d’un réseau triangulaire de période (a), un sous-réseau de trous de période (2a) qui améliore considérablement l’efficacité de couplage dans la direction verticale. Bien que certaines mesures de l’efficacité de collection et du coefficient de qualité aient déjà été mentionnées dans la littérature, aucune mesure directe des diagrammes de rayonnement de ces nanocavités n’a été réalisée jusqu’alors. Nous étudions dans ce travail différents types de nanocavités et de molécules L3 à cristaux photoniques présentant des profils de champ lointain optimisés. Les diagrammes de rayonnement de cavités non-repliées et repliées incorporées dans des membranes actives suspendues en InP sont systématiquement mesurés et comparés. Un bon accord entre les simulations numériques et les diagrammes de champ lointain mesurés expérimentalement est obtenu, montrant des lobes d’émission très directionnels le long de la normale à l’échantillon. En outre, des expériences de couplage à l’espace libre ont été réalisées montrant des efficacités de couplage d’environ 15% pour des coefficients de qualité supérieurs à 10 000. Ces résultats valident ainsi la technique de repliement des bandes dans les cavités L3 qui, une fois repliées, conservent un faible volume modal et un coefficient de qualité élevé ainsi qu’une grande efficacité de couplage à l’espace libre, à la fois dans les configurations nanocavité unique et nanocavités couplés. Nous montrons aussi expérimentalement que l’écart spectral inter-modal dans deux cavités L3 couplées de manière évanescente peut être contrôlé grâce à l’ingénierie de la barrière photonique. La « barrière de potentiel » est formée par les trous d’air séparant les deux cavités. L’écart en fréquence entre les modes peut être fortement réduit et augmentée via une diminution ou une augmentation du rayon des trous de la rangée centrale de la barrière jusqu’à ∼ −30% ou ∼ 30% de sa valeur initiale. En outre, le signe de la l’écart spectral entre les modes peut être inversé de telle sorte que le mode fondamental peut être soit symétrique ou anti-symétrique et ce, sans modifier ni la géométrie de la cavité, ni la distance inter-cavité. / Photonic crystal (PhC) nanocavities have been intensively investigated during the last decade due to their capabilities of achieving tight light confinement and low optical losses simultaneously. Among the different geometries, the cavity proposed by Noda et al., namely a L3 cavity (three holes missing in the K direction of the underlying triangular lattice) with shifted end-holes has been widely used in several applications including laser emission and switching devices. However, input/output free space light coupling of such nanocavities is quite challenging. In this regard, near field coupling schemes have been recently developed, such as evanescent coupling using tapered optical fibers. In order to overcome the poor free space coupling, a new cavity design has been recently proposed by De Rossi et al. that totally changes the radiation pattern. This is based on a band folding approach introducing a modulation of the holes size at twice the period of the underlying PhC, which considerably increases the coupling efficiency in the vertical direction. While some measurements of the Q-factor and coupling efficiency were performed, no direct characterization of the far-field of such cavities has been performed so far. In this work we have studied different types of L3 photonic crystal cavities and L3 photonic molecules with optimized far-field profiles. Radiation patterns from « folded » and « unfolded » cavities incorporated in suspended InP active membranes were systematically measured and compared. Good agreement between simulations and experimental far-field patterns has been found, demonstrating highly directional emission lobes along the sample normal. Furthermore, free space input coupling experiments have been performed showing coupling efficiency of about 15% of contrast with quality factors exceeding 10 000. These results validate the « folded » L3 cavities as good candidates for small volume and high Q cavities with efficient free space coupling, either in single or coupled cavity configurations. We also experimentally show that the mode splitting in two-evanescently coupled Photonic Crystal L3 cavities can be controlled through photonic barrier engineering. The « potential barrier » is formed by the air-holes in between the two cavities. By changing the hole radius of the central row in the barrier up to ∼ 30% or down to ∼ −30% , the frequency splitting can be strongly increased or reduced. Moreover, the sign of the splitting can be reversed in such a way that the fundamental mode can be either the symmetric or the anti-symmetric one without altering neither the cavity geometry nor the inter-cavity distance.

Úlceras decorrentes de disfunções venosas são comuns na prática clínica. Fatores como hipóxia, infecção, acúmulo de fibroblastos senescentes, metabolismo anormal de colágeno e desequilíbrio entre produção e absorção de matriz extracelular contribuem para a cronicidade dessas lesões. Até o momento, não existe tratamento ideal para essas úlceras. A radiação infravermelha longa (FIR) tem sido proposta como opção. Diversos estudos descrevem efeitos antimicrobiano e anti-inflamatório, melhora na circulação sanguínea, regeneração de colágeno, aumento na proliferação de fibroblastos e expressão de TGF-beta, e aumento da síntese de óxido nítrico (NO), que tem papel importante em todas as fases da cicatrização. O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar, por imunoensaios, a ação de substratos têxteis emissores de radiação infravermelha longa (FIR), em associação ou não à prata (FIR+Ag), sobre cultura de fibroblastos oriundos de úlcera venosa (venous ulcer fibroblasts VUFs) quanto a citotoxicidade, expressão de vimentina, colágeno dos tipos I e III, iNOS e VEGF, além do potencial antimicrobiano sobre cepas de bactérias frequentemente encontradas no leito de úlceras venosas. Ao que parece, o aditivo FIR sozinho, ou em combinação com prata, não exerceu efeito citotóxico sobre fibroblastos humanos (VUF). Houve aumento na expressão de vimentina em relação ao controle em todos os estímulos avaliados. Também foi observado aumento da expressão de iNOS estimulado pela prata. Não ocorreu aumento da expressão de VEGF e colágeno do tipo I e tipo do III. O efeito antimicrobiano de FIR foi comparável ao efeito classicamente descrito para a utilização de prata. Assim, acreditamos que o emprego de produtos têxteis emissores de FIR como curativos seja uma possível opção para o tratamento de úlceras venosas / Ulcers resulting from venous dysfunctions are common in clinical practice. Factors such as hypoxia, infection, accumulation of senescent fibroblasts, abnormal collagen metabolism and imbalance between production and absorption of extracellular matrix contribute to the chronicity of these sores. There is no ideal treatment for those ulcers. Far Infrared Radiation (FIR) has been proposed as a treatement option. Several studies describe antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory effects, improvement in blood circulation, regeneration of collagen, increased proliferation of skin fibroblasts, higher expression of TGF-beta and increased synthesis of nitric oxide (NO), which plays an important role in all phases of the wound healing process. The aim of this study was to evaluate the action of textile emitting FIR substrates, whether containing silver or not (FIR+Ag), on the culture of venous ulcer fibroblasts (VUFs) regarding to: cytotoxicity, vimentin, types I and III collagen, iNOS and VEGF expression as well as the antimicrobial potential on strains of bacteria frequently found in venous ulcers. Our results proved that FIR additives alone, or in combination with silver, did not exert a cytotoxic effect on human fibroblasts (VUF). There was an increase in vimentin expression in relation to the control in all evaluated stimuli. Increased stimulation of iNOS expression by silver was observed. No increase in the expression of VEGF and nor collagen types I and III was observed. An antimicrobial effect of FIR comparable to the effect classically described for the use of silver has been verified. Thus, we believe that the use of FIR-emitting textile products as curatives is a possible option for the treatment of venous ulcers