This dissertation is an analysis of the Ottoman-European legal contest over Egypt. I explore the relationship between international law, imperial expansion and state formation in the late Ottoman Empire against the joint reconfiguration of ideas of sovereignty and imperial control during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British occupation of Egypt (1882-1914) was a novel experiment in quasi-colonial administration, where legal justifications for the occupation demanded the retention of Ottoman institutions and shaped administrative practices. My research examines the significance and consequences of maintaining Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt during the British occupation in an effort to explain the formation of a distinctive model of sovereignty, both for late empires and for successor states in the post-Ottoman Middle East. I argue that a new model of client-state sovereignty produced during the course of the occupation, emerged out of the intense imperial rivalry between the Ottoman and Europe Empires in Egypt, and had lasting significance more generally for how we define states and sovereignty today. These findings recast the Ottoman Empire as a major, albeit weak, actor in European diplomacy. Though Ottoman and European history have developed as separate fields of academic inquiry, my research shows that nineteenth and early twentieth century European and Ottoman political practices and ideas were inextricably intertwined. The Ottoman Empire contributed to and was perhaps the key testing ground for enduring political and administrative experiments in the post-imperial international order.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, as wheat production and marketing were transformed in scale and in practice, American farmers tried to make sense of how they were positioned within a rapidly growing and changing international market. They tried to formulate a response that would gain them some sense of control over a market that was described by some as vast and powerful as nature itself, and by others as a playground for the wealthy speculators who supposedly controlled it. By situating the farmers within the changing international grain market this thesis explains the challenges that they were up against. American farmers understood their plight through narratives of market failure, common enough during the agricultural depression of the 1890s, as well as in the first decade of the twentieth century: declining prices, distant famines, and attempts to corner the wheat market reinforced the notion that supply and demand were not working "properly" to produce prosperity for all. During the Populist period, farmers organized to demand relief, in the form of government intervention, from what they perceived as a predatory market system that guaranteed profits to speculators but usually left producers with little to show for their labor. They mounted a moral critique of the marketing system, arguing that merchants and middlemen had organized the market in such a way as to control it through unethical and damaging means such as pools and price agreements. These efforts having largely failed, farmers turned increasingly to the cooperative movement to try to exert influence in the marketplace. The crisis of World War I created a different kind of market failure, one that prompted different forms of government intervention in both wheat importing and wheat exporting countries. In both cases these interventions were designed to stabilize prices through centralized oversight, something the farmers had repeatedly asked for and failed to achieve, but found, in the end, did little to secure their way of life. In the aftermath of war, in what was for wheat farmers a permanent crisis requiring permanent government intervention, farmers continued to identify the middlemen as their problem, but after 50 years of controversy, the merchants and exchanges had established a relatively well-oiled and highly technical system of marketing and trading to handle commodities in an international market. Farmers were left with little choice but to think of themselves as businessmen dealing with other businessmen, and this position overtook the older moral discourse as farmers sought to marshal their cooperative strength toward forming their own price-controlling marketing organizations.

In the twentieth century, Americans got old. The average lifespan grew from forty-eight to seventy-eight years of age and new policy questions and ethical challenges accompanied this demographic transition. How should old age be defined? Who would care for the nation's elders? What should older Americans give back to their communities and what should they expect from their government? Where would the infirm elderly live? Where would they die? This project returns to the middle of the twentieth century when experts within universities, foundations, social welfare organizations, and the federal government took on these questions and sought lasting solutions to the mounting problem of old age. More specifically, Honor Thy Father and Mother investigates how "old age" came to be defined as a social problem worthy of federal attention in the 1950s and how that federal attention shaped a national discussion on the nature and needs of the elderly. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the definition and problems of old age were in flux. Scientists, social workers, policy makers, doctors, and religious leaders challenged the viability of chronology as a medical and political marker of old age and questioned the wisdom of seeking longevity over a purposeful and dignified end. Their perspectives, while present in scientific, medical, and political discourse, did not translate into broad, well-funded federal programs. In their stead, the government threw its financial and administrative weight behind what I call the Medical Security Solution: initiatives such as bio-medical research and Medicare, which sought to cure the diseases of old age and relieve financial insecurity by covering the health care costs of social security recipients. Honor Thy Father and Mother explores how the Medical Security Solution captured the attention of policy makers, activists for the aged, and senior citizens in the middle of the twentieth century and what ideas were lost in this process. This project offers a needed history of the assumptions that continue to frame, and limit, public discussions on care for the elderly.

This dissertation analyzes the process of state building by Qing imperial representatives and Republican state officials in Batang, a predominantly ethnic Tibetan region located in southwestern Sichuan Province. Utilizing Chinese provincial and national level archival materials and Tibetan language works, as well as French and American missionary records and publications, it explores how Chinese state expansion evolved in response to local power and has three primary arguments. First, by the mid-nineteenth century, Batang had developed an identifiable structure of local governance in which native chieftains, monastic leaders, and imperial officials shared power and successfully fostered peace in the region for over a century. Second, the arrival of French missionaries in Batang precipitated a gradual expansion of imperial authority in the region, culminating in radical Qing military intervention that permanently altered local understandings of power. While short-lived, centrally-mandated reforms initiated soon thereafter further integrated Batang into the Qing Empire, thereby demonstrating the viability of New Policy reforms and challenging the idea that the late Qing was a failed state. Finally, I posit that despite almost two decades of political, economic, and social upheaval in the post-Qing period, Nationalist officials' ability to repel central Tibetan attempts to assert their authority over Batang while effectively denying multiple movements for autonomous self-rule by local Batang political activists who were also Nationalist Party representatives directly contributed to Batang's incorporation into the Nationalist state. This analysis of Batang's transition from an imperial domain of the Qing Empire to a county in the newly created province of Xikang in 1939 highlights China's desultory and still incomplete transition from empire to nation.

Between 1580 and 1599, Spain was the subject of a barrage of foreign polemical attacks, a reaction to Spain's European hegemony under Philip II. These attacks used historical arguments to directly challenge Spain's political legitimacy and power, its reputation, and its political standing within Europe by criticizing Spain's dynastic arguments for empire, and denigrated Spanish imperialism and the nature of Spanish rule, threatening constitutional structures by claiming that Philip ruled as a tyrant. In response to these attacks, a coterie of scholars and powerful political advisors, seeking to solidify claims to certain territories and to justify imperial actions, developed innovative historical writing practices that were effective ideological tools for creating support for new political ideas. To convincingly defend Spanish imperialism and restore Spanish reputación, official history needed to concern itself with questions of statecraft, and to do so within the framework of humanist notions of "good" history. Specifically, the new type of historical writing used humanist and antiquarian methodologies, especially an emphasis on source-based documentation of arguments and claims, and combined these with reason of state politics to respond to European challenges to Spanish imperial authority and Spanish actions in Portugal and France by ensuring that only a very specific image of the king was conveyed, and very specific sources were utilized and revealed. In doing so, official historians, most notably Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Esteban de Garibay, and Gregorio López de Madera, and advisors, like Juan de Idiáquez and Cristóbal de Moura, turned to the writing of history not as a means to reform the state, but instead as a potent means to bolster and defend the existing state's identity and advance its purpose. This dissertation uses court correspondence, the treatises on the artes historicae written by the court historians, and the innovative official histories they produced to show how the tensions between ideology and methodology played out in this new form of official history, and how theory and practice came together in the service of power. Through its use of multiple sources of data, this study shows that it was due to the polemical context, not despite it, that a new and more powerful history emerged, which included new practices and cultivated a more critical sensibility. Official history came to play a role in giving conceptual identity and political legitimacy to Spain's imperial ambitions in a new reason of state context. Thus, notions of rule (Spanish Christian reason of state) and provisions of proof became the two pivots upon which Spanish imperial ambitions were justified, and larger debates about how to legitimize formal rights and privileges found a concrete form of expression in official history.

This dissertation is a study of the elaborations of the cultures of politics in the Mughal capital of Shahajahanabad - modern day Delhi - from the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the invasion of the Iranian warlord Nadir Shah in 1739. While this period has frequently been imagined as one of imperial decline and political failure, this dissertation argues that these years of tumult saw instead the transformation of elite politics and the development of a language of popular politics within the space of the Mughal capital. The transformation of politics as practiced by Mughal elites became dramatically evident in the second decade of the eighteenth century, in which two reigning emperors were violently removed from the throne. Through a close examination of the admonitory historical texts which describe these events, this dissertation suggests that such transgressive actions reflected a debate among the Mughal elite about the proper role of the emperor in an empire which had become unprecedentedly bureaucratic and routinized in its administration. Yet speculation about the place of the emperor did not remain the affair of the empire's elites who saw themselves as the traditional guardians of the realm. For now, an unlikely new party began to intervene ever more assertively in matters that had been considered the preserve of the empire's ruling nobility. This was the people itself, an entity that agitated vociferously in support or in criticism of elite acts of governance. In doing so, the people produced a new language of popular politics which directly addressed the powers-that-be. Such a popular politics was produced within, and enacted upon the stage of the Mughal capital, itself built as a representation of the virtues of Mughal imperium. The emergence of the people as an increasingly visible mass in the city is the subject of the first chapter. The second, third and fourth chapters then turn to an examination of the dramatic convulsions of elite politics which caused the bodies of slaughtered princes to be paraded in the thoroughfares of the Mughal city. Chapter four ends with a study of the popular response to one such incident, the deposition of the Emperor Farrukh Siyar in 1719, arguing that the event marks an instance of the city's masses making an explicit intervention in the politics of the imperial elite. Chapter five considers the means of communication by which such political solidarities were forged, arguing that poetry in particular was a powerful form of social communication which might activate political solidarities among the people of the city. Chapters six and seven offer a detailed account of other instances of popular political activity, focusing particularly on the Shoe-sellers' riot of 1729. Chapter eight turns to the invasion of Nadir Shah in 1739, arguing that the resistance to his occupation of Delhi and subsequent events mark the limits of possibility of such politics. The conclusion examines the divergent trajectories of elite and popular politics through the end of the empire and the rise of the colonial state in the subcontinent.

This dissertation examines the social and cultural history of psychiatric concepts and definitions of "normalcy," "deviation" and mental illness in German-occupied Yugoslavia in the Second World War, and the way those were conditioned by both the extreme (and amoralizing) circumstances of the Nazi occupation and the local Yugoslav social and political conflicts. I pay particular attention to the impact of the occupation on the development of psychiatric thinking and practice, as well as on ways in which psychiatrists reacted to and conceptualized the criminality and violence that they encountered with increasing frequency in their meetings with patients. In my research, I have three overarching objectives. The first is to examine the construction of psychiatric knowledge and authority during a tumultuous period of inter-war state and nation building, intense political conflict, German occupation, and the emergence of the Communist state. The second is to analyze how these different governments utilized the psychiatric profession itself in their projects of state building. The third is to use previously unexamined psychiatric records to recover the social history of the wartime era, focusing on the perceptions of peasants and the urban lower classes who made up the bulk of psychiatric patients. The effect of the war on the practice and ideology of the profession was deeply counter-intuitive: for reasons I go on to examine in detail, the occupation encouraged the development and ultimate predominance of environmentalist psychiatry and psychotherapy, at the very moment when German psychiatry was undergoing Nazification and a further drift towards organicist, biological and hereditary theories of mental illness. In that sense, my dissertation offers a revision of the common historical understanding of WWII psychiatry (and indeed of Nazification generally) in Eastern Europe, and argues that even collaborationist psychiatrists gradually rejected organicism and racial theories, and came to embrace psychogenic approaches and relied on the psychotherapeutic, re-educational effects of psychiatry. Psychiatry, far from being a marginal profession in Yugoslavia, was viewed as central to the state during the interwar, wartime and postwar periods. In the wake of the First World War, it was considered to be providing essential scientific guidance to the inter-war state's attempts to implement a civilizing project of sorts and overcome what was perceived as the widespread popular "backwardness" or "primitivism;" after the outbreak of the war, psychiatrists again turned out to be central to the task of political and ideological (re-)education. Thus, psychiatry played a pivotal role in efforts at political education of the (largely illiterate) masses because it directly addressed the issue of reforming the national character and molding the "mind of the nation." Collaborationist politicians sought to use the profession to develop their own brand of reformatory, therapeutic fascism, while the Communist Party worked through the psychiatric concept of war trauma in order to come to terms with some of the more problematic implications of its own social revolution after 1945. The core chapters of the dissertation focus on close-reading of psychiatric patient files, and utilize various theories and approaches of literary criticism to analyze these case histories. Psychiatric records have been completely neglected as windows into Eastern European social history. Consisting of intensive, detailed interviews with patients, these documents include patients' speech and contain independent writings by patients, which provide a unique (albeit highly mediated) insight into the lower classes, workers and peasants, and their understanding of ideology, politics, violence, illness and normality. In that sense, this is an attempt to write the inter-war and wartime history of Yugoslavia from below, and to understand what ideology and political affiliation meant to those who were not members of the elite, how they thought of their own position, choices and possibilities in an atmosphere in which political or ideological indifference was simply not an option.

This dissertation explores the property regimes of postrevolutionary Mexico through a multi-layered analysis of struggles over territory in the oil-producing areas of the state of Veracruz. I analyze land petitions made by oil workers to establish the relationship between the 1930s agrarian reform program and the nationalization of the oil industry of 1938 in the context of a general re-definition of citizens’ property rights after the revolution of 1910-1920. These events were essential in the construction of a revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. Arguably, in fact, Mexican nationalism has been built over specific legal and cultural notions of what constitutes the patrimony of the nation and citizens’ right to participate in the national project by obtaining a piece of that patrimony, even if it is by force. I contend that the same laws that allowed the governments of the postrevolution to enforce the agrarian reform and to nationalize the oil industry, also gave them the power to organize, regulate, and limit land possession among regular folk with the goal of de-radicalizing dissident groups after the armed struggle. Throughout the five chapters of this dissertation, I provide examples of individuals and communities that consistently competed for land and territory with foreign oil companies first and with Mexican Petroleum after the oil nationalization of 1938. These examples show the ways in which postrevolutionary leaders’ constant debates about property were understood and experienced on the ground. These instances also show how people living in or near the oil fields of Mexico fought for their property rights in part by engaging in these discussions—through letters and petitions—and in part by acting for or against the laws that since the enactment of the Constitution of 1917 regulated citizens’ access to property. Actions included land invasions, the breaking of fences and other enclosures, and the organization of cooperatives and other coalitions to petition land or to occupy territory. These debates over property reveal the collision between the “ideal types” of social organization, political action, and property holding advanced by the postrevolutionary regime and the reality that citizens experienced every day.

The recovery of the Anglo-American relationship in the late 1970s took place in the Third World. The “Special Relationship” between the United States and Britain reached its post-World War II nadir in the decade between 1964 and 1974. Simultaneous to this decline in the relationship was the growing power and influence of the Third World in international institutions. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, both the United States and Britain were suffering political and economic turmoil brought about by increased oil prices, labor unrest, and inflation. The two countries worked together to navigate a broad array of problems to include the Third World’s increasing hostility to Israel and calls for a New International Economic Order in the United Nations, a growing refugee crisis in southeast Asia, the spread of the Cold War to southern Africa, and questions about decline and disorder at home. In the United States, neoconservatives began to assert a greater role in international affairs by questioning both the future of British socialism and the wisdom of appeasing the Third World. Within these constraints, British and American statesmen acted to end white rule in Rhodesia to contain communist expansion, care for refugees while upholding international law within real fiscal constraints, and free American hostages held in Iran. Through both their actions and their improved mutual understanding, intellectually and politically diverse statesmen such as Henry Kissinger, Anthony Crosland, Andrew Young, and Peter Carrington established a balance in the Special Relationship that allowed the United States and Britain to cooperate in the Third World while respecting the other’s independence.

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