In the middle of the California Desert is an inland desert sea, called the Salton Sea. Its existence is curious, nearly magical. It is California’s largest lake, it is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, it is slowly dying, and its existence is a complete accident. This thesis breaks down the historical narrative of the Salton Sea from a white settler perspective, using theories posed by Yi Fu Tuan about distinctions between space and place. The temporality of spatial locations, the construction of the binaries natural/built, and the moralizing of landscapes all provide further understanding of the Salton Sea’s existence. Throughout history, the white settlers of the Imperial Desert have projected, their morals and desires upon the desert landscape, reforming the space into their vision of the future as a result of their abilities to tame and control rivers. Instead of a future, they produced a place replete with the past: a place considered worthless and potentially dangerous. Through looking at the constructions of space, place, memory, and history, we are better able to understand the birth of this desert sea.

This master thesis examines cross-boundary connections between a state and an empire. This was done by mapping connections over Kvarken between the Swedish county of Västerbotten and its Finnish counterpart, Österbotten, during the period 1835-1870. Accounts from the custom houses in Jakobstad, Nykarleby, Vasa, Kaskö and Kristinestad served as primary source material together with contemporary Osterbottnian newspapers. For this thesis, a quantitative content- and network analysis as well as a qualitative text analysis was conducted out of a spatial, boundary- and imperial theoretical framework. This thesis shows that the sea trade continued during the entire period without being hindered by neither impending cholera epidemics nor the Crimean War. When other trading routes were cut off by trade embargoes or when ice covered the sea; the trade never ceased. The traffic across Kvarken was primarily Vasterbottnian, and a most Swedish project, except during the Crimean war. During the war, an enormous amount of Osterbottnian trading parties would come to Västerbotten, chiefly in pursuit of salt. Compared to other trade conducted, the Osterbottnian trade with Västerbotten was extensive both in terms of the sheer number of ships, but also in the value of traded goods. Thus, Kvarken can be seen as a cross-border region. The Russian endeavour to severe ties between Sweden and Finland during the 1840’s through the abolishment of particular tariff prescriptions and swedish currency had no noteworthy impact upon trade across the Kvark. Neither value nor flow of goods was impacted. The amount of ships consistently remained at around 25-40 ships anually for the entire study period. To the contrary, temporary prescriptions to promote trade were constantly introduced. It was probably in the greater interest among both Russian and Swedish rulers that the connection between the two peripher, northern regions should function for the well-being and prosperity of the local peoples. In newspaper reports also the cultural value of musicians and theatre companies travelling across Kvarken was greatly appreciated.

(i): The first part of this thesis questions the concept of ‘minority’, and the way it has been used to analyze French imperial policy in Syria (‘divide and rule’). Chapter 1 traces the concept’s emergence, showing that it is not self-evidently valid but rather depends on a set of wider social and political circumstances related to the existence of modern nation-states: the minorities of modern Syria cannot be mapped directly back onto the Ottoman millets or religious communities. Chapter 2 examines the term’s application in Syria between the wars: French imperial policy emphasised divisions in Syrian society, but the term ‘minority’ was only systematically attached to these divisions from the 1930s. The concept’s spread in Syria reflects its growing importance in international public discourse worldwide, as the nation-state became the standard state form after World War One. The second part of the thesis uses case studies of particular themes to show how the emergence of minorities illuminates processes of state-formation that have shaped the modern world. Chapters 3 and 4, on the question of ‘separatism’ and the definition of modern Syria’s northern border, examine the spread of effective state authority across a ‘national’ territory. This process bound culturally-divergent populations more tightly into the fabric of a centrally-controlled state, thereby constituting them as ‘minorities’. Chapter 5 examines the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty leading to Syrian independence, showing that this made the recently-established body of international law on ‘minorities’ in newly-independent states applicable to Syria: the term only became widespread in Syria at this time. Chapter 6 looks at French efforts to reform personal status law in the later 1930s, when the restructuring, on religious lines, of the institutional relationship between the Syrian state and its population created a new uniformity within communities at the national level (one condition for their developing the sense of being ‘minorities’). It also sparked opposition from groups now claiming to represent the ‘majority’. Other Syrians, though, understood their society in different terms.

This is the history of a turbulent borderland in a time of transition. Colonialism redefined the meaning of borders in Burundi, and in the traumatic shift from colonial rule to Independence it became dangerous to live on the frontier. Responding to Newbury’s plea to ‘bring the peasant back in’ to the written history of the Great Lakes region, the thesis takes a micro-history approach, viewing the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of the hills and the homestead. The border with Rwanda, as experienced in the two communes of Kabarore and Busiga, is tested as the point of encounter between society and state in this crucial time. It reveals the function and dysfunction of political linkage, and the tensions of being a citizen and a subject in the margins of a political community ruled by suspicion and paranoia. The themes - dissent, collaboration, elimination, repression - link this local history to the flow of national politics and the making of a new African state. Taking as its scope the pivotal period from decolonisation to the military state’s ‘selective genocide’, enacted against its Hutu population, the thesis identifies ‘vigilance’ as the most productive concept by which to study concepts of governance, political community and political linkage in the Great Lakes at the vital point of transformation. A communicative act that blends the stance of the citizen and the subject to shape a means of cautious cooperation and mutual recognition between people and state, vigilance also proved the destructive weapon that violently distilled the population into a subjugated peasantry beneath a bloodied state. The interaction on the border reveals these vital issues in acute contrast, opening the door to their examination elsewhere. This thesis studies the border; its conclusions may be chased far beyond it.

Traditional historiographies of the Cold War Middle East read into Britain's postwar economic decline a corresponding demise of British regional influence. According to these accounts, the Suez Crisis served to teach Britain new limits to its military capabilities, occasioning a break from independent endeavours to project power in the region. However, the case studies presented in this thesis demonstrate that the Suez Crisis did not mark a precipitous turning point in Britain's political influence in the Middle East in the short- to medium-term. Britain's power in the region rested upon not only its material assets, but other less tangible bases as well. Most importantly, Britain's power in the Middle East during the period examined increasingly included its ability to influence the policies of United States – a country with great resources and an emerging presence in the region.

Concentrating on the time frame between the establishment of India's Constituent Assembly in 1946, and the passing of the Dowry Prevention Act in 1961, this thesis attempts to write an alternative history of India's transition to Independence, by applying the tools of feminist historiography to this crucial period of citizenship making, as a way of offering new perspectives on the nature, meaning and boundaries of citizenship in post-colonial India. It focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of two prominent women's organisations, the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), documenting and analysing the voices and positions of this cohort in some of the key debates around nation building in Nehruvian India. It also traces and analyses the range of activities and struggles engaged in by these two women's organisations - as articulations and expressions of citizenship in practice. The intention in so doing is to address three key questions or areas of exploration. Firstly to analyse and document how gender relations and contemporary understandings of gender difference, both acted upon and were shaped by the emerging identity of the Indian as postcolonial citizen, and how this dynamic interaction was situated within a broader matrix of struggles and competing identities including those of minority rights. Secondly to analyse how the framework of postcolonial Indian citizenship has both created new possibilities for empowerment, but simultaneously set new limitations on how the Indian women's movement was able to imagine itself as a political constituency and the feminist agenda it was able to articulate and pursue. Thirdly to explore how applying a feminist historiography to the story of the construction of postcolonial Indian citizenship calls for the ability to think about the meaning and possibilities of citizenship in new and different ways, to challenge the very conceptual frameworks that define the term.

Between 1957 and 1964 the Soviet Union sought to export to West Africa a model of economic and social development. Moscow’s policy was driven by the conviction that socialism was a superior economic system, and could be replicated in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. However, Soviet confidence in the project was undermined by the unreliability of local leaders, and then by the Congo crisis. The setback in West Africa taught the Soviet leadership crucial lessons, including the importance of supporting ideologically reliable leaders, and the necessity of building military strength to bolster intervention. Combining Soviet and Ghanaian sources with those more readily available in the UK and the US, this thesis shows the importance of modernisation of the Third World for Moscow’s foreign policy during the Khrushchev era, and contributes to the new sets of literature on the cold war in the third world, and on the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.

This thesis explores the anxieties and opportunities that attend fame and posterity in the second sophistic and how they play out in both literary and monumental expressions of cultural production. I consider how elite provincials in the Roman empire, who are competitive, bi- or even tri-cultural, status-driven, often politically active, and engaged in cultural production, attempt to construct a future presence for themselves either through the composition of literature that is aimed (at least in part) at the future or through efforts to write themselves into the landscape of their native or adopted cities. I argue that the cultural and temporal perspective of these men drives their multifarious, playful, and self-reflexive approach to the production of literature or monuments. For those men engaged in the ‘second sophistic’, in the narrower, Philostratean definition, there is an ever present tether on their creative efforts, in that for contemporary success they must immerse themselves in the culture of classical Athens; and the prominent practice of epideictic oratory, with its promotion of improvisation and lack of repetition, discourages the kind of literary effort that aims at eternity. At the same time, their attempts to build themselves into the hearts of cities is less restricted, in that those who possess or have access to sufficient wealth can grant elaborate benefactions which essentially stand as monuments to their financer. Nevertheless, their belated position with respect to the Greek literary canon and the heights of political and cultural prestige invested in classical Greece infuses the cultural efforts of the second sophistic with a sense of pathos that acknowledges the impossibility of creating and controlling one’s future reputation regardless of how much effort is applied. At the same time, this impossible position, rather than limiting them, endows these men with a varied, self-ironizing, intertextual, intermedial, and unique approach to cultural production that actively engages with the inescapable and laudable past in order to carve a lasting impression on the literary and physical landscape of the Roman empire.

The present study is a survey of Anglo-French imperial, policies on the Upper Nile question and the Fashoda Crisis which resulted, and it is an attempt to place this conflict within the framework of the "new imperialism" after 1870.

This thesis traces British colonial governance and the workings of the late colonial state from 1938 until the end of empire in the early 1960s in Cyprus, Kenya and Nyasaland. It proposes that colonial governance operated in place and time back and forth across a spectrum, typified by polarities of (i) 'soft' management and regulation of colonial populations in the 1940s, and (ii) 'hard' control exemplified by the use of harsh physical coercion in the 1950s, although both 'soft' and 'hard' approaches - and hybrid variants somewhere in between - were always, in truth, sides of the same coin. British colonial governance is examined through the filter of three approximate, although not rigidly linear, 'phases': (1) a 'soft' phase of development and welfare from 1938-45, during which the rhetoric of governance was distinguished by the language of benevolence, in the attempt to re-legitimise empire, (2) the post-war period from 1945-1950, when Britain played a leading role in establishing supranational institutions promoting universal human rights and also, and however reluctantly, extended a modified human rights regime to its colonies, and (3) the swing to 'hard' governance during emergency periods in Cyprus (1955-59), Kenya (1952-60) and Nyasaland (1959-60), during which Britain strove to resolve the dichotomy between competing domestic and international demands of (a) maintenance of empire, often through the use of coercive physical measures, and (b) promotion of universal human rights on the world stage. This was all played out, at least in part, as an albeit muted ideological confrontation between opposing post-war visions of global order - the very survival of the old imperial system pitched against the implicitly decolonising thrust of the universal human rights movement as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). This thesis argues that by 1959 and in part as a consequence of the cumulative political impact of allegations of human rights and other abuses during emergency periods, Britain could no longer reconcile these competing visions of colonial governance and world order, nor sustain its empire and colonial rule by force.