Die vorliegende Arbeit beinhaltet Modelluntersuchungen der Strömungsverhältnisse am Beispiel des Imperial Smelting-Ofens. Die Versuche verfolgen das Ziel, Erkenntnisse über optimale Einblasbedingungen der Sekundärluft zu erhalten, um die Neigung zur Ansatzbildung verringern zu können. Die durchgeführten Untersuchungen lassen die Schlussfolgerung zu, dass die Simulation der in der Gasphase ablaufenden Strömungsvorgänge eines pyrometallurgischen Aggregates mittels eines physikalischen Modells realisierbar ist. Aufgrund der Berücksichtigung der Arbeitsweise des Ofens sowie der Ähnlichkeitstheorie bei der Prozessmodellierung, können die erhaltenen Ergebnisse in der Tendenz auf das Original übertragen werden. Für die weitere Erklärung der Problematik der Ansatzbildung in der IS-Anlage werden thermodynamische Berechnungen durchgeführt, Ansatzproben aus dem Originalofen analysiert und die Abscheidungen der Nebelflüssigkeit an den Modellwänden untersucht. Im Ergebnis dieser Untersuchungen werden Vorschläge zur Optimierung des IS-Prozesses unterbreitet.

Spanish travel writings on China at the end of the 19th century have been largely ignored in the history of literature. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a thorough examination since these texts constitute a particular and important vision of an "Orientalized" country about an Oriental nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. On one hand, Spain was characterized by an irreversible decadence. Thus, in contrast to British and French imperial discourse, which reflects colonial experiences, Spanish travel writings provide a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Furthermore, although China was a goal of imperial ambition, it was far less colonized than other regions. As a result, the commanding imperial gaze and fearless exploration were less likely to be cast on China. In addition, despite its general decline, China remained the home of an ancient and highly advanced civilization that still deserved Western respect and offered the West much to learn. Considering these facts, this dissertation consists of a general analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to portray the bibliographic genealogy of references on Spanish travelers and their writings on China during this period; to depict their particular vision in which the construct of colonial discourse is transformed into a pretension to recover the lost imperial prestige and an interiorized reflection on Spain's own problems and possible solutions; and to present a fundamental ambivalence or even difficult conciliation between the colonial discourse and its resistance, ideology and utopia, as well as imperialist ambition and national crisis. Spanish travel writings on China consequently become an allegory of imperial nostalgia: a yearning for the imperial power that had vanished, without hope of restoration. / text

In this dissertation I offer an analysis of the ideological significance of Juan de Castellanos' writings in light of the epic model provided by Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana. My main goal is to demonstrate that, unlike Ercilla, Castellanos embraced and manipulated the resources at the disposal of epic poets not only to praise the deeds and defend the rights of the first wave of colonists, but also to challenge the policies of Hapsburg monarchs concerning the administration of the recently established Viceroyalties in the New World. Hence, this dissertation aims to foreground the complexities and ambiguities of a text that bears evidence of an internal ideological fissure that significantly shaped Spain’s political and territorial expansion and contributed to the emergence of a new type of literature. If epic, as has been persuasively argued by Elizabeth B. Davis "was invaluable to the ruling circles of the imperial monarchy, who used it to forge a sense of unity and to script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest" (10), then the heroic poems written by Castellanos on behalf of the conquistadors and encomenderos represent the boldest attempt to turn the most prestigious vehicle of Spanish imperial propaganda, epic poetry, into a tool for the expression of colonial political concerns, a project which included but was not limited to the deployment of aggressive practices of poetic imitation, the expression of a new sense of selfhood, and the demarcation of a new sense of patriotism. Nevertheless, from its inception Castellanos' project was also plagued by many contradictions, most of which are the result of his nostalgia for the values and practices commonly associated with the warrior nobility of the feudal era, and by the constraints imposed by simultaneously having to point to and erase the trace of Ercilla's text. / text

This dissertation examines the roles of popular sports baseball and Gaelic Games in Taiwanese and Irish society respectively between the years 1884 and 1968. During this period, the spread of each sport in popularity and the subsequent increased profile in the public realm highlighted similar challenges faced by the societies of each territory as inhabitants of minor players in a global political system dominated by major powers. The development of Taiwanese baseball and its spread in popularity during the colonial period reveals the extent to which divisions between colonial Japanese and local Taiwanese blurred beyond the parameters of governmental efforts at coexistence and assimilation. Two teams in particular, the Nenggao team of 1924-25 and the KANO team of 1931, give evidence of a colonial Taiwanese sporting culture that featured strengthening connections with sporting culture in Japan. In both cases, baseball displayed potential as an integrating force in colonial Taiwanese society between social groups resident on the island rather than as a source for opposition to colonial rule. This is in direct contrast to Irish society, where the resurgence in popularity of Gaelic Games occurred within the political context of exclusivist nationalism. Gaelic Games existed as cultural markers of an Irish culture defined by a Gaelic ethnic identity and political commitment to an Irish nation state, choosing to ignore the realities of partition and the existence of a sizable Loyalist community in the north of the country. This viewpoint persisted until the late 1960s, when the eruption of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland irrevocably changed the terms of Irish political participation. At the same time, Taiwanese baseball transitioned from a shared cultural form between Taiwan and Japan to a potent avenue for emerging Taiwanese political voices in 1968 with the widely celebrated success of the Hongye schoolboy baseball team. Baseball’s popularity had persisted in the face of ambivalent attitudes among ruling Guomindang officials following retrocession, but the Hongye victory marked the introduction of specific political overtones to Taiwanese baseball, bringing an end to decades of the sport’s primary role as an act of public participation with limited political connotations. / text

For more than thirty years, historians of the Holy Roman Empire have registered little discernible interest in imperial censorship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As historical scholarship has evolved in its understanding of the Holy Roman Empire during this period, it has lagged behind in its appreciation for how imperial authorities controlled expression and regulated the book trade. Old assumptions about imperial censorship have been slow to wither and decay even though assumptions about the Empire have been reexamined and revised. Where a growing appreciation for the Empire's complexities spurred interest in territorial and civic censorship, a corresponding interest in imperial censorship has not developed. Interestingly, the two–old assumptions and modern revisionist histories–have conspired to moot studies of the imperial government, its policies, and its procedures, which has meant that the significance of imperial censorship in the Empire has been largely overlooked. Moreover, historians' attention to local controls and regulations has inspired a more nuanced approach to censorship than had previously prevailed, leading to a general reassessment of how censorship influenced the circulation and reception of ideas in both positive and negative ways. Imperial censorship has failed to register its mark in this regard as well. Using a combination of imperial censorship legislation, archival documents, and printed primary sources, this dissertation charts imperial censorship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as both a concept and a practice. Unable to enforce religious uniformity in the Empire after the Reformation's successful establishment in the 1520s, imperial legislation came to rely on libel, rather than heresy, as the formal basis for its censorship policies. Libel was an ambiguous category of illicit expression, the interpretation of which depended a great deal on the contingencies of context and the subjective preferences of enforcers. This affected how imperial and local authorities, respectively, interacted on matters of censorship, requiring more negotiation and cooperation than has heretofore been appreciated.

Colonialism in twentieth century Canada has operated as a totalizing discourse, administered not by the force of a colonizing power, but by the mimicry of descendants from the constructed British imperial centre. These anglo-celtic descendants built a colonial identity that in its ideal manifestation asserted universal dominance and control, demanding that all difference assimilate or cease to exist. The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), a Canadian women's patriotic organization formed in 1900 and still in existence, is used to represent this colonial identity; a hegemonic process that was constantly changing, and produced in a recursive relationship to the threats and resistance that, at specific moments, challenged its composition. Tracing the historical/cultural geography of the IODE reveals the shifting focus of Canadian identity from imperial space to national space. This shift was produced in a multiplicity of geographic locations that offer a complicated challenge to theories of 'public' and 'private', of masculine and feminine and the 'everyday' and the 'theoretical'. Archival sources from across Canada, interviews with members of the IODE provide the primary sources.

This work explores the relationship between time, temporality, and power by utilizing interactions between Jesuit missionaries and the Ming and Qing governments of late imperial China as a case study. It outlines the complex relationship between knowledge of celestial mechanics, methods of measuring the passage of time, and the tightly controlled circumstances in which that knowledge was allowed to operate. Just as the Chinese courts exercised authority over time and the heavens, so too had the Catholic Church in Europe. So as messengers of God’s authority, the Jesuits identified the importance of astronomical and temporal authority in Chinese culture and sought to convey the supremacy of Christianity through their mastery of the stars and negotiate positions of power within both imperial governments.

The cultural venue of European exhibitions in the late-nineteenth century enabled the promotion of the modern nationhoods of imperial powers. This study examines the official attempts of Britain to project its imperial power and modern nationhood through exhibits of colonial Indian “tradition” in London. It traces the historical dynamics of such Indian displays in three exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, and the 1924 Empire Exhibition. The juxtaposition of Indian “tradition” and British “modernity” at the exhibitions denoted India’s inferior “difference” from Britain, and thus the necessity of imperial rule in India. The exhibitions also evidenced the tensions of such notions with those of Indian modernity, especially by the inter-war period. Chapter One examines how the spatial and architectural landscapes of the exhibitions made visible the hierarchies of British imperial rule in India. Chapter Two discusses exhibits of India’s supposedly pre-industrial socioeconomic conditions. Chapter Three assesses the ethnography of the exhibitions, and how they denoted the racial inferiority of Indian “natives” at the same time that they recognized the political power of Indian princes and middle-class elites.

The eighteenth century French explorer La Vérendrye has been commemorated in Canadian history as the “Pathfinder of the West.” Although many historians have praised La Vérendrye for his tolerance and understanding of Aboriginal culture, he was nevertheless a colonial servant, fiercely loyal to the French Crown, and tasked to carry out the imperial policies of Versailles. La Vérendrye sought to create alliances with the Indigenous peoples of the Petit Nord – Cree, Monsoni, Assiniboine, and Dakota – with the intent to bring them into a network of French-mediated alliances emanating from the Great Lakes region. The governor of New France, called Onontio by the natives, sought to ensure the symbolic subjugation of all the Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region and the Petit Nord. In theory, the role and acknowledgement of Onontio as the Father of the Alliance would have permitted the Cree, Assiniboine, and Dakota of the Petit Nord to recognize each other as “brothers and children of the same father [frères et Enfants du même Père],” to forget their inter-village quarrels, and to forge a common identity. In reality, this was far from the case, as frequent inter-village rivalries placed French officers at the western posts in a difficult position. Unlike their Great Lakes counterparts, the Cree of the Petit Nord did not need the “glue” of French mediation to hold together their already cohesive alliance with the Assiniboine, nor did they need Onontio’s authority to protect them from their traditional enemies, the Dakota. Ultimately, the Cree, Assiniboine, and Dakota rejected Onontio as their Father, dismissed La Vérendrye as his representative, and ultimately refused French conceptions of the alliance in the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains.

Between 1857 and 1913 approximately 120,000 of the labouring poor from the East End of London were assisted to emigrate to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and sometimes South Africa in order to transplant surplus urban labour to emerging colonial markets and to provide the poor with a means of personal and financial improvement. These charities described the work they did as building “The Bridge of Hope for East London.” By the end of the nineteenth century, Eastenders had long been plagued by poverty, dependency on the Poor Law, and periods of unemployment. Typecast as morally, socially, economically, and racially degenerate in an emerging slum discourse, Eastenders were rarely considered ideal colonial emigrants. For Canada, these emigrants made poor prospects for the westward-expanding nation intent on recruiting agricultural immigrants. At times over the course of these six decades, the Canadian government grew so concerned about their migrations that it took legal measures to bar their entry. By 1910, Canada effectively banned charitably assisted emigration from East London in an attempt to control its borders and dictate the kinds of immigrants it desired even when they were English. Despite these shortcomings and obstacles, assisted emigrants from East London made new lives for themselves and their families in Canada most often in cities. We know something about their experiences from letters some of them wrote to the emigration charities that sponsored them. As a migrant group, they present a unique type of English settler in Canada. Forever failing, despite their many successes and their integration, to meet the ideal imperial British standard, Eastenders were considered undesirable on both sides of the Atlantic – a blight on British prosperity at home and unsuitable representatives abroad. Eastenders occupied an uneasy “third space” struggling to fit in somewhere between home and empire. This dissertation, employing analytical models and methodologies inspired by the ‘New Imperial History,’ the ‘British World’ model, post-colonial theory, and transnationalism seeks to understand why and under what circumstances Canada restricted charitable emigration from East London by 1910. It examines how British charities, politicians, commentators, and, above all, emigrants developed and experienced an imperial discourse and practice of assisted emigration over the course of six decades under ever-changing economic circumstances at home. Overall, it argues that British emigration charities, under the mounting pressures of poverty at home and spurred on by liberal and imperial reformist attitudes, rarely heeded Canadian warnings about the sending out of poor urban emigrants from East London even though they were English. Instead, these emigrationists developed a system of assisted emigration that largely suited their own objectives of poverty management. East End emigrants experienced this system with varying degrees of success, failure, benefit, and harm. The dissertation explores their experiences in two case studies in addition to three chapters on the evolution of assisted emigration discourses and practices in the East End. In placing assisted emigration of the urban poor from East London at the centre of a discussion of late nineteenth and early twentieth century intra-imperial responses to poverty, the dissertation reveals a complex interplay between social welfare, liberalism, and migration in two disparate but connected parts of the ‘British World,’ home and abroad. In doing so it fosters a deeper understanding of the evolution of colonial immigration policy and complicates the limits of race and class for studies of English emigration.