The habit of honouring outstanding individuals with statues was common throughout the Roman Empire. Yet after the end of the Severan reign at the beginning of the third century AD, a decrease in honorific statues is generally assumed to have taken place. This thesis aims to evaluate this hypothesis, focusing specifically on the years AD 222-285. The thesis is assessing the contemporaneous imperial remains for the Roman Empire as a whole and the evidence from four exemplary cities that are particularly conspicuous in their statuary production and display, both before and after the time frame under investigation (Leptis Magna, Athens, Ephesus, Aphrodisias). The purpose is to explore the standards, conventions, and limitations of statuary practice in Roman society in a synthetic and comparative analysis and thereby to evaluate its political and social role during a state of internal and external instability, labelled 'the third century crisis'. By providing concrete figures, the practice of the third century can be juxtaposed with both the antecedent and subsequent centuries and this will facilitate a more coherent insight into the overall development and changes in Roman honorific statuary practice. The results suggest that the assumed decline in the number of statuary installations might have to be re-evaluated. It has become apparent that in order to obtain comparable numbers, the inclusion of imperial family members in any statistical evaluation is indispensable, a factor which has previously been disregarded. A gradual decrease cannot be supported and neither can a decrease in the appreciation of honours.

At its greatest extent, the Roman empire represented one of the largest continuous areas of land to have been ruled by a single central administration in the classical period. While the extent of the empire may be determined from both the extensive body of literary evidence from the Roman world, and also from the physi- cal remains of great public works stretching from Britain to Arabia, the processes by which the Romans were able to apprehend larger spaces remain infrequently studied in modern scholarship. It is often assumed that Roman spatial awareness came from cartographic representations and that the imperial Roman administration must have possessed detailed scale maps of both individual regions and of the empire as a whole. In the first part of the present study, it is demonstrated that Roman spatial understanding may not have relied very extensively on cartography, and that any maps produced in the Roman world were designed to serve very different purposes from those that we might associate with maps today. Instead, it is argued that the extensive construction projects that defined the character of the imperial world would have pro- vided a means by which the larger physical spaces of the empire could be understood. However, as transformations began to occur within the built environment between the late-third and late-sixth centuries, spatial processes would have necessarily started to change. In the second part of the present study, it is suggested that attitudes toward the built environment would have led to changes in the physical arrangement of rural and urban spaces in late antiquity; furthermore the eventual dissolution of the constructed landscape that defined the Roman empire would have resulted in new approaches to the apprehension of larger spaces, approaches in which cartographic expression may have played a more central role.

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 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 research project investigates the relationship between pain and the practices of explaining and narrating it to others. Current scholarship argues that the representation of suffering became, during the Imperial period, an increasingly effective and popular strategy for cultivating authority and that this explains the success of Christian culture’s representation of itself as a community of sufferers. One criticism of this approach is that the experience of pain has often been assumed, rather than analysed. Here, I investigate the nature of pain by attending to its intimate relationship with language; pain was connected to the strategies used to communicate that experience to others. I will show that writers throughout the Imperial period were concerned with questions about how to communicate pain and how that act of communication shaped, managed, and alleviated the experience. I investigate this culture along three axes. Part 1, ‘The Sublime Representation of Pain’, investigates the way different authors thought about the capacity of sublime language and rhetorical techniques such as enargeia to effectively communicate pain. I argue that for writers such as Longinus, the sublime offers an opportunity to replicate the traumatic experience of the pain sufferer in the audience or listener—pain is narrated to the audience through a traumatic communicative mode. Contrarily, I show how authors such as Plutarch and Galen were particularly concerned to desublimate the representation of pain, reducing the affective power of images of pain by promoting the audience’s conscious engagement with the text or representational medium. Part 2, ‘Medical Narratives’, examines a conflict between Galen and Aristides over the way language and narrative signified or referred to painful experiences. I show how both writers negotiate the way pain destroys and transcends ordered, structured, narrative by engaging in a process of narrative translation. I will illuminate the difference between scientific, diagnostic narratives which explain and rationalise pain experiences (in the case of Galen) and those which attempt to give witness to the nebulous, ineffable qualities of pain. In Part 3, ‘Narrating Cures’ I investigate ancient practices of psychotherapy. I show how various philosophical consolations were underpinned by an understanding of the power of pain to continually return and overwhelm the individual. I show further that the Greek romances engage in a type of talking cure: the novels use narration and story-telling to help assert the protagonists’ distance from their past traumatic experiences and, thus, allow the individual to overcome their painful past.

This thesis examines the nature and dynamics of U.S.-Iran relations during the Cold War under the leadership of U.S. President Richard Nixon, his adviser Henry Kissinger, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran. This revisionist account critically examines the popular view of Mohammad Reza Shah as a mere instrument of American strategies of containment during the Cold War. Relying on recently declassified American documents, British government papers, and the diaries, memoirs and oral histories of Iranian actors, this thesis restores agency to the shah as an autonomous Cold War actor and suggests that Iran evolved from a client to a partner of the United States under the Nixon Doctrine. This partnership was forged during Nixon’s first term in office between 1969 and 1972, as the United States embraced a policy of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf region. Thanks to a long-standing friendship with the president, the shah was able to exercise extraordinary influence in the Nixon White House. This partnership reached its peak during Nixon’s second term as the United States supported Iran’s regional primacy against the challenge from Iraq. The shah drew Nixon and Kissinger into Iran’s secret war against Iraq in Kurdistan in 1972, by portraying Iran’s long-standing regional conflict with Iraq as a Cold War confrontation with the Soviet-backed Ba’th regime in Baghdad. When the shah unilaterally decided to abandon the Kurds in a deal with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger had little choice but to acquiesce, despite the personal embarrassment and domestic recriminations that followed. The U.S.-Iran partnership declined following Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In spite of the best efforts of the shah and Kissinger, between 1974 and 1976 the United States and Iran were unable to reach an agreement on U.S. nuclear exports to Iran. President Gerald Ford tried to impose a discriminatory nuclear agreement on Iran that was rejected by the shah because it violated Iran’s national sovereignty. Under Ford, the United States reverted to treating Iran as a client rather a partner of the United States.

This dissertation argues that during the nineteenth century, the journey to London revealed a world undergoing systemic change as industrialisation steadily eroded the traditional rhythms of the countryside in favour of urban modernity; indeed, London is regarded as a synecdoche for the forces shaping the wider world. This work uses tourist narratives to London as investigative tools to examine the ways in which individuals comprehend the modern changes occurring around them, as represented by the British capital, and does so in a comparative fashion, investigating the British Empire, the United States, Britain itself, and continental Europe. In so doing, it addresses two questions: first, whether one’s acceptance or rejection of modernity was predicated upon specific social and national preconditions; and second, whether the idea of nineteenth-century modernity was itself a non-universal construction dependent upon a variety of socio-cultural outlooks. The evidence for this study is drawn from the published and unpublished narratives of tourists from the four different contexts mentioned above, and divided into four chapters to focus upon each group. This study is grounded in a theoretical context which establishes a correlation between the methods used to interpret the city’s spaces, and the methods used to interpret modernity more generally. I conclude that the changes occurring from the interaction between global modernity and local culture were regarded with ambivalence and uncertainty, judgments influenced by London’s impact on the visitors mentioned above. The city gives a physical dimension to the travellers’ imagined fears, benefits, or concerns over future progress. Victorian London is thus one focus for a transformation affecting large segments of the nineteenth-century world, illustrating that modern industrial changes were ultimately perceived as being ambiguous and ambivalent forces.

Soviet-Third World relations during the Cold War are still not clearly understood. Largely based on previously unused primary material, this study aims to fill this gap in knowledge by emphasising the interplay between domestic, local, regional, and global dimensions in analysing Moscow’s involvement in the Horn of Africa. By offering a detailed examination of Soviet involvement in Somalia and Ethiopia during the Cold War, this thesis aims to shed light on the factors, shaping Moscow’s policies in the area. While it does not lay any claim of representativeness for other Third World regions, this thesis aims to highlight the intricate interplay between ideology and realpolitik in the making of Soviet foreign policy. Additionally, it tries to determine to what extent the ‘local pull,’ exerted by both Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, as well as by Soviet and other Bloc diplomats, informed the Kremlin’s policy in the area. This thesis shows that the two main strands of Moscow’s foreign policy, the pragmatic statist line and the ideological Cominternist approach, were not in conflict with one another. Instead, they were amalgamated into a flexible tactical approach, designed to maximise Soviet influence by whatever means available, along the path of least resistance. Another strand in the argument is interwoven with the pericentric framework for the study of the Cold War. While accepting recent interpretations of superpower-Third World relations, this research develops a more nuanced account of the centre-periphery interaction. The act of local engagement was Moscow’s initiative, in accord with its wider geo-political plans. Once engaged, the local actors proved instrumental in informing the Kremlin’s exercise of maintaining a presence. As with its entry, Moscow’s disengagement was predicated on strategic considerations. The period of perestroika, assigned the Third World lower priority in the Kremlin’s global agenda, engendering a withdrawal from the Horn.

This thesis is a microhistorical investigation of the dynamics of control and resistance in Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital’s Maximum Security section from 1964 to 1994 in South Africa. It examines the evolution of daily life inside these institutions, both situated in the Western Cape, and the extent to which these institutions were part of the security apparatus developed by the apartheid state. The permeability of Pollsmoor and Valkenberg shed light on the connections between repression, resistance, collaboration and survival inside and outside closed institutions. The division of incarcerated populations according to race, gender, age and behaviour reflected wider logics of governance of the South African society. Similarly, the modalities of resistance and collaboration adopted by ‘political’, ‘common law’ and ‘insane’ prisoners on the inside echoed the processes of popular mobilisation on the outside. The construction of a ‘healthy nation’ through the production and control of deviances was hence far from being a smooth process. The thesis is divided into three parts, each composed of three chapters. The first part analyses the way a system of law and order, based on delineation, the bestowal of privileges and violent repression, was imposed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals’ Maximum Security sections and how this evolved according to the changing social and political imperatives of the apartheid state. The second part shifts the gaze to the level of the courts, where psychiatric and criminological discourses became increasingly entangled throughout the period. The operating modalities of the judicial system reflected the fears and expectatives of the white minority, while providing a racialised image of black populations as both dangerous and childlike. Finally, the third part analyses the links between outside and inside resistances and adaptations to the regime of apartheid. It focuses on the 1994 prison revolts as prisms to understand the processes of subjectivation and politicisation which had emerged in closed institutions during apartheid.

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