Thesis advisor: Robert Bartlett / In his depiction of Athens in his Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shows a city of extraordinary daring, energy, resourcefulness and hope. However, it is difficult adequately to articulate the character of that which is most central to Athens, namely, her imperial ambition. Although Athens is clearly distinguished from the fearful, ever-hesitating Sparta by her apparently boundless activity and hopefulness, it is nonetheless unclear what, precisely, Athens is hoping for. What is the attraction of the ceaseless toil and danger of great empire? In risking what they have because they are “always seeking more,” what exactly do the Athenians think they are getting? My study approaches these questions through a focus on one of the great puzzles of Athenian imperialism, namely, that the Athenians claim both that their empire is pursued under the compulsion of fear, honor, and/or interest, and that it is freely undertaken -- a contradiction that creates a difficulty especially for the Athenians’ repeated suggestion that their empire is a noble, praiseworthy enterprise. Through consideration of the Athenians’ experience of their imperial ambition and the ways in which the contradictory elements of that ambition fit together in their minds, as made clear especially through the rhetoric of their outstanding statesmen, we gain greater clarity about the character of the longings underpinning the extraordinary Athenian energy for empire. We also come better to understand the conditions in which the Athenians’ hopes are made more or less tractable and reasonable, as well as the influence of the rhetoric of leading Athenians on these hopes. This dissertation argues that the Athenians are less attached to one particular object as the deepest root of their imperialism, and more to the notion of a freedom from all limits, which can be both inflamed by, as well as helpfully anchored to, their opinions of their virtue; thus, the study suggests that the desire for empire is deeply rooted in human nature, and that empire will therefore appeal to us for as long as human nature remains unchanged. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

At the end of the First World War, new states were created in the former domains of the Ottoman Empire. In the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Britain and France obtained through conquest and international writ new "mandate" territories in Iraq and Syria, while in 1923 a new Turkish republic was founded on the Anatolian peninsula. During the next two decades, governments in these states planned a series of water control projects on the two rivers as part of broad economic development efforts. Many of these projects were eventually constructed after the Second World War, shaping the environment of the river basin with dams, flood control and irrigation works, and hydroelectric power stations. By comparing these states' efforts to exploit natural resources and manage the environment of the basin, this study considers the environmental function in the shift from empire to independent nation-state and in the diverse processes of modern state formation. Through water resource exploitation, Iraq, Syria and Turkey founded modern bureaucracies, centralized control over natural resources, and justified new techniques to manage populations. However, the intentions of Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus, as well as the results obtained, differed in significant ways, providing insight not only into the nature of these states, but also the political dimensions of managing a critical natural resource. This dissertation is based on analysis of archival records in Arabic, English, French and Turkish, collected from institutions in England, France, the United States, India and Turkey.

By the turn of the twentieth century, "rural youth" came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, as well as a number of other youth training programs, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create "rural youth" unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South Ch'ungch'ŏng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old, determined the motivations and emotional drives behind youth participation in the mobilization. To invert the analytical viewpoint from the state to youth themselves, I use the term "Rural Youth Industry." This indicates the social sphere in which agrarian youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success-oriented modern youth, shared an identity as "rural youth" by incorporating imperial and global youth activism, and developed a sense of moral superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. The social dynamics of the "Rural Youth Industry" explain why many of these youth so internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism that they volunteered for military service and fought for the empire. This dissertation offers a new perspective to the study of modern empires in several respects. It provides a new way to dissect the colonial empire, challenging the methodological trap of emphasizing the present-day national boundaries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It highlights rural modernity, often neglected in the urban-centric historiography of colonial modernity. It also brings together global, regional, and local histories. The seinendan were part of the global waves of imperialism, nation-state building, agrarianism, and the rise of youth. I argue that the spread of the "Rural Youth Industry" most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a "nation-empire." This dissertation examines the operations of the "nation-empire" at the grassroots level by comparing the social environments of mobilized agrarian youth. Situating the practices of the Japanese empire in these broader contexts as well as the specific local conditions of village societies, this dissertation illuminates the nature of mass mobilization and the shifting relationship between the state and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Political, military, and economic power alone cannot explain how empires work, for empire-making is also a matter of theories, narratives, ideas and institutions. To sustain themselves, empires both coerce and persuade. Tools of persuasion, however, were seldom the monopoly of those who sought to dominate, for they could also be contested and appropriated by those who sought to resist. This dissertation on Chosŏn Korea’s (1392–1910) interactions with Ming China (1368–1644) offers a cultural history of interstate orders and diplomatic institutions in early modern Korea and East Asia. I illustrate how Chosŏn appropriated the persuasive technologies that sustained Ming empire as a political imaginary to contest Ming imperial claims and ultimately reshape imperial ideology. Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process. Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire.

This dissertation is a study of the codification of empire and its unexpected consequences. It returns to the constitutional history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — a subject whose heyday had passed by the late 1920s — to offer a new history of sovereignty in Central Europe. It argues that the imperatives of imperial constitutionalism spurred the creation a rich jurisprudence on the death, birth, and survival of states; and that this jurisprudence, in turn, outlived the imperial context of its formation and shaped the “new international order” in interwar Central Europe. “Law, Time, and Sovereignty” documents how contemporaries “thought themselves through” the transition from a dynastic Europe of two-bodied emperor-kings to the world of the League of Nations. The project of writing an imperial constitution, triggered by the revolutions of 1848, forced jurists, politicians and others to articulate the genesis, logic, and evolution of imperial rule, generating in the process a bank or archive of imperial self-knowledge. Searching for the right language to describe imperial sovereignty entailed the creative translation of the structures and relationships of medieval composite monarchy into the conceptual molds of nineteenth-century legal thought. While the empire’s constituent principalities (especially Hungary and Bohemia) theoretically possessed autonomy, centuries of slow centralization from Vienna had rendered that legal independence immaterial. Seeking conceptual means to manage the paradox of states that existed in law but not in fact, legal scholars and regional claim-makers alike cultivated a language of “historical rights” to serve as a placeholder for the suspended sovereignty of these sleeping states, swallowed up but not dissolved in the python of empire. Remarkably, “historical rights” became a kind of Trojan horse that smuggled the specter of international law into the internal workings of imperial constitutional law: the line between the two orders grew porous long before the formal sovereign rupture of 1918. Drawing on nineteenth-century legal studies and government legislation as well as parliamentary debates and other public statements, I thus show how imperial constitutional law — closely intertwined with the new academic discipline of constitutional law that emerged coterminously — provides an extraordinarily powerful vantage point from which to observe the construction of “modern” notions of statehood, rights, and sovereignty out of the raw materials of dynastic law. What is more, I reveal how the intellectual products of this constitutional tradition survived the empire’s dissolution in 1918: bodies of legal knowledge designed to capture and codify the fractured nature of imperial sovereignty eventually served as intellectual tools for managing its absence. When the empire collapsed under the pressure of four years of total war, a carefully cultivated discursive terrain lay waiting, well-stocked with tropes, arguments, and claims concerning the pre-existing statehood of many of the empire’s component parts. At the Paris Peace Conference and beyond, claim-makers redeployed the rhetorical arsenal of imperial constitutional debate on the world stage, arguing for the survival of these historic polities and their rights over the rupture of imperial collapse. The interwar settlement in Central Europe, I contend, cannot be understood outside a broader sweep of legal ideas forged in the cradle of imperial law. In this way, my dissertation offers a new pre-history of the interwar international order (often narrated as a Central European “year zero”), as well as a history and post-history of the empire’s legal worlds. Sensitive throughout to the co-implication of political and epistemological questions, this dissertation is not only a history of sovereignty but also a history of knowledge about sovereignty. At its heart lies a preoccupation with the relationship between law and time. By tracking law’s “persons” and their survival through time — especially their talent for both reinvention and continuity, and their capacity to carry rights through history — it sketches a more anthropological portrait of the particular tools and logics by which legal thought sets itself in history and resists the effects of time’s passing. In offering a new account of the transfer of rights and their subjects between old world orders and new, “Law, Time and Sovereignty” doubles as a study of the temporal life of states.

No description available.

After the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in 1895, colonial and diplomatic officials sought to encourage, regulate, and surveil the movement of individuals from Taiwan to the south China treaty-ports by conferring upon those who traveled there the legal designation Taiwan sekimin, or “registered Taiwanese.” Japanese officials and sekimin alike fashioned the Taiwan’s inhabitants, their capital, their socio-economic networks, and Taiwan’s colonial institutions as the basis for expanding the Japanese empire’s political and economic influence. This legal status afforded sekimin the extraterritorial protection of local Japanese consulates and subjected them to consular oversight. Over time, the category of Taiwan sekimin was expanded to include local and overseas Chinese whose support Japanese officials sought to garner. This dissertation charts the transformation of Taiwan sekimin as a juridical and social category and argues that it was central to Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan and imperial ambitions in south China. By tracing these changes, this dissertation shows how efforts by Japanese and Chinese officials, as well as by sekimin themselves, drew upon and reshaped the existing social and commercial networks that linked Taiwan to the south China treaty-ports and conditioned Japanese imperial and Chinese imperial and national state formation in south China. Taiwan sekimin ranged from wealthy elites, petty merchants, and doctors and other professionals trained in colonial Taiwan, to young anti-colonial activists drawn to China, criminal elements who formed gangs, and disreputable proprietors of opium and gambling establishments. Diverse though the category was, the status of Taiwan sekimin became, at times, the basis of individuals’ appealing for Japanese consular protection, and at others, the basis of Japanese officials’ laying claim to exercising jurisdiction over individuals considered Japanese subjects. By exploring how Taiwan sekimin individuals both supported and challenged the ideologies and institutions of the Japanese empire at its margins, this dissertation reveals their role in entrenching a Japanese imperial sphere across and beyond the region between 1895 and the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The legal and spatial bounds of Taiwan sekimin as a juridical and social category were central to intra-imperial and inter-imperial contestations for power in south China. Contention over the Japanese empire’s economic and political ambitions led to contestation over the legal boundaries of Taiwan sekimin between Japanese colonial officials in Taiwan and local consular officials, who sought to regulate the mobility of people, ideas, and capital between Taiwan and the treaty-ports. Over time, Japanese officials also sought to channel the support of sekimin through new institutions. These institutions expanded the spatial scope of jurisdictional contests within and beyond the treaty-ports and thus the scope of imperial power; these institutions also rendered Japanese imperial ambitions more contingent on the support of the sekimin. Chinese local, national, and diplomatic officials also actively challenged the legality of sekimin status and the inclusion of individuals these officials considered Chinese nationals under its purview, particularly after the rise to power of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang) in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, the concept of Taiwan sekimin was increasingly at odds with Chinese national conceptions of social and economic order. This dissertation shows that, in this context, conflicts involving sekimin were not just local scuffles to be resolved on the interpersonal level but laden with ideological import, leaving the sekimin caught between the logics of empire and nation. This dissertation draws on Japanese- and Chinese-language materials from Japan, Taiwan, and China. It reads official sources “along the grain” to reveal the logic that organized knowledge production about the sekimin and “against the grain” to reconstruct a history largely beyond the purview of bureaucratic institutions. By exploring the competing inter- and intra-imperial claims to authority over Taiwan sekimin, this dissertation argues that jurisdictional contestation had legal and spatial implications in linking Chinese national and Japanese imperial state formation in south China.

No description available.

Contemporary scholars of imperialism and colonialism studies have revealed how different imperial spaces were malleable, and they constantly shift through negotiations between diverse agencies. Whereas most existing studies investigate change of imperial space from the view of ‘metropolitan centre’, this thesis attempts to decentralise the dominant view of existing Japanese imperialism studies, and explores the Japanese imperial expansion with a particular focus on people’s subjectivities and agencies on the national border zone. The thesis particularly focuses on the border/boundary between the Yaeyama Archipelago of the Ryukyu Islands and colonial Taiwan. The first chapter explores the boundary between Yaeyama and Taiwan in representation and discourse after Yaeyama was annexed to Japan. I discuss how ‘Yaeyama’ came to appear as a historical subject in the Japanese colonial discourse, by distinguishing itself from the colonised subject as well as criticising the dominance of the main island of Okinawa. In critically examining the previous Yaeyama Studies, I suggest reconstructing Yaeyama’s history in the East Asian regional framework. The second chapter explores how civilians actively committed themselves to defining the national territory during the late nineteenth century. The chapter also aims to reconsider the dominant discourse of Okinawa’s modern history, which tends to focus on conflicts between the Japanese government and the former samurai class of Okinawa prefecture. Chapters 3 further discusses how people on the border zone constructed the boundary between Japan and Taiwan, but I argue that the border between Yaeyama and Taiwan did not only demarcate the ‘metropolitan nation’ and the ‘colony’, but also demarcated the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ areas. In other words, the third chapter considers how the national border had different implications to people on the border zone. I explore how new settlers dominated the newly emerging economy of Yaeyama and developed trade links with colonial Taiwan. Furthermore, I discuss how while Yaeyama native farmers were marginalised from the local economy and industry, they also crossed the border in a form of rural-urban migration. Chapters 5 and 6 examine Yaeyama migrants’ experiences in Taiwan. Firstly, I explore in what social and cultural conditions Yaeyama migrants lived and worked during the 1920s to the 1940s. I argue that the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘Taiwanese’ was not instantly determined by the colonial authority, but continuously constructed and negotiated by social agents. In Chapter 6, I examine how Yaeyama migrants shaped their Japanese identity by distinguishing themselves from the colonised subjects. The southern border between the Inner Territory and the Outer Territories were constituted through the interaction between ensembles of practices in the local ‘place’ and the wider imperial networks and ‘space’. Yaeyama people’s experiences of constructing and crossing the boundary effectively demonstrates how the determination of the Japanese national border was incorporated into colonialism, and how Japanese colonialism was associated with the emergence of modernity in East Asia. With a particular focus on the border islands of Yaeyama, this thesis presents an alternative view to Japanese colonial history, East Asian social history as well as Okinawa’s modern history.

No description available.