This thesis examines Anglo-Greek relations during 1947-1952; the era of the Greek civil war from the British announcement to withdraw aid from Greece until the end of the civil war and Greece's entry into NATO. A comprehensive treatment of the crisis of the civil of the civil war focuses on British imperial defence, the politics and society of Greece and bilateral relations as formulated by Cold War needs. During the rift between the Right and the Left in Greece, the main issue addressed by this work is the continuation of British influence in Greek affairs and the extension of British interest in bolstering the anti-Communist fight of the Greek government. In 1947 Britain, being itself on the verge of economic collapse, opted to discontinue financial support to the Greek right-wing government, which boosted the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947. In the wake of American interference in Greece, Anglo-Greek relations remained close and intense, as the Greek governments maintained their trust in the British. For the British, Greece remained a destitute country, in need for assistance to defeat the communists. This study emphasises the diplomatic and military co-operation between the British, the American and the Greek governments in trying to defeat the communist forces, while attention is given to the policy and aims of the Greek Communist Party. The communist attempts to take over power along with the policies of the Greek governments and their allies are examined, with particular emphasis on the counterinsurgency operations of the Greek government developed from 1947 until the final defeat of the communist forces in 1949. The British role in these operations is considered to be important and influential in training and equipping the Greek armed forces. In the first post-civil war period of 1950-1953, the main issues examined are the attempts made by the Greek governments and the allies to establish a strong democratic cabinet and to strengthen the security of Greece within the context of international Cold War policies. Due to anti-Communist perceptions, precipitated by the Korean War, Greece became a quasi NATO member in 1950 and full member in 1952, which brought the withdrawal of the British Military Mission from Greece.

The break-up of Yugoslavia, and the ensuing wars, dominated the British foreign policy agenda for the first half of the 1990s. The way in which the British Government reacted to the series of crises was a matter of ongoing scrutiny by those within and outside of Parliament. The complex nature of the conflicts, in the early years of the post Cold War world, meant that responses by British politicians were in no way based on traditional ideological divisions, that is, M.P.s did not form neat, homogenous groups reflecting the three political currents. The Labour Party was no exception to this rule. The thesis is a study of the way in which politicians of the Labour Party responded to the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the way its M.P.s reacted to events in the region, and to the actions of the British Government. With close reference to Parliamentary debates as recorded in Hansard, the thesis shows the many and complex ways in which politicians from one British political party responded to a foreign policy episode. What is demonstrated is that a number of factors influenced the opinions of the politicians. One would expect to find some level of front and back bench division. However, what is apparent is much more complex. Whilst, in general, the Shadow Cabinet mirrored the responses of their Parliamentary opponents, of more interest is the way in which the back bench politicians contributed to debates. Some M.P.s followed the example of their senior colleagues, whereas others took totally different positions. However, the motivations for these opinions varied. It is not possible to offer a simple, generalised reading of the responses that were taken by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Contributions to debates were influenced by a variety of features: namely, the way in which an individual viewed an international institution such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union; the attitude that they took towards military intervention; and finally, the way in which the events of the Second World War informed their position on a contemporary conflict. The thesis adds to the research undertaken by scholars such as Brendan Simms and Mark Phythian. Through close reference to debates in Hansard, this work offers the opportunity to gain a much more detailed understanding of the responses of one British political party to one episode in international relations.

This thesis seeks to develop a fresh approach on immigration history in post-war Britain by focusing on public administration in a contract labour programme. The orthodox approach towards studies of immigration has been to concentrate upon the outcomes of state activity rather than the process. Consequently the experiences and reactions of volunteer workers have received much attention. This thesis offers new perspectives based on an analysis of the frameworks developed to deliver the Displaced Persons and European Voluntary Worker programmes after the Second World War. It is argued that the mundane aspects of government bureaucracy, normally unremarkable and unimportant, are indeed crucial to an understanding of how post-war labour and refugee policies were managed. With an abundance of government records extant, it is feasible to revise an important chapter of immigration history by exploring the architecture of public administration in an era of expanding bureaucracy. This study analyses the techniques and systems deployed by civil servants to provide a clearer understanding of the organisational character of a contract labour scheme that also granted political asylum to refugees. Although some political ambitions guiding the programmes were questionable, the method of their delivery suggests greater consideration was given towards participants than has previously been claimed. Emphasis is given to the origins of the immigration schemes within the wider framework of state activity, and towards the government machinery and resources available to implement policy. The state expanded dramatically during the Second World War and the civil service gained invaluable experience in managing complex new tasks. By analysing the application of this knowledge, it is possible to gain an insight into the culture of bureaucracy, explore how projects involving tens of thousands of individuals were conducted, and how the programmes affected the frame of reference of civil servants overseeing immigration and political asylum.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Gregory J. Eiselein / The presence and persistence of ethnicity in Sri Lanka has led scholars such as Jayadeva Uyangoda to describe Sri Lanka as an “ethnocracy” and is identified as one of the major challenges for attempts to reconcile communities after a 26-year-long civil war that ended in 2009. The emphasis on ethnicity, however, often makes it difficult for scholars to examine the discontinuities that have shaped the emergence of ethnicity as the most significant social category in the country. This thesis addresses this lacuna by providing a careful re-reading of the conditions under which ethnicity became the focus of both politics and epistemology at the turn of the 20th century in colonial Ceylon. Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality enables this examination by demonstrating how ethnicity became the terrain on which political rationalities and governmental technologies were deployed in order to shift how populations were constructed as the focus of colonial governance between 1901 and 1911. Colonial political rationalities are explored through an examination of the debate that emerged in the Census reports of P. Arunachalam (1902) and E.B. Denham (1912) over whether Ceylon is constituted by many nationalities or by one nationality—the Sinhalese—and many races. The emergence of this debate also coincided with the Crewe-McCallum Reforms of 1912 which aimed to reform the colonial state in response to the demands of the local population. Like the debate between Arunachalam and Denham, what is at stake in the reforms of 1912 is the question of whether the Island is constituted by many racial populations or a single population. The terms of these debates over ethnicity that took place over a century ago, continue to shape the tenor of Sri Lanka’s post-war political landscape and therefore provides a pathway for understanding how Sri Lanka’s post-war challenges are imbricated in the dilemmas of inhabiting its colonial present(s).

This research explores the external and internal factors and their roles in shaping Turkish foreign policy, which has witnessed many changes in the post-Cold War era. External factors are explained by referring to structural systemic dynamics, while internal factors are conceptualised within the scope of agency. Analysis is conducted on three levels. At the ‘systemic level’, the effects of changes created by the international system are discussed based on the Neorealist view of the international system. To avoid the pitfalls of Neorealism, which ignores domestic and individual factors, the focus of the study is shifted to the main agential factors in the domestic sphere of foreign policy-making at ‘state level’. On the third platform of analysis, the ‘individual level’, ideational factors of key figures are integrated into foreign policy analysis. It is argued that systemic effects were influential on Turkish foreign policy in the first period (1990-2002), while agential factors were weak and incapable of responding enough to pressures generated by changes in the international system. In the second period (2002-2010), however, the role of the system in shaping Turkey's foreign policy lessened, while the stronger and coherent governmental agency started to be a rising factor in shaping foreign policy.

This thesis details the purchase of liberal internationalism on elite and public opinion between 1945 and 1975 by examining two of its bastions, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, better known as Chatham House, and the United Nations Association, the successor organisation to the League of Nations Union. It reveals how liberal internationalism survived the collapse of the League of Nations and the Second World War by exploring the relationships Chatham House and UNA had with the public, media, Whitehall and the main political parties. Chatham House and UNA had a significant impact upon these groups, acting as democratising agents in foreign policy by extending debate over international affairs beyond Whitehall. Nonetheless, although elite and popular liberal internationalism survived past 1945, it struggled to do so and in order to fully appreciate how, it is necessary to simultaneously assess the confines they and their fellow NGOs worked within. Chatham House and UNA’s impact upon the politics of foreign policy must also be understood in connection with the formal and informal political structures that restricted their attempts to democratise foreign policy; structures that promoted the illusory bifurcation of domestic and international affairs.

This thesis examines the role and currency of medical and psychological languages and anxieties in discussions of women’s work, housework, marriage and motherhood in Britain between 1945 and 1963. More specifically, it traces the emergence of the ‘dual role’, a life balanced between work and home, as the product of competing and colliding concerns over childhood and adult illness. Arguing for a granular and contingent approach to historical knowledge and experience, it analyses a series of conversations and transformations, each of which contributed to shifts in ideals of appropriate, ethical, and healthy behaviour. In moving beyond existing histories of women, work, and home, this thesis takes a complex look at the medical politics of post-war feminism and counter-feminism. It identifies and explores important sites of contestation and collision, in which new orthodoxies and compromises were formed. Through close review of disregarded post-war literatures on motherhood, male health, housework, fatigue, loneliness, selfhood, ageing, the therapeutics and prophylaxis of productivity, overstrain, caring, morbidity, psychological conflict, and the relationship between medicine and political transformation, this thesis provides a methodical and nuanced account of the ideas and experiences which framed and bounded changing patterns of combination between work and home. It offers scholars of women’s history a more sophisticated understanding of the diversity and importance of knowledge about the mind and body – as well as the thoughts, words and actions of medical professionals – in shaping historical processes which have been widely described but insufficiently understood. For historians of medicine, it explores the political context and consequences of discourses on health, using questions over work, domesticity, marriage and motherhood to interrogate the collaborative and antagonistic convergences between feminist activism, curative therapy, and public health.

This thesis explores how writers mobilise what I call the “social-scientific imagination” to think through the welfare state during its “golden age.” Given the ongoing rollback of welfare programmes in Britain and elsewhere, the study offers timely insight into the history of the welfare state and its possible future. To that end, the chapters concentrate on postwar writers’ indirect and mediated representations of the welfare state in the form of a “social-scientific imagination” manifested in both cultural ideology and literary style. The term “social-scientific imagination” describes these writers’ engagements with the language and technique of social scientific disciplines like sociology, psychiatry, criminology, sexology and the science of city planning in their fiction, and how they imagine these disciplines as shaping the construction and maintenance of the British “welfare state” and its institutions. The texts I explore here capture the tension between care and control, between freedom and security, that is fundamental to the operation of social welfare programmes and that complicates women’s orientation to the welfare state; it is a relationship characterised by ambivalence, even though, as Jane Lewis has argued, women during the war and since perceived they would be – and have been – the welfare state’s primary beneficiaries. This, then, is the central problem examined in this thesis: that the novels represent welfare policies as integral to women’s security at the same time as they point up their coercive tendencies.

This thesis examines a neglected transatlantic link between three post-war British poets – Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull and Andrew Crozier – and a group of Depression-era modernists: the Objectivists. This study seeks to answer why it was the Objectivists specifically, rather than other modernists, that were selected by these three British poets as important exemplars. This is achieved through a combination of close readings – both of the Americans’ and Britons’ poetry and prose – and references to previously unpublished correspondence and manuscripts. The analysis proceeds via a consideration of how the Objectivists’ principles presented a challenge to dominant constructs of ‘authority’ and ‘value’ in post-war Britain, and the poetic is figured in this sense as a way-of-being as much as a discernible formal mode. The research concentrates on key Objectivist ideas (“Perception,” “Conviction,” “Objectification”), revealing the deep ethical concerns underpinning this collaboration, as well as hitherto unacknowledged political resonances in the context of its application to British poetries. Discussions of language-use build on recent critical perspectives that have made a case for the ‘re-forming’ potential of certain modernist poetries, particularly arguments about ‘paratactic’ versus ‘fragmentary’ modernisms, and as such the three British poets’ interest in the Objectivists is interpreted as a response to a need for restitution following the trauma of World War II. Ultimately, it is argued that this interaction (which this thesis figures in explicitly transatlantic terms) was a challenge to the emphasis placed on collective and normative viewpoints in much post-war British poetry, many of which were located in an organic conception of ‘nation.’ This study claims that the Objectivists’ example posited a contrasting poetic, foregrounding individual agency and capacity for thought as the only viable means for the poet to re-connect with and make meaningful statements about society and the world.

My dissertation investigates American images of Japan in the aftermath of World War Two. My premise: Japan represents America’s last clear victory, militarily and culturally. In the decades since the cessation of active hostilities, Japan has served in the American regard as an Other that reinforces and perpetuates an American mythos that is rooted in masculine narratives that depict righteous, regenerative violence. I emphasize images that legitimate American excesses during World War Two, reflecting earlier “Yellow Peril” periods of anti-Japanese immigration scares. American excess is sanitized during the SCAP Occupation period, after which American—and ancillary—images posit Japan as an exoticized site for Western self-affirmation. Japan remains thus marginalized until the late eighties, at which point Japan’s burgeoning economic power engenders American images that regress to the demonization of wartime propaganda. My hope for the dissertation is to assert American images of Japan as a negative paradigm. The example of how Japan has been manipulated for American purposes should be considered cautionary. America must be concerned about the ramifications of its continued reliance on a mythos narrative of redemptive masculine violence. The relocation of Japanese culture may prove prescient if America does not learn how to deal more appropriately with other Others that do not conform to America’s mythos-based Self-sustaining narrative.