This dissertation analyzes nearly 200 plans for institutional reform in British America between 1675 and 1791. In doing so, it views the colonial period from an imperial perspective, since plans incorporated North America, the West Indies and Great Britain as an integrative whole. Reform plans addressed practical problems in colonial administration, trade, defense, and the constitutional connection between the colonies and the mother country. In the attempt to devise solutions, men throughout the empire—including colonial governors and assemblymen, Members of Parliament, merchants, customs officers, economists, and colonial agents in London—constructed plans that sought to improve the imperial connection by strengthening institutions. This study thus emphasizes the empire as planners viewed it, as an institution writ large, with integrally-connected parts secured by bonds of commerce, affection, government, common heritage, religion, and royal political culture. Political ideology and institutional structure influenced and reinforced each other in reform plans. The planners ideological assumptions originated from an evolving, transatlantic, political dialogue and generally represented a positive vision of empire. In their institutional suggestions, planners employed imperial models, such as Rome, the Dutch Confederation, and the Anglo-Scottish Union. They also used legal precedent and constitutional theory to buttress plans that they believed could provide a solid, workable foundation and incorporate disparate parts of the empire. Initially, plans focused on consolidation and centralized control； however as colonies grew and matured and the empire evolved, events demanded adaptive solutions. This created a public forum on establishing imperial equity and the constitutional foundations of the empire. It also forced advances in thinking about imperial structure that eventually led to imaginative suggestions for expanded governmental and commercial frameworks. Despite these developments, throughout the entire period of colonial reform planners sought to create order and stability, and to distill the idea of a common good into institutional form in order to create a mutually-beneficial, symbiotic imperial system. The plans thus collectively represent a consistent strain of eighteenth-century political ideology in British America that centered on the concepts of union and empire.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category:
On the Inner Frontier: Opening German City Borders in the Long Nineteenth Century
In the eighteenth century, most German cities possessed clear physical and conceptual borders. The breach of these borders was a conspicuous sign of the ruptures of modernization that also greatly altered everyday life. This dissertation examines the opening of German city borders beginning in the eighteenth century with the removal of fortifications and moats through nineteenth-century battles over opening city gates, removing walls, lifting border taxes and expanding municipal boundaries, and closes with debates at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth over urban growth and the relationship between the growing city and the German nation. Placing archival research on four different cities selected to represent the diversity of German urban experience (Berlin, Leipzig, Oldenburg and Paderborn) in the context of an emerging national discussion of urban form, I use local debates over the opening of city borders to investigate the relationship between the experience of the city as a local place and the changing notions of what it meant to be each urban, modern and German in the nineteenth century. This project draws on recent developments in German history and urban studies that have pointed to the investigation of spatial practice as a way of integrating the history of material conditions and imagined communities. The investigation of the urban border is a particularly valuable subject of study for this purpose, since its opening was of both symbolic and practical significance. It also contributes to the growing field of literature on the relationship between local experience and the nineteenth-century nation. A return to local environments has enriched our understanding of modernization processes traditionally thought to loosen the ties between understanding of modernization processes traditionally thought to loosen the ties between identity and proximate place. Urban borders were both established and dissolved through a confluence of local, regional and national concerns as local actors strategically appropriated universal and national categories to frame their interests. In this way, abstract notions of both nation and modernity constituted and were constituted by the concrete experience of urban spaces.
Beau monde State and Stage on Empire’s Edge, Russia and Soviet Ukraine, 1916-1941 Volume I
This dissertation traces how the involvement of officials in the arts, and of artists in the state, shaped both the arts and the state in interwar Soviet Ukraine through the story of Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas (1887-1937), a Ruthenian theater director from Austro-Hungarian Galicia who moved to Kyiv during World War I and participated in an artistic revolution. Kurbas belonged to a beau monde, a milieu of both artists and officials circulating in the theaters, cafes, apartments, editorial offices, and prisons of interwar Soviet Ukraine while creating culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. Kurbas’ Ukrainian-language theater dominated the cultural landscape of early Soviet Ukraine, but he and his colleagues were arrested and sent to the gulag in the early 1930s； then he, his colleagues and the Party-State officials who had arrested them were all shot in the late 1930s. The Soviet takeover of Galicia at the start of World War II revealed how the beau monde had been transformed with the full absorption of artists into officialdom. More broadly, the shared Soviet and nationalists’ agendas of separating theater artists and audiences by ethnos managed to inhibit, rather than encourage, cultural efflorescence. Soviet Ukraine, home to a kind of lingering imperial explosion in the arts in the 1920s, never amounted to more than a province — artistically and politically — by the late 1930s, despite all efforts to the contrary. Ultimately, my dissertation argues that the crucial factor for creativity may not be primarily the degree of freedom accorded by a state, but rather the meaning ascribed to art by officials, audiences, and artists. While innovation, whether scientific or artistic, is possible in conditions of un-freedom, dissolving the boundary between artists and officialdom limits the possibilities of the imagination.
Reconstructing Identities in Roman Dacia: Evidence from Religion
Beyond discussing various manifestations of the rich religious life in Roman Dacia, the purpose of the present study is to reconstruct, to the extent that this is possible, the diverse types of individual and collective identities, consistently negotiated by Dacian provincials. I start from the premise that, the very fluidity of concepts of “religion” in the Roman world allows it to infiltrate, and at the same time to provide a “stage” for, the outward expression of a variety of other facets of the identity of an individual and that of his or her community, be they cultural, social, economic or political. Understood in this context, the evidence from religion in Roman Dacia functions as the starting point in exploring the ways in which the people of this province negotiated these diverse identity constructs—professional and personal, public and private, individual and collective, civilian and military, male and female, Roman and non-Roman—within the larger context of a new frontier province, and within that of the Roman Empire, in general. As part of my examination of the religious life of the Dacian province, I have conducted a corpus study of artifacts from all across Roman Dacia. These artifacts mention and/or represent nearly 2,200 instances of over 160 individual deities including deified abstractions), falling into roughly 25 origin groups. As such, the material gathered in the corpus could be seen to provide a “representative sample” of the religious culture of the Dacian province. The task of undertaking a more rigorously empirical study on the religious life of Roman Dacia is an imperative realized by the present dissertation and its reliance on corpus analysis. Such an empirical approach allows for a more accurate and nuanced interpretation of a large, comprehensive data set, illustrating patterns, trends, characteristics of, and even motivations for, “religious behavior,” that would otherwise be more difficult to detect.
Clergy in the trenches: Catholic military chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War
My dissertation analyzes battlefield religion with a sense of subjectivity, agency, and locality that re-frames standard histories of the First World War’s disenchanting industrial violence. I argue that variables both above and below the level of the nation-state created an identifiably common Catholic experience of warfare that nonetheless had extremely localized ascriptions of meaning for soldiers. These influences included unit particularities, different geographical experiences of sacrifice, the charisma of individual personalities, and the center-periphery dynamics of empires in which Catholics were a suspect minority in Germany and a favored majority in Austria-Hungary. The dissertation argues that Catholic chaplains as pastoral caregivers were figures of limited direct agency as priests at the battlefront, thus refuting the model of Catholic priests as “milieu managers.” However, by studying chaplains’ social position as intermediary authority figures practicing adaptive traditionalism, I analyze the boundaries of public religiosity in a military context, especially incorporating information from below the division-level of particular armies. Through its comparative analysis using personalized archival sources such as letters, diaries, and reports, my dissertation goes beyond national religious histories that focus on vitriolic war sermons and episcopal politics. This dissertation revises an instrumental reading of military religion in which religiosity was successful to the degree that it sustained victory. Instead, I argue that religious identity formation was a complex process and that Catholics from the losing powers coped with the war’s violence in ways beyond the standard narratives found in reductive cultural histories of secularization and literary modernism.
Dress, Technology, and identity in Colonial Peru
How do people use dress to convey information about themselves to the world? In colonial situations, when social and political roles are rapidly changing, clothing is a critical part of creating and negotiating group and individual identities. This project examines two collections of dress-related artifacts from Colonial Peru. The first is a set of ten clothed figurines found on the patrimonial khipu of Rapaz, Peru, a small highland town. These figures probably date to the early nineteenth century. The second is an extensive collection of textiles excavated from the colonial site of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, Peru, on the north coast. Magdalena was a reduccion and was occupied from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The collection of textiles from Magdalena includes imported and indigenous fabrics, as well as a wide variety of hybrid artifacts. Both collections provide evidence for changes in the production, wearing, and manipulation of clothing during the colonial period. The textiles from Magdalena de Cao show that some people probably men) wore locally-grown and woven wool and imported linen sewn into European styles, while others primarily women) continued to use indigenous cotton plain eaves. Technological hybridity occurs primarily in cotton cloth, suggesting that weavers manipulated textiles in a subtle way to indicate their blended identities. The figurines from Rapaz show that by the nineteenth century standard male highland dress consisted of a poncho, trousers, and a hat. Imported fabrics in a variety of textures and styles were used for highly visible or meaningful parts of the ensemble such as the headgear, coca bag, and scarves. This indicates that residents of Rapaz were adept at combining locally made and machine-produced fabrics into ensembles expressive of individual identity. Taken together, the collections indicate that after the Spanish conquest in 1532, indigenous Andeans quickly became skilled at European methods of textile production and clothing construction. Andean people chose to deploy these techniques in combination with their Pre-Columbian methods to create new ensembles and communicate complex information about their changing roles in a colonial world.
Tending to Unite? The Origins of Uyghur Nationalism
This dissertation seeks to answer the question of how and why a community straddled along the Russia-China border imagined itself as the modem Uyghur nation in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Reflecting the transnational character of its subject, it incorporates a broad range of archival sources from Russia, Central Asia, China and Great Britain. It is also the first study of this subject to give proper space to local Uyghur-language sources. The dissertation begins by examining ways in which movement through this frontier zone, characterized by ambiguous categories of sovereignty and citizenship, led to hardening or weakening of existing ethnic and corporate forms of group identity. Trading networks, labor migration, and refugee flows, are all considered as parts of the formation of this diaspora of emigres from Xinjiang living in Russian Turkistan in the late nineteenth century. An analysis of the internally differentiated structure of this diaspora is seen as key to understanding the varied responses of this community to the ruptures of the early twentieth century. It also considers the extent to which transnational political ideologies overcame these boundaries, and questions the role of pre-revolutionary reform movements in the genealogy of the first Soviet Uyghur cadres. My study argues that the invention of Uyghur nationalism can best be understood as a marriage between an ideological project formulated by long-standing migrants from Xinjiang with Russian citizenship, and the organizational forms adopted by sojouming Kashgari traders to defend their economic interests during the Civil War. The unstable nature of this alliance led to a protracted and multi-sided debate on the nature of the Uyghur nation throughout the 1920s. The dissertation concludes by looking at the reflection of these events in the Uyghurs putative homeland of Xinjiang, and the role of Uyghur Communists in the transition from late-Qing forms of govemmentality to the new authoritarianism of the Sheng Shicai regime of the 1930s—the first to recognize the Uyghur as an official ethnic group in the province.
Dirty Laundry: Public Hygiene and Public Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris
In nineteenth-century France, in rural areas, women washed laundry in the nearest streams or in the sea and hung the linens where they could, on lavender bushes, rocks and grass fields, where it had a quaint, if not artistic quality. In villages, laundresses washed linens in fountains, or other water sources, which were often found at or near the center of town. In either case, laundresses operated in public spaces without problem. I argue that, in Paris, changing ideas about the functioning of city space, the management of public hygiene and decisions about the use of public space, made laundresses and laundry operations matter out of place in the city. This study will demonstrate the changes laundering and laundresses underwent during the nineteenth century in Paris, making them out of place. City administrators and public health officials changed the occupation and places where laundry could be done as they sought to render laundry and laundresses invisible within Paris. In the early nineteenth century the Prefet de la Seine forbade women from using the river banks. In the mid-nineteenth century complaints about the disgraceful aspect of women laundering on the river prompted the Prefet to try to eliminate bateaux-lavoirs. In the late nineteenth century the discovery of microbes focused attention on laundry and laundresses and their potential to transmit diseases prompting another wave of hygiene regulations and questions about closing bateaux-lavoirs and lavoirs. The Prefet and Conseil d’Hygiene’s struggle to make them invisible by moving them into approved facilities continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Studying laundresses and laundry sheds light on how the shifts in politics, changes in acceptable uses of public space and public hygiene affected working women. It illustrates the manner in which public hygiene—the Conseil de Salubrite and later the Conseil d’Hygiene , functioned and to what degree they could demand changes to the city in the name of hygiene. Through identifying subtle policy shifts, historians may learn how laundry demonstrates policies on the use of urban space, public hygiene or issues about work.
Anti-Catholicism and the Rise of Protestant Nationhood in North America, 1830–1871
This dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, anti-Catholicism was a natural inclination of the intellectual outlook of both citizens of the United States and subjects of the British Crown in colonial Upper Canada. This project is a historical work； its source base is archival, and its methodology qualitative. By 1830, Protestant evangelicals had begun to draft a Christian account of American history； in this narrative, the Reformation had begun a process whereby freely saved Christian men founded colonies in the New World and subsequently fought a Revolution for the spiritual and political freedoms of that land. This version of American history illustrated merely one logical conclusion of a similar British narrative. In that account, the United Kingdom, seen as an inherently Protestant place despite the presence of several million Catholics, had already achieved perfection in spiritual and political freedoms. These, Britons passed on to the North American colonies still under the Crown. In Upper Canada, for instance, Loyalism, not independence, became the logical product of post-Reformation events. Despite this divergence in the understanding of the history of the United States and Upper Canada, anti-Catholicism would he common in both places—not due to simply religious bigotry, but because it was widely understood that the triumph of Protestantism was crucial to the success of the nation and the colony, respectively. “Anti-Catholicism and the Development of Protestant Nationhood,” examines the creation and application of the common reality of anti-Catholicism in American and Canadian intellectual and public life, highlighting the struggle over religious identity during this major period of nation-building. Suspicion of Catholic theology, Catholic clergy, Catholic laity and the Pope in Rome pervaded American and Canadian histories of this period； it infused systems of education, and infested public speeches. The occasional convent-burning, and the more than occasional Catholic-Protestant riot were but the by-products of a larger reality in the character of nineteenth-century North America.
Essays on Social Networks
The area of social networks has attracted increasing amount of attention amongst academics, researchers and the popular culture. While a vast majority of research has been within specific disciplines such as economics, computer science and statistics, inter-disciplinary research is required to address complexity issues and dynamics. This dissertation looks to further build an understanding of information networks by bridging the gap across these disciplines. In the first essay, I seeded subjects with binary information, recorded their conversations, and analyzed the subsequent results from a large field experiment to study the effects of social learning in real-world networks. There, I found some empirical support for double-counting, but also strong support for information decay according to the proposed “streams model” of social learning. In the second essay, I extend this stream of research in information networks by investigating the existence and dynamics of “influentials” or agents who disproportionately influence others. While previous researchers have associated personal characteristics or structural positions with influence, I hypothesize that when agents are information seeking over repeated generations of ideas, and link formation is endogenized, then influence evolves. Using a large computer simulation, or agent-based modelling ABM), I show that experts who receive exogenous information may be less influential than some non-experts, or “aggregators,” who are able to collect information from multiple sources. However, noisy communication channels act to moderate the aggregators influence, and increase the relative strength of experts. In the final essay, I investigate the performance of the scale-up method for network sampling “hard-to-count” sub-populations using a large online network population of professionals. I find that although the estimates are stable with either increasing sampling size, or increased number of “known” attributes, the former has greater effect to reduce the standard error. Through a variety of techniques across three disciplines, my research provides insight into information in networks, who are the key actors, and provides tools for research.