British Empire

In describing the experience of British Empire soldiers in the First World War, most scholars have focused only on the Western Front, ignoring the most important secondary theaters of Britain's war: the Sinai and Palestine. In these campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, there ca…

At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began seriously to venture to the region they called “Arabia,” drawn by both geopolitical concerns and the hope of finding in a proverbially mystical land the spiritual calm that eluded them at home. These compet…

This study examines the relationship of Winston Churchill to the British Empire in the broadest terms. It demonstrates by reference to Churchill's writings and actions that empire was not a sidelight of Churchill's life and thought, but rather formed a keystone for the understan…

This study covers two important aspects of the colonial settlement of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. First of all, it examines the origins of the mandate system, designed at the end of the First World War to replace German and Turkish rule in their own colonies with Allied con…

In this dissertation, I examine the transition period between Ottoman and British rule as experienced by the residents of Jerusalem, between the years 1912--1920. By treating Jerusalem as a mixed urban locale, consisting of Muslims, Jews and Christians of various ethnic and nati…

This dissertation argues that melodrama was a crucial mode for the representation of British imperialism within generically hybrid works of late Victorian fiction. Previous critics have noted the popularity of the melodramatic mode and mentioned its importance for imperial propa…

This dissertation addresses the lack of postcolonial criticism concerning the fiction of Anthony Trollope, himself an avid traveler in and writer about the British Empire. Chapter One provides background about the critical reception of Trollope's writings about the Empire and tr…

In his ground-breaking Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson declared that the census, map and museum shaped the manner in which the colony imagined its dominion, the nature of the colonized, the geography of the colony and the ancestral right of the colonizer to rule. 1 The a…

The British colonial administration in India transformed Muslim law in the nineteenth century through the three concurrent processes of translation, legislation, and adjudication. Although Indian Muslims were gradually displaced in their traditional position as interpreters of t…

Sayyid Qutb is often rendered as a backward looking, anti-modern figure. This portrayal suggests a serious misunderstanding of his theory of history and, by extension, the relationship between the foundational sources of Islam and the life of the Muslim community. In broader ter…

This dissertation examines South Asia during the colonial period from the vantage-point of a polity that was never formally colonized--the Muslim-ruled Princely State of Hyderabad. The chapters highlight the complexity of the relationship between Muslim sovereignty and the colon…

This dissertation examines the relationships between citizenship and sexuality and gender in imperial formations, through an archaeology/genealogy of the subject position of those classified as the hijra. Combining Lacan's symbolic order with Foucault's historic a priori in orde…

Empire is not a supreme entity controlling high-level policies in metropolises: it is a reality translated into the daily lives of the subalterns at the periphery of the periphery of empire, as this microhistory of Qina province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arg…

This study is an attempt to ascertain the degree to which occupied and occupier can truly understand each other. The focus is Egypt between 1882 and 1919. This work attempts to ascertain how a whole host of Egyptians of various outlooks perceived the British Empire that had rece…