Empire

This dissertation examines the 1916 US occupation of the Dominican Republic to analyze how US and Dominican stakeholders used public schools to disseminate their notions of Dominican citizenship. Drawing on correspondence and memos from the Department of Public Instruction in th…

Considerable attention is being given to the growing problem of the racial wealth gap in the United States of America. Understanding this chasm requires a critique of the government’s imprimatur on the institution of slavery, the legalization of Jim Crow, and the myriad of ways …

This dissertation, “The Production of Religion and the Secular in China, 1858-1898,” explores how the intellectual and sociopolitical crises attendant to foreign imperialism, the upheaval of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), and the influx of capitalist labor regimes influenced…

This dissertation uses regional archaeological settlement data to develop a model of Inca imperialism along the south-central Peruvian coast during the terminal decades of the fifteenth century CE. A close investigation of lower and middle valley of Cañete, home to the Late Inte…

This dissertation is an exploration of the profound influence of violent conflict on the development of identities across imperial, national, racial, and cultural boundaries. The study uses the 1775 rebel invasion of Quebec during the American War for Independence as a window in…

Throughout its fifty-year colonization, Japan oscillated between inhibiting and encouraging rice production in Taiwan. Past studies approached this phenomenon by analyzing the endogenous factors of this island or the supply-demand dynamics between Taiwan and Japan. This disserta…

Long Live the Arab Worker: A Transnational History of Labor and Empire in the Yemeni Diaspora, examines how Yemeni workers and activists in their struggle to live and make a living highlighted the connections between local challenges in the diaspora with global politics of empir…

This project interrogates the bounds of empire by recovering neglected discourses of resistance to foreign domination in nineteenth century East Asia. During this period, European empires encountered several difficulties in expanding into East Asia, due in no small part to how a…

“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logi…

This dissertation concerns contemporary multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. (MELUS) and empire. Namely, contemporary MELUS invites a reckoning with U.S. Empire, an amalgamation of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, which works through ahistorical and transhistoric…

During its lifetime, the League of Nations aspired to gather reliable facts and produce accurate knowledge that could transform the conduct of international politics. Inquiry was one of many techniques the League actively deployed to find more rational means in which diplomacy w…

Britain's foreign relations formed a crucial component of the political nation during the eighteenth century. Foreign affairs were a key issue of state, and perceived failure within European power politics could cause the fall of government ministries. Britain's foreign relation…

This thesis explores black West Indian activism in London between 1931-1948. It does so through a focus on those black West Indian activists who involved themselves in the work of four campaigning political organisations, namely, the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), the Interna…

Reading a range of novels that appeared between the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I argue that imperial history does not and cannot exhaust the literary object. Rather, the literary object encodes that history differently than other rhetorical forms — along diff…

The phrase “Americans don’t torture” has never been true, but uttering it is a specific political act. This study integrates institutional, legal, cultural, religious, and military histories in order to more fully analyze the expansion of American executive power since WWII, and…

My dissertation entitled “Waves of Revolution: Interrogations of Sikh Political and Spiritual Subjectivities in Punjab and the American West, 1900-1928” examines the development of anti-colonial thought and activity among Sikh laborers after their arrival to the American West fr…

During the Late Bronze Age (c. 1640/1540 – 1100 BCE), the installation of Egyptian garrisons throughout the southern Levant made Egypto-Levantine interaction the primary discursive relationship defining cultural expression in the region. To date, focus has predominantly been on …

In this thesis I argue that the management of Muslim pilgrims and the Haj traffic in Bombay was the result of the localization of an international regime of regulation aimed at controlling Hajis as mobile threats to public health and imperial security. International scientists, …

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and data culled from interviews, this manuscript explores how Islamic ethics shape the epistemic approaches of Muslim intellectuals to liberal democracy and corollary paradigms of western modernity. Specifically, it examines a c…