This dissertation investigates how the agents and organs of the Seleucid Empire explored, bounded, and endowed with meaning its imperial territory. I argue that king and court responded to the enormous opportunities and challenges of such a landscape with a range of ideological …
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This dissertation analyzes the rise of opium Prohibition in colonial Southeast Asia. Over the course of six decades spanning the turn of the 20th century, European powers in the region abandoned opium as a lucrative source of revenue, denouncing as dangerous what had once been d…
This is an ethnopolitical study of the majority non-Han, Muslim province of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest during the transition from empire to nationalizing state. After achieving provincial status in 1884, the final decades of Qing rule witnessed fatally weakened attempts b…
This dissertation addresses early British intelligence activities and Anglo-Ottoman relations by viewing the activities of army officers and private individuals as a collective pursuit to safeguard British imperial interests. It offers a new understanding of the relationships be…
Previous studies on politics and history writing in early modern Europe have focused on how early modern monarchs commissioned official royal histories that served to glorify the crown and its achievements. These works discuss the careers of royal historians and their importance…
This dissertation poses a simple question: how did Jews in the Second Temple period (ca. 536 BCE-70 CE) perceive foreign empires? This is a natural avenue for exploration given that this period is distinctive for its rapid succession of empires (Persian, Greek, and Roman) experi…
This essay looks at Dean Mahomet through his autobiographical text, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, a portrait of an elite Indian male at the beginning of the British conquest of India from within the British military. I analyze the poli…
This dissertation focuses on the intellectual issues that surround the most dramatic form of human encounter: that of imperial conquest. By examining the modes of thought available to conquering societies I examine the way in which specific narrative traditions influence the pro…
This dissertation explores the construction of the post-communist political imaginary as an attempt to translate the vagaries of liberal democracy in to the certainties of post-Soviet epistemology. The ambiguities of the political are refracted through the "independent Republic …
The Quality of the Blood: Race, Gender, and Empire in Revolutionary French Nationalism (1789-1815) examines the emergence of modern French nationalism in the Revolutionary period. This thesis argues that elites who had intimate contacts with empire and immigration policy played …
This dissertation explores the link between a uniquely American gothic literary tradition and the establishment of American subjectivity and nationhood. Filled with virginal maidens fleeing lascivious patriarchs through haunted castles, dungeons, and subterranean passages, the B…
The dissertation analyzes the intersections between the discourse of adolescence and the discourse of Empire. The adolescent is a major, if not the central, figure in the rhetoric of Empire, specifically as a site of adult anxiety and imperial contestation. Chapter 1 revisits Ho…
Since the end of the Cold War, violent ethnic conflict has coincided with an increase in the number of failed or collapsed states and the emergence of more muscular and intrusive forms of external intervention by the United Nations. This dissertation explores the relationship be…
This dissertation is the first study to focus on Russia's attempts to build its empire in the Caucasus in the reign of Catherine II (1762-96). Prior to the reign, Russia's presence in the region was concentrated at Fort Kizliar and in a handful of Cossack settlements on the left…
This dissertation, a study of trade life in western Siberia in the early modern period, focuses on the careers and practices of merchants groups to whom that Russian state awarded various privileges in early modern and early imperial Russia. These groups were Orthodox Russian me…
One of the most common ways powerful states in international politics have organized their relations with weak polities is through imperial rule, yet most international relations theorists argue that the structure of international system should discourage hierarchic relations of…
The Native people who served as US Indian Scouts from 1866 to 1947, a formally designated Indigenous US Army unit, provide insights into a complex relationship with the American Empire and its settlement of the West. Both the scouts and the army changed over time through accultu…
This dissertation explores the relationship between public health and race-making in Hawaiian Islands, from the last years of the independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i through the first two decades of American rule. During this period, it was a commonplace among white colonists that Na…
The subject of this dissertation is the 1897 Pukhtun revolt in the North-West Frontier of British India. The Frontier occupies a unique place in the history of British colonialism. The British were unable to conquer this region or subdue its inhabitants—the Pukhtun tribes—despit…