Nineteenth century

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the Sariq Turkmens, a semi-nomadic tribe occupying the Merv oasis in southern Turkmenistan in tile first half of the nineteenth century, and the Khanate of Khiva, a sedentary Uzbek state centered in Khorezm. The research is…

This dissertation traces negotiations of the human/animal boundary in literary treatments from 1870-1904 when the antivivisection movement provoked a cultural dialogue about the interests of animals in human concerns. Works by Ouida, Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells, and Frances Powe…

While the prohibition movement of the 1880s gained limited success, the Progressive Era variant of the movement achieved a remarkable accomplishment in American politics: the Eighteenth Amendment. How can such divergent outcomes be explained? This dissertation argues that choice…

This dissertation analyzes the failed assassination attempts against King Louis-Philippe of the July Monarchy and Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire to understand the contentious political culture of mid-nineteenth-century France. It is divided into three parts: the repre…

The establishment of museums in India during the nineteenth century was unmatched elsewhere in the British Empire. Between 1814 and 1910, more than a dozen major museum projects were undertaken in India. There were also countless smaller museums, which emerged not only in the ci…

Building on work in European history on culture and identity, as well as recent trends in diplomatic history, I explore questions of imperialism, nationalism, identity, and Orientalism and examine how the British press and other forms of public discourse, such as theater and ser…

This thesis focuses upon the representation of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Cossacks in nineteenth-century French culture. It examines how different representations motivated by either aesthetic or ideological questions informed French readers about the existence of Ukraine and its…

In the middle of the 19th century major economic, social and political changes took place in Lebanon. The economic changes centered around the capitalization of the silk industry, and the introduction of capitalist market relations into the lives of the Lebanese peasantry. The s…

The following study examines the manner in which nineteenth-century British novels use a Semitic discourse to imagine and construct Christian English people as racially pure. One result of the growing presence of assimilated Jewish people living in England in the nineteenth cent…

This study examines the often neglected genre of African-American conversion narratives: the extraordinary, often miraculous accounts of men and women who experience conversion to Christianity. It begins with an examination of the historical and literary circumstances under whic…

This thesis examines how cartographic discourse shapes interactions between the subject and space in representative nineteenth-century American and British narratives. In this period, mapping became a material expression of the project of Empire and an integral part of the proce…

The present study first analyzes the evolution of the perception of the Kurds and Kurdistan in history. Then, it focuses on the social and tribal dimensions of Kurdish nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by introducing proposographical data on the Kurd…

Supposedly discovered by the naturalist, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1822, the Walam Olum is allegedly a set of pictographic tablets with an accompanying text in the Lenape (Delaware) Indian language. Only the "copy" of the tablets in Rafinesque's manuscript is known, the "…

The origin of Saint-Louis in 1659 and its growth are inseparable from the history of the development of the French commercial empire in the framework of the newly-created world economy. This study argues that city's health problems were due to two sets of factors, external and i…

I examine how the judicial courts dealt with the 'polities' of Khojas and Pushtimargis as 'communities' within Islam and Hinduism respectively. I want to draw attention to two things in the above formulation: one, that the Khojas and Pushtimargis who one may characterise as 'pol…

This dissertation examines Herman Melville's self-consciously intertextual use of antebellum popular texts to register and critique the prevailing ideological assumptions and values which underwrote the American exclusionary culture of the period. Through a subversive dialogue w…

According to most scholarly inquiries in Ethiopian studies, forceful incorporation and submission were the main mechanisms by which empire was built and sustained. Power is often associated with an “elite ethnic” group identified as Amhara whose particular characteristics are de…

The course of women’s education in the United States changed drastically during the nineteenth century, shifting from “French” finishing schools which treated education as an accomplishment to the first women’s colleges which sought to compete with longstanding academic institut…

On 9 January 1864, 109 men joined the newly formed Scientific Society in Ghazipur, India. Its founder, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), and his engagement with various scientific disciplines is the subject of my dissertation. This work takes a notable figure in South Asia and …

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing governmental finance saw two contradictory trends. On the one hand, decentralization became increasingly obvious, more and more sources of revenue outside of the formal system fell into the control of local governments at all levels. On…