Browsing by Subject "History"

In this thesis, I probe the incremental religious and social changes in the local society that led up to the great transformations of the mid-19th century. I use the word “sleeplessness” both literally and figuratively. My protagonist, Zheng Guangzu (1776-1866), a member of a local elite from Lower Yangzi Delta, suffered from insomnia and was perturbed by the corruption of Confucianism by popular Buddhism and Taoism. These were, however, merely an interlude to the great challenge of his life, the spread of the Taiping religion, a heterodox Christian ideology that triggered the mid-19th century civil war. Through a case study, my research highlights the Confucian literati’s daily interaction with local religious practices that are alien to their cultural ethos. In doing so, I explore the diverse appeal of Confucianism to different social groups and uncover the tension between elite and popular culture. Significantly, this tension sheds light on Confucian’s responses to the Taiping. More broadly, based on my protagonist’s description of local religion, my thesis evaluates the extent of the state’s success in reaching into local society through the lens of its religious policy. Although it was the greatest patron of Confucianism, the state, I argue, exhibited an ambivalent attitude toward local cults rather than outright rejection.

The theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on the question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.

Between 1890 and 1965, the ideology of government responsibility for maternal and child health represented a continuous and central goal that fueled programs and institutional networks of progressive and liberal social policy advocates. Beginning in the settlement houses of the 1890s, a cadre of female bureaucrats, social reformers, and their political allies developed an array of federally based programs. Conservative stakeholders--among them anti-feminists, representatives of the medical industry, anti-communists, and white supremacists--strenuously opposed this vision of health justice, arguing that health was a personal responsibility in which government should play no part. Despite the achievements of government-based progressive reformers in instituting their vision in urban settlement houses, under the Sheppard-Towner Act of the mid-1920s and during the years of the New Deal and World War II, the Cold War's approach to domestic social policy after 1947 clamped down on their vision. After this conservative turn against social democratic solutions to welfare needs, these progressive advocates shifted their attention to the international health rights movement and to community-based maternal and child health activities.

My dissertation introduces the concept of health justice as an interpretive lens to trace the history of health policy progressives and their institutional networks. On the one hand, health justice reflects the communitarian premise that the health of all members of society is essential for the common good. On the other hand, health justice implies that health and health care are individual rights that government ought to protect. While communitarian arguments were often on the tip of the tongues of social reformers, a passionate belief in citizenship-based rights and redistributive and humanitarian ideas of social justice undergirded their policy ideas and became a more explicitly stated position during the New Deal and World War II. This justice-based approach to maternal and child health policy was consistently undermined by the prevailing counter-ideologies of individual responsibility for health, local control of public services, racial segregation in health services, and the commodification of health care.

My work relies on primary evidence collected from the personal papers of key protagonists, the administrative records of the Children's Bureau housed at the National Archives, oral histories, and the presidential papers of Harry S. Truman. Published primary materials have been culled from memoirs, professional public health and medical journals, as well as the popular press. I also draw from a body of historical and political science scholarship of the past twenty-five years to contextualize the narrative.

This dissertation is a legal history of debt and economic life in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It draws on materials from Bahrain, Muscat, Bombay, Zanzibar and London to examine how members of an ocean-wide commercial society constructed relationships of economic mutualism with one another by mobilizing debt and credit. It further explores how they expressed their debt relationships through legal idioms, and how they mobilized commercial and legal instruments to adapt to the emergence of modern capitalism in the region.

At the same time, it looks at the concomitant development of an Indian Ocean-wide empire of law centered at Bombay, and explores how this Indian Ocean contractual culture encountered an Anglo-Indian legal regime that conceived of legal documents in a radically different way. By mobilizing written deeds in imaginative ways, and by strategically accessing British courts, Indian Ocean merchants were able to shape the contours of this growing legal regime.

Most broadly, the dissertation argues that law and courts became increasingly central to economic life in the Indian Ocean, and that economic actors in the region employed a wide range of different legal strategies in adapting to a changing world of commerce. In the Indian Ocean, as elsewhere, the histories of commerce and law were inextricably intertwined.

This dissertation examines the adaptability of civic cults during the Hellenistic period. Faced with shifting populations, increasing social tensions, economic changes, and political pressures, Hellenistic communities devised a number of strategies aimed at negotiating the tension between maintenance of traditional religious practices and adaptive, context-specific change. Through the lens of inscribed Greek sacred laws we see communities balancing the twin requirements of innovation and tradition. The epigraphic record shows significant changes to the choreography of religious experience in response to demographic change; experimentation in funding mechanisms, in what appear to be responses to economic and cultural changes; ambitious attempts to redefine the configuration of sacred space both inside the city and out; savvy rhetorical and ritual framing of innovation in the face of cults that had had failed or else were on the brink of doing so.

Through a series of case studies I elucidate the legislative strategies with which communities dealt with these challenges. In chapter 1, I investigate legal strategies aimed at maintaining traditional oracular procedures as more visitors were coming to iatromantic shrines. I focus on the shrine of Apollo Coropeius in Thessaly where the civic authority at Demetrias passed a law reevaluating the administrative and ritual procedures for consultation. In chapter 2, I analyze the changing obligations of sacred personnel to perform rites in the city at large, i.e. before festivals, in the face of shifting socioeconomic norms. Communities frequently experimented with alternative mechanisms to fund religious activities. A sacred law from Halicarnassus forms the backbone of this analysis. I argue that cultural pressures may have helped shape these mechanisms. Chapter 3 concerns legislative strategies for the reconfiguration of sacred space, particularly the moving or refactoring of sanctuaries. Here I analyze a third-century decree from Tanagra that regulates the transfer of a sanctuary of Demeter and Kore. Other laws, particularly from Anaphe and Peparethus, provide crucial details for the rearrangement of important cult structures. In these cases, we see the concerted efforts to provide for private and public and sacred and secular interests in order to ensure the perpetuation of traditional religious practices. The fourth chapter investigates the reinvention of cult caused by political and ideological interests. Communities employed rhetorical strategies to justify or mask the reinvention or renewal of traditional rites that had lapsed or were on the brink of doing so. I focus on two case studies that illustrate the complexities of legislating ritual reinvention. A second-century Athenian law details the rites for the revived Thargelia whereas a decree from Magnesia-on-the-Maeander details the expansion of the cult of Artemis Leukophryene with a new festival commemorating the goddess' new temple. In both cases, we can see rhetorical strategies of augmentation and renewal reflected in the writings of Anaximines of Lampsacus. The concluding chapter provides a view of the other side of the coin: what happens when communities fail to adapt to the challenges that threatened their cults? Polybius, Pausanias, and Plutarch shed much light on our most pressing questions. For instance, what did failed cults look like? How did Greeks envisage dilapidated sanctuaries and defunct cults? Overall, the case studies based on sacred laws present a Greek view of religious change that finds strength in change, continuity in adaptation, commonality in variation, stability in the shifting sands of historical change. The portrait of Greek religion that emerges from this study is one in which tradition and innovation form two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing forces

This dissertation examines the modern transformation of orthodoxy within the Otani denomination of Japanese Shin Buddhism. This history was set in motion by scholar-priest Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903), whose calls for free inquiry, introspection, and attainment of awakening in the present life represented major challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. Judging him a principal player in forging a distinctively modern Buddhism, many scholars have examined Kiyozawa's life and writings. However, it is critical to recognize that during his life Kiyozawa remained a marginal figure within his sect, his various reform initiatives ending in failure. It was not until 1956 that Otani leaders officially endorsed and disseminated Kiyozawa's views. Taking my cue from Talal Asad's critique of Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, I move beyond interpretation of the "meaning" of Kiyozawa's life and writings to the historical study of how they came to be invested with authority, impacting the lives of millions of sect members and influencing the perception of him among scholars.

I approach this history on three levels. On an individual level, I examine the lives and writings of Kiyozawa, his followers, and his critics, as revealed in their books, journal articles, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters. On an institutional level, I examine the transformation of the Otani organization's educational, administrative, and judicial systems, as documented in institutional histories, denominational by-laws, official statements, and administrators' writings. Finally, on a national level, I examine the effect of major political events and social trends on Kiyozawa's followers and the Otani organization.

This study reveals that one critical factor in the transformation of Otani orthodoxy was the strategic use of a discourse of "empiricism" by Kiyozawa's followers. As the Otani organization's modern university gradually came to supercede its traditional seminary, Kiyozawa's followers positioned themselves as authoritative modern scholars. At the same time, this study shows that the transformation of Otani orthodoxy was contingent upon broader historical developments far outside the control of Kiyozawa's followers or Otani leaders. Specifically, the state's persecution of Communists, war mobilization policies, and the post-war context of democracy building all shaped the views and fortunes of Kiyozawa's followers. I argue that by better acknowledging and examining the contingent nature of religious history, scholars can approach a more realistic view of how religions are formed and reformed. Specifically in regard to modern Buddhist studies, I also argue that more attention should be paid to how sectarian institutions continue to grow and evolve, shaping all aspects of Buddhist thought and practice.

* Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*

Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama

belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At

midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more

conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they

had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic

Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence

remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the

South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of

industry in the county operates unorganized.

A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was

once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to

study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the

famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even

more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the

most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give

even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with

police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism

represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had

also been something like a union town.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to

terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down

and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds

about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not

the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It

was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists

who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when

Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against

people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class

city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.

In this dissertation I analyze aspects of American civil-military relations and the political economy of national security policymaking. Specifically, I examine efforts to balance the military power necessary to secure American interests while considering the economic implications towards the national debt, veteran behavior in congressional resource allocation, and how civil-military relations relate to military effectiveness. I employ qualitative, quantitative, as well as mixed-methods research in examining policymaker rhetoric, voting records and bill sponsorship data, as well as a list of military use-of-force decisions. I find that policymakers deliberately consider the tradeoffs between debt and defense spending, that veterans demonstrate a small yet distinct behavior on military issues considered by Congress, and that operational outcomes were not more likely to be better when military authorities applied their preferences than when civilians asserted theirs. This dissertation helps fill important underexplored gaps in American civil-military relations and political economy of security studies.

The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.

This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.

Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.

This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.

This dissertation examines a corpus of 486 satirical images of artistic life in Paris. The Parisian art-world was regularly the subject of a form of satirical criticism conducted in visual media. More significantly, this satirical criticism was produced in the medium of print, and in its reproducibility, could broadcast its satire to large audiences. By doing so in the amusing and subversive tone of satire, it constituted a visual counterpart to art criticism. I examine what these images reveal to us collectively over time as they overlap with representations of the art world disseminated in other equally understudied popular media, namely popular theater (vaudeville and opéra comique) and panoramic fiction (physiologies, short fiction, and so on).

This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.

Drones may appear a recent technology whose future may have just barely started. But drone technology’s development and the rationales for their adoption extend back over a century ago to weapons called “pilotless airplanes” during World War I. Historians have examined the deployment of drones in military campaigns, the history of drones as technical systems, science fiction as a cultural inspiration for engineers, and the institutional machinations required to fund new war machines. Philosophers and jurists debate the ethics and legality of conducting violence through remote control. Peace activists, whistleblowing drone operators, and interfaith coalitions have formed a burgeoning anti-machine war movement. Yet, amongst the dynamic discussions surrounding drones, the fantasies and anxieties that animated the technology’s adoption during the twentieth century remain largely unexamined.

My dissertation offers a cultural history of U.S. drone warfare during the twentieth century. Cultural discourses and practices proved key to the policy formations, military planning, and political economy of the American way of war’s increasing turn to mechanization. I present the military use of drones as a key, yet understudied, part of the larger history of U.S. machine warfare that relied on superior productive power to overwhelm enemies with technological means. Airpower became central to U.S. war-making during the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Drones, in turn, developed into an ever-more important “asset” in the U.S. aerial arsenal before reaching a central place in present day pursuits of war.

Drone technology’s ascent owes less to its utility in war than to the cultural projections and fears that surrounded pilots in air war. Technical bugs often rendered drones less than mechanically stellar. Despite functional flaws, replacing pilot with machine in war became attractive precisely because human agents consistently seemed limited instruments of war in popular and policy discourse. Soldiers always died in war. Many became security risks when captured and tortured for information. Some turned against the war they were supposed to fight. Grieving families politicized their personal loss. War made U.S. audiences anxious their men were not “man enough” to achieve victory. Remote-controllable drones seemed to solve these problems, by sparing American lives, by rendering war less visible, and by removing men deemed incapable of war from the site of combat, thereby ‘depoliticizing’ war and saving armed conflict as an instrument of policy.

The history of drone adoption is not a teleological story of linear technological progression, but rather a narrative of fits and starts, with differing actors operating in differing contexts imagining war machines to accomplish differing goals. Current claims to a “humane” form of war through “surgical strike” capabilities and effective surveillance do not sum up the history of the drone. The drone has long been used as a means of mass destruction including chemical war, nuclear war, and multitudes of missile strikes.

My dissertation examines the presence of enslaved prisoners in local jails and workhouses of antebellum South Carolina from 1730-1850 with a particular focus on the 1790s as a transformative period. Those sites expose the close relationship between governmental authority and the discipline of black people, a relationship that has gone largely unexplored and one that ultimately recasts larger questions about race and criminality, property and ownership, and state formation in the slave South. Much scholarship locates government control over criminal African Americans within penal institutions in a post-emancipation moment and then traces the implications through convict leasing, chain gangs, and penitentiaries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence of enslaved people within jails and workhouses during the antebellum period, however, challenges the assumptions that frame the chronology.

Primary source materials such as legislative documents, court records, newspapers, personal diaries, travel journals, and slave narratives reveal that jails and workhouses not only secured law and order within slave societies but also functioned as tangible symbols of government power to which all people, including the enslaved, were subject. The presence of enslaved people within penal institutions, however, increased over time, a trend that coincided with burgeoning racialized conceptions of criminality and contributed to a larger transformation in racial ideology. And while slave owners and government officials united to uphold white supremacy, they disagreed over government’s role in regulating enslaved people. Lengthy confinements, in particular, became a frequent point of conflict between white slave owners and local government officials. Finally, the dissertation explores how the changes evident in antebellum penal institutions reflected the ways in which the nation wrestled with the growth of government. Indeed, those changes reflected the challenges inherent in the statemaking process as the meanings of liberty and citizenship shifted and changed. As important, they revealed the construction of a new social order in the American South which firmly, and exclusively, placed enslaved people on the lowest rung of the social, political, and legal hierarchy. By considering the intersections of statemaking, property, and criminality, the dissertation roots “the condemnation of blackness” in the practice of enslavement and in the Early National and Antebellum state making projects.

This thesis explores the integration of User Experience (UX) Design in digital humanities, with a focus on Augmented Reality (AR) at Bennett Place. It draws on Brennan's public digital humanity concept, emphasizing the need for public-oriented approaches in digital humanities. The research employs UX design methods, adhering to a workflow comprising research, ideation, design, and user testing.In the research stage, Bennett Place's historical context and visitor personas are analyzed to inform design objectives and user expectations. The ideation stage addresses content design and AR technology selection, aiming for effective information delivery and inclusive user experiences. The design stage details the digital project's implementation. The final delivery of this thesis is an iOS AR app the final stage involves user testing to evaluate the application of AR in enhancing on-site visiting experience at Bennett Place. Although the testing results are not definitive, they provide valuable insights for future digital humanities projects, particularly in public engagement. This thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of AR in enhancing on-site visiting experience at Bennett Place and highlights the potential for incorporating UX methodologies in digital humanities, advocating for more user-focused, engaging, and informative experiences.

In the 1970s, consumer advocates worried that Alabama's weak regulatory structure around consumer fraud made it a kind of "con man's heaven." But by the 1990s, the battle cry of regulatory reformers had reversed, as businesspeople mourned the state's decline into "tort hell." Debates about the correct balance of power among consumers, businesses, and the state continue to shape political contests in both Alabama and on the broader national stage today, whether contextualized under the aegis of "consumer protection," "access to justice," "tort reform," protecting "free enterprise," or cultivating a positive "business climate."

This dissertation argues for analyzing such matters in terms of a regulatory ecology, following the interconnections across institutions, including formal rules of civil procedure as well as informal codes of conduct, that shape the law of lawsuits within the American civil justice system. Drawing on case files, interviews, and archival sources, it traces the development of Alabama's first consumer-protection law and regulatory agency in the early 1980s, the construction and deconstruction of a comprehensive state tort-reform package in 1987, the rise of tort lawsuits and its invigoration of Alabama's trial-lawyer bar, and the transformation of the Alabama Supreme Court in the 1990s. It then analyzes how political narratives, fashioned in part by powerful business lobbies, molded the terms of the tort-reform debate at the state and national levels in ways that effectively swayed public opinion and created favorable conditions for successful tort reform legislation.

The dissertation does not propose a regulatory agenda; rather, it concludes that interdisciplinary perspectives on regulatory governance, drawing insights from legal, political, and business history as well as other social science disciplines, better frame problems than more simplistic assessments of tort reform. Tort lawsuits blossomed in Alabama where other avenues for resolving regulatory issues or expressing dissent closed. Tort reform is likely to unleash new pressures for addressing perceived instances of unfairness in the marketplace.

While China’s recent Belt and the Road Initiative and its expansion across Eurasia is garnering public and scholarly attention, this dissertation recasts the space of Eurasia as one connected through historic Islamic networks between Mecca and China. Specifically, I show that eruptions of unpredictable wars and political turnovers across Asia in the twentieth century sparked a sector of Chinese Muslim militarists and scholar-politicians to constantly reformulate extensive networks of kinship, scholarship, patronage, pilgrimage and diplomacy between China, the Indian Ocean world and the Arabian Peninsula. In these endeavors, Mecca represented a hub and mediator of mobility, a diplomatic theater filled with propaganda and contestations, and a fictive homeland that turned into a real home which absorbed streams of exiles and refugees.

Each chapter adds a layer of Chinese Muslims’ engagements with Mecca as a locale and a metaphor – from old little Meccas in Linxia (southern Gansu) and Canton (Guangzhou), to the new logistical hub of Shanghai that hosted Mecca-bound pilgrims from across China in the first half of the twentieth century, and to Mecca where competing pilgrimage diplomatic delegations and refugee settlers asserted their belonging. By doing so, the dissertation unleashes Chinese Muslims’ sphere of activities, imaginaries, space-making, and historiographical reconfigurations from the confines of the territorial state of China, revealing the creation of sacred places and logistical hubs across regions, and channels of circulations that went through them. I draw from a wealth of pilgrimage and diplomatic travelogues, interviews with living communities in Saudi Arabia, mainland China and Taiwan over multiple generations, archival documents, memoirs and biographies.

While the protagonists in this dissertation represent only a portion of the diverse groups of Chinese Muslim populations, they present an indicative view of Chinese Muslims as a collective — as a people for whom real and imagined connections with external places have been central to their self-understandings and social mobility in multiple locales. At certain moments when inter-state relations were about to take off, they undertook roles as diplomatic mediators in official and unofficial capacities. Their spatial configurations, in turn, show the role of Mecca as a physical site and a symbolic center in assembling inter-Asian circulations -- giving rise to little Meccas and infrastructural hubs elsewhere, attracting competing diplomatic missions, and offering a haven for pilgrim sojourners and diaspora communities who have constituted the diverse social make-up of Saudi Arabia.