Browsing by Subject "Imperialism"

Dreams of a "tropical Canada" that included the West Indies occupied the thoughts of many Canadians over a period spanning nearly forty years. From the expansionist fever of the late nineteenth century to the redistribution of German territories immediately following the First World War, Canadians of varying backgrounds campaigned vigorously for Canada-West Indies union. Their efforts generated a transatlantic discourse that raised larger questions about Canada's national trajectory, imperial organization, and the state of Britain's Empire in the twentieth century.

This dissertation explores the key ideas, tensions, and contradictions that shaped the union discourse over time. Race, nation and empire were central to this discourse. Canadian expansionists' efforts to gain free access to tropical territory, consolidate British possessions in the Western hemisphere, and negotiate the terms under which West Indians of color would enter the Canadian federation reflected and perpetuated logics that were simultaneously racial, national, and imperial.

Canada-West Indies union campaigns raise important questions about the processes at work in the ideological and material formation of the Canadian "nation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Employing a wide range of public and private manuscript material, diaries, travelogues and newspapers, this dissertation argues that Canadians' expansionist aspirations in the West Indies were inextricably connected to a national vision. To the campaign's advocates, acquiring colonial satellites - particularly in tropical regions - was a defining feature of nation-state formation.

Victorian England was the first empire in history to imagine itself as liberal, believing that its own power could bring law to the darkest and most unruly corners of the world. But despite covering nearly the entire period known as the Pax Britannica, Victoria's long reign did not include a single year without war.

The conceptual knots presented by England's global power forced some of the century's most canonical authors to confront, and attempt to solve, contradictions fundamental to their self-consciously liberal society. Because law was understood by many Victorian theorists as the opposite of violence, it was when metropolitan thinkers came up against the fringes of civilization's ordering power, in the empire, that the violence underwriting peace become most uncomfortably plain. "Out there," said jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, "you see real government." But if what Stephen called the liberal state's quiet but crushing force emerged most explicitly at the peripheries of law's reach, literary forms composed at the center of the imperial network --London-- reveal the problem of liberal violence as absence, as silence: as a problem. These problems became dilemmas of narrative and poetic form that I argue are legible across linked areas of Victorian literary production: from the realist masterpiece (The Mill on the Floss) and the philosophical treatise (A System of Logic) to works of political historicism (On Liberty), sensation fiction (Armadale), and apparently apolitical poetry about flowers (Poems and Ballads). Forms of Empire looks to show how the Victorian state's interrelated forms --literary and political, conceptual and historical-- expose the violence liberal theory could not see.

Forms of Empire builds on and seeks to advance work on the pairing of "liberalism and empire" in the broad area of cultural studies. To do so it works dialectically, placing Victorian liberalism's vision of perpetual peace in the context of the empire's endless war and tracking loose networks of London-based thinkers as they confronted the problem of how violence relates to law. This process exposes live debates, both explicit and implicit, about just what force secured Victorian England's so-called Age of Equipoise. What emerges is a particularly literary analysis of how linked coteries of Victorian writers, through the height and decline of a great world power, attempted to make sense of the uneasy links they saw (and did not see) between liberalism and empire, the forms of law and the disorder of violence --the vexed connection, that is, between peace and war.

The project's focus on literary structure and political theory is also historical, tracing Victorian global rule from its phase of hegemonic globalization at mid-century (the so-called Age of Equipoise) into its more openly war-torn, post-1870 decline, a structure that corresponds to the project's two halves. While reframing existing periodizations of empire in Victorian Studies, this genealogical procedure also particularizes what is often studied as a homogenous "imperial discourse." Forms of Empire is necessarily interdisciplinary, since it charts the conceptual cross-pollination among semi-autonomous fields of Victorian knowledge: political theory, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and literature, among others. But it is also focused on method, showing that theoretical debates among Victorians themselves --about the dilemmas of their hegemony-- can illuminate controversies about liberalism, violence, and method in a newer moment of empire, ours.

How can we explain the significant variation in the organization and performance of public bureaucracies across countries, across regions, and between the levels of the administrative hierarchy? Considering the high level of path dependence in bureaucratic organization, this dissertation explains divergence in the institutions of public administrations through a set of historical analyses focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries–a time period crucial for the establishment of modern bureaucracies. The second chapter deals with the influence of socio-economic groups in countries that enjoyed domestic political autonomy. Three social classes had fundamentally different interests in the organization of the state apparatus, and their relative political influence was a key factor determining its organizational characteristics. The third and fourth chapters deal with the impact of foreign rule on the bureaucratic organization of countries that did not enjoy domestic political autonomy. Specifically, the third chapter focuses on within-country regional variation in bureaucratic organization and provides an in-depth study of Poland, which was historically ruled by three empires with vastly different bureaucracies. I develop an account of path dependence and suggest that persisting differences in culture and perceptions of public administration are key drivers of regional divergence. Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on variation in bureaucratic organization between levels of the administrative hierarchy and provides an in-depth study of Romania, which was historically partially ruled by the Habsburg Empire and partially autonomous. I develop a theoretical framework of imperial pervasiveness that explains differential effectiveness of external rule along the administrative hierarchy.

In our capitalist world-economy, fear has become the primary source material for wealth production. Fear underwrites regimes of limited access and various systems of occupation. Occupation as a strategic operational paradigm extends into civilian life of the dark and unresolved colonial, imperial and totalitarian legacies. The domestic and international exclusion of certain populations is grounded in age-old, mostly violent self/other distinctions that have been re-activated from their latent state and again made into viral political discourse material. An array of complex infrastructures, which include legal architectures and the built environment, have acquired operational importance. Such infrastructures are characterized by a built-in violence designed to control, contain, and redirect the massive population flows created by the globally destabilizing and denaturalizing affects of contemporary capital. Access to opportunity, vital resources, and security have become the crucial equity that populations compete for in the early 21st century. The very nature of capital has been transformed into actual economies of fear. Whereas parts of the world’s population will have the chance to live a dignified life, other parts will be indefinitely deprived of such fortunes and left to perish. The end result of such economies is the death-world.

The analysis proposed by this dissertation blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art, cultural anthropology, sociology, military history, economics, political science, psychology, architecture, urban studies, philosophy. This transdisciplinary methodology originates from the understanding that an effective critique of global capital as the dominant economic world-system can no longer be explained via a single knowledge field or academic specialty. Moving a step beyond interdisciplinary studies to bona fide informational crossovers between textual and visual archives allows for a more encompassing and thick investigation. The multi-sited approach of this study examines the visual traces found in the built environment and the controversial social realities expressed in current global geopolitics. The resulting synthesis between theory and practice offers new pathways for citizen participation and for potential solutions to collective grievances and global risks. This transdisciplinary approach gives art a leading role in establishing a new sense of place in which people are empowered to articulate their ideas—a new place built from a rehabilitated understanding of trust in self, trust in collective institutions, and trust in reality and truth. Above all, this new place holds the promise of a future worth living and fighting for.