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From the middle of the eighteenth century the landscape movement had dominated garden making in England, but to many in the early nineteenth century this meant the destruction and loss of the old formal gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using contemporary commentary throughout the nineteenth century from a range of literature, books and periodicals, from a variety of people, some known and some not, the thesis traced, analysed and explained why there was a revival of the formal garden in the later years of the nineteenth century. Two architects contributed to the revival of the formal garden. George Devey in the 1850s was the first to restore a formal garden from a plan of 1702 at Penshurst Place in Kent. Devey is little known, he did not write about his work and left no personal papers, but he did leave a small number of garden drawings and sketches which to date are unknown. Using these drawings and sketches, site visits and other archive material the thesis traced, analysed and explained Devey's contribution to the revival of the formal garden. The other architect was Sir Reginald Blomfield who is known, but more for his temperament than his garden making. In the 1940s Blomfield sent all his papers, including his garden plans, for the war effort. Using what little survived with archive material, Blomfield's own writings, perspective drawings, garden plans that remain at some properties, site visits and other research material, the thesis again traced, analysed and explained Blomfield's role as he followed Devey in the revival of the formal garden. These three elements, the commentary from contemporary literature, the work of Devey and of Blomfield, were analysed and argued to lead to an understanding and explanation of why the formal garden was revived in the later part of the nineteenth century and what was the contribution of Devey and Blomfield to this revival.

The Italian Renaissance workshop was simultaneously a business, a collaborative practice and a space for experimentation. Disegno, a term that can be interpreted to refer to a physical object –generally a work on paper –or the act of depicting an invention in visual form, served as the thread that connected theseinterests. This thesis investigates the role of disegno inthe workshop operated by Bartolomeo Montagna in Vicenza, Italy, between circa 1480 and 1520. During this period, the Montagna workshop was not only the preeminent workshop in Vicenza, but also ranked among the most prosperous on the Venetian terraferma. Focussing on the output of the Montagna workshop consequently in a manner that has hitherto gone unexplored therefore contributes new insights into the management of Venetic workshops. The graphic arts –here taken to encompass drawings and prints –serves as the prism through which a number of key themes are refracted. The question of an artist’s formation is addressed through analysis of Bartolomeo Montagna’s drawings in their deployment of media and handling of form in relation to the graphic traditions of other Venetic cities. The specialisation of Bartolomeo Montagna’s secondson, Benedetto, as an engraver, invites an extended appraisal of both how artists were instructed in printmaking techniques, and factors that facilitated the workshop’s diversification into print production. Mobility is revealed as a drivingforce: the migration of publishers from Northern Europe was instrumental to the establishment of the print trade in Vicenza, the import of Northern prints fostered an awareness of the medium and its potential, while the reputation of the Montagna workshop attracted ‘peintre-graveurs’ from across the Veneto. Benedetto Montagna is newly afforded a pivotal role in the development of engraving in the Veneto by virtue of the exchanges of ideas and knowhow between engravers that must have taken place around him. When taken in conjunction with the workshop’s concurrent fulfilment of commissions for altarpieces, devotional paintings and fresco schemes, the fundamental concept that emerges in the workshopis that of co-working. Drawings produced by Bartolomeo Montagna and prints acquired from other artists are posited as the basis of the workshop’s visual archive; a repository of designs that was recycled in diverse projects and deployed by various individuals. Access to vital materials such as paper, copper and a printing press is similarly shown to have brought artisans into contact. This pragmatic approach to resources is ultimately shown to have streamlined operations within the Montagna workshop. What, therefore, does this thesis contribute to scholarship on theItalian Renaissance? The collaboration between Bartolomeo and Benedetto Montagna, as father and son, that was fundamental to their printmaking ventures offers a new dimension to our understanding of the interplay between artistic autonomy and the assertion of a workshop identity. The extended analysis of the family’s production and use of prints and drawings demonstratescompellinglythe importance of disegnoto the operation of a Venetic workshop. Finally, and crucially, the potential of the Montagna workshop to attract itinerant artists to Vicenza brings into question the hegemony of Venice in the artistic developments of the Veneto.

In the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period, monopolies emerged as a crucial tool of crown financial policy. In response, subjects petitioned crown, council, and parliament to lament the changes these grants wrought on their trades and livelihoods. This thesis will offer an analysis of anti-monopoly petitioning activity between 1590-1625. It will demonstrate the vibrancy and sophistication of petitioning in this often-overlooked period, whilst illuminating the important intersection between politics and economics at the turn of the seventeenth century. This economic issue politicised subjects, who turned to petitioning to lament the effects of this intrusive form of prerogative finance. They embraced the opportunities to approach parliament, council, monarch, and even new commissions charged with managing economic petitions. Subjects proved willing to draw on wider discourses in political culture and economic thought as bargaining strategies within petitions designed to further their own economic interests. This thesis will adopt a case study approach, focusing on the monopolisation of leather, starch, glass, and cloth. It will draw on a range of sources, predominantly manuscript, from such archives as the State Papers and individual livery companies. The role of London's livery and overseas trading companies both as petitioners, and as a source of concerted opposition themselves, will be explored throughout. In addition, the capacity for subjects to organise petitioning activity independently of the auspices of corporate organisation will be shown. By analysing often overlooked petitioning campaigns, the complex alliances between courtiers and artisans made possible in this era of monopolisation will also be illuminated. Through a focus on these anti-monopoly petitioning campaigns, this thesis will add to understandings of manuscript petitioning culture in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, whilst demonstrating the importance of economic issues to the politics of the early modern public sphere.

This thesis for the degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) in history focuses on eleven single-author papers in peer-reviewed journals, three single-author book chapters, and three single-author books: 'Ada English: Patriot and Psychiatrist' (2014), 'He Lost Himself Completely: Shell Shock and its treatment at Dublin's Richmond War Hospital (1916-19)' (2014), and 'Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland' (2016). In the accompanying critical appraisal, I explore these publications in the context of the criteria for higher degrees. In this work, I use my training in both history and psychiatry to balance 'demedicalisation' with 'medicalisation' in order to maintain critical historical awareness and avoid the omission of clinical medicine from history. This paradigm supports a dynamic balance between historical awareness and the medical gaze. 'Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland' makes original contributions to several specific areas (e.g., particular institutions, various diagnoses, pieces of legislation, health policies, leading figures) and concludes that, despite Ireland's high rate of psychiatric hospitalisation, Ireland never had an epidemic of mental illness - we had an epidemic of 'mental hospitals'. A combination of poverty, poor healthcare, hastily enacted legislation, and a preference for institutional solutions to social problems resulted in Ireland's vast asylum system which was, I argue, as much a social creation as a medical one. 'Hearing Voices' draws on clinical archives from various 'mental hospitals', as well as legislation, policy documents, and historical and medical literature. I performed biochemical analysis of water from Tobar na nGealt ('well of the mad') in Kerry, to investigate reports of high levels of lithium, used for the treatment of bipolar disorder. 'Hearing Voices' provides a unique diversity of historical, social, epidemiological, and medical evidence, and original analysis, to explore an interplay of social and medical influences that was complex, dynamic, and fascinating.

This thesis examines the emergence and influence of the 'Pan-Pacific' idea from the 1910s-1940s. It makes the case that to a diverse demographic globally, it proved a compelling regional geo-paradigm; the institutions it inspired, significant inter-imperial spaces for representatives from the former British Dominions to consider their society's place in the world and the region's globality. Situated at the intersection of 'British' and 'Pacific' World historiographies, the thesis is organised as a multi-thematic intellectual history, demonstrating the capacious appeal and ideological multiformity of the Pan-Pacific in educational, ethnological, leftist, commercial and geopolitical contexts respectively. Chapter 1 explores the intellectual roots of the Pan-Pacific, examining the institutional archives and private papers of figures associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations and Pan-Pacific Union. It argues that a 'Honolulu nexus' in inter-imperial affairs emerged, influencing a greater appraisal of the Dominions' own interests, including a form of 'rooted regionalism', largely neglected in the extant literature. Chapter 2 examines how the Pan-Pacific proved a conduit for the examination of race relations through the ethnological research programme of Honolulu's Bishop Museum and its investigations into the 'Polynesian Question' (the then disputed origins of the peoples of Oceania). Chapter 3 examines the attractions of the 'political left' to the Pan-Pacific, exploring the affiliation of trade unions in the Dominions to the Comintern-backed Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. Chapter 4 explores how the Pan-Pacific idea boosted a regional commercial imaginary, whilst shedding light on the emergence of the Dominions' own nascent regional trade representation in the form of regional 'Honorary Agents'. The final chapter considers the emergence of trans-Pacific aviation and its influence upon conceptions of Dominion defence from sites spread across a Pan-Pacific cartography - from the atolls of the Phoenix Islands to the Kermadecs, spaces which found renewed significance in the 'Air Age'.

This work examines the lives and wellbeing of Irish women in the United States from 1850 until 1914, encompassing the end of the famine and the age of mass European migration. Irish migration in this period has been the subject of a large body of research, but existing studies have focused primarily on men, despite Irish female migrants often outnumbering male migrants in the late nineteenth century. The decision to emigrate in this period has frequently been explained by wage differentials between Ireland and destination countries, but this was only one factor in a multifaceted process. The importance of the family and the home is usually overlooked, despite their centrality to the decision to emigrate; and insufficient attention has been paid to how the experiences and circumstances of Irish émigrés changed over time. Most glaringly, the particular experiences of female migrants have not been given sufficient attention, with the result that our knowledge of this exceptional group of women is scanty, and their seminal impact on the broader history of Irish emigration is underplayed. This thesis takes a new and innovative approach to Irish emigration research, an approach which questions many of the assumptions underlying existing analysis. It does so in four main ways. First, this thesis places women at the centre of the analysis, considering their life in Ireland and, for emigres, their life in the United States. Second, it adopts a broad approach to wellbeing that extends beyond the typical and androcentric focus on real wages. Third, it considers how the lives of Irish women evolved over their life course, as workers, wives, mothers and widows. Fourth, it adopts a multi-level approach which combines numbers with narratives. The former includes United States micro-census data which provides information on all individuals in 1880, allowing for a new, national and comparative picture of women's lives. The latter includes parliamentary papers, newspaper articles, philanthropic studies of urban life, and charity reports. Moreover, this thesis employs letters of Irish women, to extrapolate how these women themselves perceived their own lives. Through this examination, this thesis shows the multidimensional nature of women's wellbeing, and how women's lives often deteriorated as migrant women aged. Although many women found independence and wellbeing in the US in their youth, many older women were left alone and destitute. Yet these women and their voices are central to our understanding of the history of Ireland, migration, and the making of the modern America.

This thesis is a study of child protection services between 1933 and 1970, with a focus on the activities of two local authorities, Birmingham City Council in the Midlands, and Westmorland Council in the north-west of England. This thesis explores the arguments articulated by senior policy makers, social workers and the parents of children placed in state and voluntary care to better understand the policies, practices, and experiences of those associated with the care system. It is argued that the efforts of both central and local government officials, tasked with protecting children's wellbeing, were often resisted by a public whose support was considered vital to keeping children safe. Acts of resistance often arose because of contrasting assessments of how best to support looked after children. Many of the practices endorsed by the state were informed by psychological principles. During the 1930s psychology was treated with scepticism by the public. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, parents increasingly drew, selectively, on the work of psychological thinkers when opposing the practices of government social workers. By drawing upon the private correspondence of local authority staff, alongside government papers and articles published in both the national and local press, this thesis makes a substantial contribution to histories of the family and the welfare state in mid-twentieth century England. It also challenges the assumption that the public only began to take a concerted interest in child neglect following the 'discovery' of battered babies in the early 1960s.

After a two-decade hiatus, the English church courts were revived by an act of Parliament on 27 July 1661, to resume their traditional task of correcting spiritual and moral misdemeanours. Soon thereafter, parishioners across England's dioceses once more faced admonition, fines, excommunication, and even imprisonment if they failed to conform to the laws of the restored Church of England. Whether they were successful or not in maintaining orthodoxy has been the principal question guiding historians interested in these tribunals, and most have concluded that, at least compared to their antebellum predecessors, the restored church courts constituted little more than a paper tiger, whose censures did little to halt the spread of dissent, partial conformity and immoral behaviour. This thesis will, in part, question such conclusions. Its main purpose, however, is to make a methodological intervention in the study of ecclesiastical court records. Rejecting Geoffrey Elton's assertion that these records represent 'the most strikingly repulsive relics of the past', it argues that a closer, more creative study of the bureaucratic processes maintaining the church courts can considerably enhance not only our understanding of these rather enigmatic tribunals but also of the individuals and communities who interacted with them. Studying those in charge of the courts, the first half of this thesis will explore the considerable friction between the Church's ministry and the salaried bureaucrats and lawyers permanently staffing the courts. This, it argues, has important ramifications for our understanding of early modern office-holding, but it also sheds new light on the theological disposition of the Restoration Church. Using the same sources, coupled with substantial consultation of contemporary polemic, letters and diaries, the fourth and fifth chapters will argue that the sanctions of the restored church courts were often far from the 'empty threat' historians have tended to assume. Excommunication in particular could be profoundly distressing even for such radical dissenters as the Quakers, and this should cause us to reconsider how individuals and communities from various hues of the denominational spectrum related to the established Church.

The interwar years have often been depicted as a period characterised by the consolidation and expansion of more progressive attitudes to crime. Reform and rehabilitation challenged retaliation and retribution for primacy in both criminal justice discourses and practice, while modern, scientific methodologies continued to shape perceptions of, and offer solutions to, a whole range of criminal behaviours. Moreover, crime was rarely politicised and never the issue it would become in the second half of the twentieth century. However, these are generalisations and offer only a partial account of crime in the interwar years - one that masks potentially divergent responses in towns and cities across the country. The localised characteristics and discretionary nature of criminal justice, and the asymmetrical impact that a range of social, political and economic issues had on attitudes to crime, make it difficult to present an overarching 'national' narrative of the period. Instead, more focused studies, which draw out the specificities and complexities of responses at a local level, may be needed. To that end, this study looks at the region of Hull and East Yorkshire, examining and evaluating a range of sources including police files, court records and parliamentary papers, and with a focus on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the local press. Here a more nuanced account is presented, where sustained levels of anxiety about crime drove diverse and at times seemingly incongruous reactions to offending. In this often incoherent collision of ideals, regional exigencies could precipitate calls for more punitive responses to crime and perpetuate certain pejorative conceptualisations of criminality, while at the same time eliciting sympathetic views, supporting notions of reform and the belief in the reclamation of the individual. It is an account that perhaps more aptly reflects the intricacies of what was a diverse period of British history.

This thesis studies print culture in colonial Lagos against the background of the public sphere, and brings together a variety of English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers. Such an approach allows for highlighting the practicalities of newspaper production and foregrounding the work accomplished by newspapermen in a changing 'information environment' and political context. It offers insights into Lagos politics, contributes to the history of the educated elite, and to more global histories of communication. Using newspapers as well as archival records, and focussing on events that strikingly reveal dynamics in the public sphere, this thesis narrates a nuanced history of a discursive field which was, amongst other things, central for Lagos politics. This thesis complicates a Habermasian notion of the public sphere as an open discursive space, and not only highlights that the public sphere was an arena of contested meanings, but also illustrates axes along which the composition of this social structure was negotiated. When newspapers emerged in the late nineteenth-century, discussions in the press were largely restricted to the elite. The economy of recognition that was at play in the public sphere was to change in the 1920s. This thesis highlights how newspapermen and contributors sought to carve out niches for themselves in the public sphere in new ways and how their becoming a speaker in this discursive field was challenged and contested. It highlights the nuanced ways in which newspapermen and contributors convened publics through their papers: how they did so around particular issues, in distinction from each other, and how they adapted the convening of publics to new political dynamics in the 1940s. This thesis gives insight into the complex relationship between English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers, and moreover illustrates how the practicalities of the newspaper business were coming to bear on dynamics in the public sphere.

The presence of the Shi ͑a communities in Kuwait, which includes groups of ͑Ajam, Baharna, Hassawiyya and a few from Iraq, currently constitute between twenty and thirty percent of the Kuwaiti population, and their historical role in building the state of Kuwait has been significant since the early history of Kuwait. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including British government documents, the writings of western travellers and the reports of American missionaries in Kuwait, the private papers of more than twenty three Kuwaiti Shi ͑a individual archives, and oral-history interviews with descendants of Shi ͑a immigrants to Kuwait, this thesis discusses the construction of the Shi ͑a communities by focusing on the causes of their migrations from their motherland to Kuwait between 1880 and 1938, the period when their migration came to its peak. By analysing the internal political, economic, religious and social conditions of the Shi ͑a homelands and Kuwait itself, in the overall regional context of the Gulf sheikhdoms, the British and Ottoman empires, and other great powers interested in the Gulf region, this thesis examines the reasons behind the Shi ͑a migrations. It considers merchants, artisans and labourers who left their places of origin (i.e. southwestern Iran, Bahrain, and al-Hasa) and chose Kuwait as their final destination in which to settle. The thesis also examines the Shi ͑a's historical relationships amongst themselves, with the Sunni, and the government. It defines the economic roles of the different Shi ͑a social groups, (merchants, artisans and labourers), in transferring Kuwait from nascent town to a prosperous city. The thesis will fill a significant gap in Kuwaiti historiography as its subject has so far not been studied in any depth by Persian Gulf scholars.

This thesis has used public and private archives, as well as newly discovered private papers, to provide new interpretations and new analytical insights regarding the early history of a British investment in Persia. This has given rise to broad questions regarding the interaction of economic and political power within the British empire and the interaction of foreign economic forces with domestic political forces in Persia. Within those overarching themes, the role of intermediation, the Anglo-Russian rivalry over Persia, British naval developments, differing legal cultures and Persian political developments have been examined in detail. Investigating the extent of official British intervention in the venture's affairs and the effects of the Persian Constitutional Revolution, in particular, have advanced the current understanding of the company's early history. In-depth archival research has thus allowed this thesis to demonstrate the shortcomings of the existing literature and provide the most complete account of the Persian oil venture's early developments to date.