UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Royal Officials in the Making of the Spanish Empire (1580-1700)(2017) Polo y La Borda, Adolfo; Cañeque, Alejandro; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the worldwide mobility of seventeenth-century Spanish imperial officials who traveled around the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. My study focuses on the lower echelon of imperial officials in order to demonstrate how their experiences of service to the king in a variety of locales affected the the governance of the Spanish Empire and how such a polity was imagined by these officials as a global, yet connected and coherent unity. I argue that the officials’ circulation was central for the cohesion and stability of the empire. It allowed the actual and imagined overcoming of the far-flung geography of Spain’s empire and the incorporation, and sometimes exclusion, of diverse subjects across the globe. The intense and extensive mobility of the officials permitted the consolidation of certain imperial political practices, values, and patterns of rule and administration, which played a decisive role in the emergence of a common imperial identity built from the ground up. This imperial identity worked to give cohesion to a polity as heterogeneous as the Spanish Empire. Imperial official’s interactions with very different peoples and cultures spawned a cosmopolitan imperial culture that unified the many cultural, geographic, demographic, and social peculiarities of diverse societies under the umbrella of the imperial mission of enforcement, defense, and expansion of the crown’s rule and spread of Catholicism. This work departs from the traditional national and area models of study by emphasizing the utility of an analytical framework that takes the whole imperial system—and not just one of its component regions—as the unit of analysis, in order to show that the histories of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia were far more entangled than previously thought. Despite the empire’s enormous diversity, extension, discontinuous territoriality, and the near-autonomous status of many imperial outposts, a great number of Spanish imperial subjects saw the empire as an integrated and coherent political unit. I analyze some of the conditions and settings that made possible the global mobility of the officials, and some effects of such circulation in the ruling and political imagination of the empire.Item Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans' Foreign Relations(2013) Sillin, Sarah; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past two decades, scholars have established sympathy's key role in nineteenth-century literary culture and the development of U.S. nationalism. While examining the bonds that feeling forges among citizens, however, critics have largely neglected the question of how sympathy also links Americans to the larger world. Representations of global sympathy--wherein characters from different cultures share one another's joy and pain--pervade nineteenth-century U.S. literature. My project analyzes how authors narrativized the nation's political, territorial, and cultural changes, while underscoring the persistent importance of feeling in defining America's global role. "Global Sympathy" tells a story about what happens when writers imagine Americans as the kith and kin of foreign peoples. Beginning in the early national period, the first chapter explores how James Fenimore Cooper employs tropes of foreign friendship to establish Americans' equality to the British, inviting readers to re-imagine the British Empire as a valuable trading partner. My second chapter considers the importance of Christianity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Cummins, whose Protestant American heroines become metaphorical sisters to people in Italy and Syria, respectively. Read together, these pre-Civil War writers evoke confidence in Americans' ability to navigate foreign relations amidst political instability. Yet with increasing U.S. expansion, writers in the second half of the nineteenth-century expressed growing concern about America's foreign influence. Chapters three and four center on minority writers who employ sentiment to criticize the effects of imperialism on "foreign" peoples both within and outside the nation. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton participates in Gilded Age literary critiques of America as unfeeling and undemocratic, and develops an international courtship narrative to convey U.S. oppression of both "native" Californios and foreign nations like Mexico. Pauline Hopkins's turn-of-the-century fiction constitutes part of a broader body of literary responses to the Spanish-American War. Hopkins questions U.S. imperialism and racism by imagining the world, rather than the nation, as a family. More broadly, this project analyzes how Hopkins and all of the writers I study translate foreign politics into intimate terms and--by depicting U.S. citizens' affective ties to diverse peoples--insist on America's obligations to the international sphere.Item After the Fire the Embers Still Burn: A Theory of Jus Post Bellum(2013) Kirkpatrick, Jesse; Soltan, Karol; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ending wars right and justly has been an ethical imperative since they have first been fought. Given that the postwar periods of numerous wars fought in the recent past have been seriously bungled, the need for postwar ethics has become perspicuously clear. This need is also striking. It is striking because theories of jus post bellum have recently begun to take shape, yet they remain seriously deficient. Jus post bellum theorizing often remains narrowly focused on interstate warfare and is not reflective of the existing complexity and modalities of twenty first century conflict. In addition, current theories typically focus on punishment, recriminations, and backward–looking models of justice that do not necessarily prioritize relief and aid to war-torn soldiers, societies, and civilians. By theorizing the concept of jus post bellum as a forward-looking cosmopolitan model of justice, where the central task is on building a just and lasting peace through stabilization, aid, and development, this dissertation aims to fill this gap. In so doing, the dissertation seeks to broaden the scope of jus post bellum by connecting it, and the just war tradition more generally, with the emerging contemporary literature of cosmopolitan global justice.