Warfare in the West Highlands and Isles of Scotland, c. 1544-1615

Warfare has long been associated with Scottish Highlanders and Islanders, especially in the period known in Gaelic tradition as ‘Linn nan Creach’ (the ‘Age of Forays’), which followed the forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493. The sixteenth century in general is remembered as a particularly tumultuous time within the West Highlands and Isles, characterised by armed conflict on a seemingly unprecedented scale. Relatively little research has been conducted into the nature of warfare however, a gap filled by this thesis through its focus on a series of interconnected themes and in-depth case studies spanning the period c. 1544-1615. It challenges the idea that the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century was a time of endless bloodshed, and explores the rationale behind the distinctive mode of warfare practised in the West Highlands and Isles. The first part of the thesis traces the overall ‘Process of War’. Chapter 1 focuses on the mentality of the social elite in the West Highlands and Isles and demonstrates that warfare was not their raison d'être, but was tied inextricably to chiefs’ prime responsibility of protecting their lands and tenants. Chapter 2 assesses the causation of warfare and reveals that a recurrent catalyst for armed conflict was the assertion of rights to land and inheritance. There were other important causes however, including clan expectation, honour culture, punitive government policies, and the use of proxy warfare by prominent magnates. Chapter 3 takes a fresh approach to the military capacity of the region through analysis of armies and soldiers, and the final thematic chapter tackles the conduct of warfare in the West Highlands and Isles, with analysis of the tactics and strategy of militarised personnel. The second part of this thesis comprises five case studies: the Clanranald, 1544-77; the Colquhouns of Luss and the Lennox, 1592-1603; the MacLeods of Harris and MacDonalds of Sleat, 1594-1601; the Camerons, 1569-1614; and the ‘Islay Rising’, 1614-15. This thesis adopts a unique approach by contextualising the political background of warfare in order to instil a deeper understanding of why early modern Gaelic Scots resorted to bloodshed. Overall, this period was defined by a sharp rise in military activity, followed by an even sharper decline, a trajectory that will be evidenced vividly in the final case study on the ‘Islay Rising’. Although warfare was widespread, it was not unrestrained or continuous, and the traditional image of a region riven by perpetual bloodshed has been greatly exaggerated.

Phobos: The design and implementation of embedded software for a low cost radar warning receiver

This portfolio thesis describes work undertaken by the author under the Engineering Doctorate program of the Institute for System Level Integration. It was carried out in conjunction with the sponsor company Teledyne Defence Limited. A radar warning receiver is a device used to detect and identify the emissions of radars. They were originally developed during the Second World War and are found today on a variety of military platforms as part of the platform’s defensive systems. Teledyne Defence has designed and built components and electronic subsystems for the defence industry since the 1970s. This thesis documents part of the work carried out to create Phobos, Teledyne Defence’s first complete radar warning receiver. Phobos was designed to be the first low cost radar warning receiver. This was made possible by the reuse of existing Teledyne Defence products, commercial off the shelf hardware and advanced UK government algorithms. The challenges of this integration are described and discussed, with detail given of the software architecture and the development of the embedded application. Performance of the embedded system as a whole is described and qualified within the context of a low cost system.

Cassius Dio's speeches and the collapse of the Roman Republic

This thesis argues that Cassius Dio used his speeches of his Late Republican and Augustan narratives as a means of historical explanation. I suggest that the interpretative framework which the historian applied to the causes and success of constitutional change can be most clearly identified in the speeches. The discussion is divided into eight chapters over two sections. Chapter 1 (Introduction) sets out the historical, paideutic, and compositional issues which have traditionally served as a basis for rejecting the explanatory and interpretative value of the speeches in Dio’s work and for criticising his Roman History more generally. Section 1 consists of three methodological chapters which respond to these issues. In Chapter 2 (Speeches and Sources) I argue that Dio’s prosopopoeiai approximate more closely with the political oratory of that period than has traditionally been recognised. Chapter 3 (Dio and the Sophistic) argues that Cassius Dio viewed the artifice of rhetoric as a particular danger in his own time. I demonstrate that this preoccupation informed, credibly, his presentation of political oratory in the Late Republic and of its destructive consequences. Chapter 4 (Dio and the Progymnasmata) argues that although the texts of the progymnasmata in which Dio will have been educated clearly encouraged invention with a strongly moralising focus, it is precisely his reliance on these aspects of rhetorical education which would have rendered his interpretations persuasive to a contemporary audience. Section 2 is formed of three case-studies. In Chapter 5 (The Defence of the Republic) I explore how Dio placed speeches-in-character at three Republican constitutional crises to set out an imagined case for the preservation of that system. This case, I argue, is deliberately unconvincing: the historian uses these to elaborate the problems of the distribution of power and the noxious influence of φθόνος and φιλοτιμία. Chapter 6 (The Enemies of the Republic) examines the explanatory role of Dio’s speeches from the opposite perspective. It investigates Dio’s placement of dishonest speech into the mouths of military figures to make his own distinctive argument about the role of imperialism in the fragmentation of the res publica. Chapter 7 (Speech after the Settlement) argues that Cassius Dio used his three speeches of the Augustan age to demonstrate how a distinctive combination of Augustan virtues directly counteracted the negative aspects of Republican political and rhetorical culture which the previous two case-studies had explored. Indeed, in Dio’s account of Augustus the failures of the res publica are reinvented as positive forces which work in concert with Augustan ἀρετή to secure beneficial constitutional change.

Shadows of militarism: an ethnography of trauma and resistance among soldiers and veterans in post-9/11 USA.

This thesis critically examines the military disciplining of trauma through a detailed ethnographic study of post-9/11 lower-enlisted soldiers and veterans in the U.S. who have links to a national movement of resistance to, and healing from, militarism. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two G.I. coffeehouses and with the post-9/11 veteran anti-militarism movement in U.S., it analyses the journey of joining the military, becoming a soldier, leaving the military and veteran identities. It explores militarism and military power as a cultural process which reproduces and conceals itself within normative conceptions of the everyday, and military trauma as a site of contested power and resistance. In doing so, this research addresses an urgent need to critically engage with military trauma as a means to challenge normalised discourses of militarism. This research reveals a disjuncture between the imagined and lived reality of military identities in the post-9/11 era. It explores the politics of recognition of veterans’ public and private lives, their contested identities, and their constrained relationship to the state. It argues that veterans are silenced and their identities reduced to symbolic tools in a public military imaginary which constructs military trauma into politically manageable categories, while disciplining and silencing the nation from critically examining war and militarism. In this way, this thesis argues that veterans serve a vital function in U.S. society by absorbing and containing the violence of the state, which then becomes unspeakable, unhearable, and inescapable. This thesis shows how a small number of soldiers and veterans are pushing back against this narrative. In sum, this thesis seeks to challenge the disciplinary effects of militarism upon trauma and support veteran voices to speak their own truths.

The symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of Imperial German and National Socialist medals and badges, 1701 to the present

This thesis examines the manufacture, use, exchange (including gift exchange), collecting and commodification of German medals and badges from the early 18th century until the present-day, with particular attention being given to the symbols that were deployed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) between 1919 and 1945. It does so by focusing in particular on the construction of value through insignia, and how such badges and their symbolic and monetary value changed over time. In order to achieve this, the thesis adopts a chronological structure, which encompasses the creation of Prussia in 1701, the Napoleonic wars and the increased democratisation of military awards such as the Iron Cross during the Great War. The collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918 was the major factor that led to the creation of the NSDAP under the eventual strangle-hold of Hitler, a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic movement that continued the German tradition of awarding and wearing badges. The traditional symbols of Imperial Germany, such as the eagle, were then infused with the swastika, an emblem that was meant to signify anti-Semitism, thus creating a hybrid identity. This combination was then replicated en-masse, and eventually eclipsed all the symbols that had possessed symbolic significance in Germany’s past. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, millions of medals and badges were produced in an effort to create a racially based “People’s Community”, but the steel and iron that were required for munitions eventually led to substitute materials being utilised and developed in order to manufacture millions of politically oriented badges. The Second World War unleashed Nazi terror across Europe, and the conscripts and volunteers who took part in this fight for living-space were rewarded with medals that were modelled on those that had been instituted during Imperial times. The colonial conquest and occupation of the East by the Wehrmacht, the Order Police and the Waffen-SS surpassed the brutality of former wars that finally culminated in the Holocaust, and some of these horrific crimes and the perpetrators of them were perversely rewarded with medals and badges. Despite Nazism being thoroughly discredited, many of the Allied soldiers who occupied Germany took part in the age-old practice of obtaining trophies of war, which reconfigured the meaning of Nazi badges as souvenirs, and began the process of their increased commodification on an emerging secondary collectors’ market. In order to analyse the dynamics of this market, a “basket” of badges is examined that enables a discussion of the role that aesthetics, scarcity and authenticity have in determining the price of the artefacts. In summary, this thesis demonstrates how the symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of German military and political medals and badges has changed substantially over time, provides a stimulus for scholars to conduct research in this under-developed area, and encourages collectors to investigate the artefacts that they collect in a more historically contextualised manner.