The arbiter state : governance of the minority at the micro-level

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-68).This thesis examines the governance of the minority at the micro-level in late colonial India. While the colonial production of micro-level state authority was inescapably conditioned by numerous political struggles between colonial subjects, the centrality of the minority in this story of state formation and citizen making is missing from most conventional descriptions of colonial governmental rationality. This study argues that the specifically colonial formulation of the minority as a figure to be both protected and inserted on to the path to modern citizenship shaped the regulation of customary modes of charity and inheritance as well as the regulation of local government power itself. Indeed, the dual commitment to protecting and modernizing of the minority constituted the micro-level state as arbiter: absolute in its judgment in cases of conflict between subjects, even though this authority was predicated on the principles of non-interference and deliberation.by Shiben Banerji.M.C.P

Architecture, urbanism, and the global moral-politics of Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, February 2015.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-295).This dissertation revises the history of internationalism through a study of the American architects Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, who practiced in the United States, Australia, and India between 1895 and 1949. Unlike previous studies of internationalism, which have focused exclusively on the transfer of architectural and planning knowledge from the putative 'West' to the 'non-West', this dissertation uncovers a global formulation of community proposed within the colonipl periphery. It does so through a sustained analysis of two objects by Mahony and Griffin: Magic of America, an unpublished memoir and political treatise consisting of correspondence and essays, which Mahony compiled and edited between 1938 and 1949, and Castlecrag, a residential suburb along Sydney's Middle Harbour, which Mahony and Griffin developed between 1920 and 1935. Delineating the scope and provenance of their theoretical writings on imperialism, democracy, international conflict, and trade, as well as their design of common property at Castlecrag, this study charts the emergence of a non-nationalist alternative to empire. Concomitantly, it argues that the conceptual sources and motivations for this alternative, global community were far removed from instrumental politics, and flowed instead from a moral-philosophical thesis that evaluative meaning existed in our relations with others. Finally, this dissertation examines how Mahony's and Griffin's written and built work was shaped by the dialectic offin-de-siecle utopianism and International Socialism.by Shiben Banerji.Ph. D