History, 1926-2026

This thesis centers on the post-WW1 activism of Enver Pasha, who was the Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire before going into voluntary exile in autumn 1918. Enver Pasha had a unique claim to influence over the 'Muslim world,' and this thesis analyzes the ideological flexibility with which Enver used his specific political capital to furnish support for his postwar activism on behalf of Turkey and the broader 'Muslim world.' Alongside this intellectual history of Enver's 'Muslim world,' this thesis draws from British documents to analyze how Enver was tracked and analyzed within the British imperial bureaucracy and its various intelligence agencies. Enver, who seemed to threaten to harness the anti-imperialist energy of the 'Muslim world' against the British Empire, became the paradigmatic object of 'imperial schizophrenia.' 'Imperial schizophrenia' refers to the tendency of political intelligence analysts to misconstrue intelligence and draw overblown and conspiratorial conclusions from fragmented pieces of information. This thesis analyzes this tendency and contextualizes this analytical proclivity within the context of interdepartmental friction, informational asymmetry, and the imperial imagination. Although there would be debates in the summer of 1919 which contemplated how to manage the 'Muslim world,' or if this conceptual approach was appropriate at all, the British bureaucracy and its intelligence apparatus failed to resolve its various deficiencies which gave rise to 'imperial schizophrenia.' This thesis argues that Enver's projected brokerage of the 'Muslim world' and British intelligence's 'imperial schizophrenia' were connected by the acceptance of the idea that the 'Muslim world' constituted a political reality and a political unit, and that British paranoia in fact augmented Enver's perceived claim to control the 'Muslim world.'

This project studies the connection of eugenics with American football, mainly looking at how measurement methods that were developed during slavery and early race science have been changed and used in today’s football institutions. The idea initially came to me last year while I was actively researching anthropometrists/eugenicists Charles Davenport and Morris Steggerda’s mid 20th century race-crossing experiments in Jamaica, with these two as the lead eugenicists of said experiments. From that research, I got a strong understanding of the physical tests and measurements used to uphold racial rankings under the pretense of scientific impartiality. What amazed me more was how similar these techniques are to the way athletes, specifically football players, are assessed in modern sports. Measurements like shoulder width and hand size that were once important in anthropometric studies are still basic metrics used in the game of football today, particularly during combine testing. Noticing this intersection made me dive deeper into a wider history: the institutional growth of football happened at the same time as the emergence and the peak of eugenic ideology. Not to mention eugenics itself started in the 1860s, which was around the same exact time when Princeton presented its first organized team (1869). At the most basic level, eugenics can be defined as the pseudoscience of determining human value and abstract qualities based on phenotype, or as Galton himself puts it, “the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which . . . takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had”. It’s not the fact that measuring differences between different races was necessarily racist within itself, but rather that Galton specifically wanted to use these measurements as justification to assert social and racial dominance over Black people and any other ethnic group that is not of Anglo-Saxon descent. Seen in this way, exploitation works in many linked methods. On one side, we have open and one-sided systems of control like slavery and Jim Crow separation laws. On another side, there are systems that seem mutual but still forceful, such as professional sports including football and basketball. These setups look to provide chances and rewards; however, they depend on the use and control of Black physical labor. For the sake of this paper, football is used as the main point of study. It’s important to note that although racial violence is less openly accepted in America after slavery was abolished, exploitation has not vanished, it just transformed. When Black athletes started joining professional football, physical dominance targeting them was no longer considered acceptable. Teams could not maintain control over Black through obvious violence any longer. Rather, fresh stories came up portraying Black athletes as naturally fit for the sport because of assumed physical benefits. In 1988, a CBS reporter by the name of Jack Snyder made a comment that was rather telling about how white America sees the Black body: “The Black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade… the owner, the slave owner would breed his big Black (man) to his big woman so that he could have a big Black kid.”. Unfortunately for the Black athletes, this was a common thought process amongst white Americans and these viewpoints ‘justified’ discrimination while still refusing complete recognition of their humanity, strengthening a system that chiefly appreciates Black bodies for their work capacity.

This thesis examines Vision 2030, the comprehensive reform programme launched by Muhammad bin Salman as Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2016, asking whether it constitutes a fundamental rupture in Saudi statecraft or the latest expression of its deepest strategic logic. The central argument is that Vision 2030 is best understood not as ideological transformation but as adaptive survival: the continuation of the logic that has governed Saudi statecraft since Ibn Saud consolidated the third state in 1932, applied under radically changed material conditions.

The argument rests on three structural claims. First, that Saudi Arabia’s rentier-distributive model has reached a tipping point driven by demographic pressure and energy market uncertainty, making economic diversification a necessity for regime survival rather than simply an aspiration. Second, that the domestic politics of Vision 2030, the curtailment of clerical authority, the construction of an explicitly Saudi nationalism, and the reorganisation of religious legitimacy, represents a recalibration of the historic Al Saud-Wahhabi alliance rather than its abandonment, following a pattern of subordinating religious ideology to state interest that dates to Ibn Saud’s suppression of the Ikhwan revolt in 1929-30. Third, that Saudi foreign policy under Muhammad Bin Salman, characterised by an initial phase of elevated risk-taking followed by recalibration, reflects the same pattern of episodic activism and structural retrenchment that has governed Saudi external behaviour since the 1960s.

To illuminate the character of the Saudi adaptive strategy, the thesis draws selectively on the experience of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore as a comparative analytical lens - a case of pragmatic developmental statecraft pursued under conditions of acute structural vulnerability. The comparison is not an equivalence claim but a diagnostic tool, used across three chapters to assess Saudi’s Public Investment Fund against Singapore’s sovereign wealth model, the Saudi nationalist project against the People’s Action Party’s construction of civic identity, and Saudi multi-alignment against Singapore’s management of great-power competition.

The thesis draws on archival research and elite interviews conducted in Riyadh, Singapore, and London between August 2025 and January 2026, incorporating testimony from officials in the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Public Investment Fund, and the Vision 2030 ecosystem, as well as People’s Action Party officials and academic figures in Singapore. Together, the analytical framework and empirical foundation enable this thesis to offer what the existing literature lacks: an interpretation of Vision 2030 as a coherent, integrated grand strategy in which economic, religious, and foreign policy dimensions are all expressions of a single underlying logic of regime survival.

This thesis argues that conservatives in Congress used the Hyde Amendment to fundamentally transform abortion politics in the United States after Roe v. Wade by shifting the debate from constitutional rights to questions of funding and access. The Hyde Amendment was passed in 1976, banning federal Medicaid dollars from funding abortion or abortion-related services. Chapter One examines the immediate post-Roe period, showing how anti-abortion legislators initially failed to pass right-to-life constitutional amendments, but began experimenting with funding restrictions as a more viable strategy to secure pro-life legislative wins. Chapter Two begins in 1976, detailing how Henry Hyde successfully combined moral rhetoric with a pragmatic fiscal appeal to build a bipartisan coalition in Congress that passed his amendment just three years after the landmark Supreme Court decision constitutionalizing abortion rights. Finally, Chapter Three traces how the Hyde’s framework became entrenched in federal policy and expanded to shape decades of litigation, institutional restrictions, and government programs that increasingly limited abortion access without directly challenging its legality. Ultimately, the Hyde Amendment stands as a durable and powerful blueprint for regulating abortion through federal policy, with consequences that continue to define the landscape of abortion access today.