Australian and Indian Plants: Making Connexions in Nineteenth-Century Botany

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Maroske

Despite the expectation in nineteenth-century botany that the plants of one country were most similar to those of adjacent countries, by the middle of the century it was accepted that there was a connexion between flora of northern Australia and ?India'. The pattern and reasons for plant distribution around the world were studied in the emerging science of phytogeography, but this paper suggests that the strength of the Indo-Australian connexion was influenced by species limits in the established science of phytography or descriptive botany. This paper also shows that while the botany of Australia and ?India' was predominantly studied in European nations, Ferdinand Mueller used resources obtained from Joseph Hooker in Great Britain, and Friedrich Miquel in the Netherlands to add new details to the distribution pattern of ?Indian' plants in northern Australia. Although Mueller was unwilling to reflect on these findings himself, they seemed to challenge attempts to introduce evolutionary and geological explanations into phytogeography.

1959 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Samuel Trifilo

Books of travel and books inspired by travel have probably been more popular in Great Britain than any other literary form, with the exception of novels.This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when travel, owing to the lack of today's facilities, was reserved for the relative few. During that period, photography had not yet replaced the written word, as is happening in our own generation. The nineteenth-century Englishman wandered through the medium of a travel book and not through newsreels, travelogues, and even full-length movies. Today, the Englishman, like the American, is able to sit in his living room and see the world on his television screen. He is not dependent on literature to the extent that his grandfather or great-grandfather was. For the Englishman of the nineteenth century, therefore, travel literature was very important. Often, these books furnished the only source of information concerning strange lands and strange peoples.


Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn

From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 233339282093232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Boretti

Here, we review modeling predictions for Covid-19 mortality based on recent data. The Imperial College model trusted by the British Government predicted peak mortalities above 170 deaths per million in the United States, and above 215 deaths per million in Great Britain, after more than 2 months from the outbreak, and a length for the outbreak well above 4 months. These predictions drove the world to adopt harsh distancing measures and forget the concept of herd immunity. China had peak mortalities of less than 0.1 deaths per million after 40 days since first deaths, and an 80-day-long outbreak. Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Great Britain flattened the curve at 13.6, 28.6, 9.0, 10.6, and 13.9 deaths per million after 40, 39, 33, 44, and 39 days from first deaths, or 31, 29, 24, 38, and 29 days since the daily confirmed deaths reached 0.1 per million people, respectively. The declining curve is much slower for Italy, the Netherlands, or Great Britain than Belgium or Sweden. Opposite to Great Britain, Italy, or Belgium that enforced a complete lockdown, the Netherlands only adopted an “intelligent” lockdown, and Sweden did not adopt any lockdown. However, they achieved better results. Coupled to new evidence for minimal impact of Covid-19 on the healthy population, with the most part not infected even if challenged, or only mild or asymptomatic if infected, there are many good reasons to question the validity of the specific epidemiological model simulations and the policies they produced. Fewer restrictions on the healthy while better protecting the vulnerable would have been a much better option, permitting more sustainable protection of countries otherwise at risk of second waves as soon as the strict measures are lifted.


2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 893-916
Author(s):  
Marieke Bloembergen ◽  
Martijn Eickhoff

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.


1952 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-367
Author(s):  
J. Edward Gerald

The first issues of the I. P. I. Report, published by the International Press Institute, appeared during this quarter. They furnish an unequalled report on communications around the world. L'Echo de la Presse became a weekly on April 11, realizing a seven-year dream of Editor Jacquemart. News developments included progress on reform of the British law of libel, evidence of the growth of advertising in Great Britain during the Socialist emphasis on the welfare state, and consideration of new basic press laws in West Germany, Pakistan and France. The chief editor of a leading Catholic daily in The Netherlands was dismissed. La Prensa of Buenos Aires reappeared as the painted darling of the Peron dictatorship and La Razon of La Paz appeared dead of intimidation by Estenssoro's revolutionary gangs. A leading Communist editor went to jail in France as part of the government's gesture of warning against armed agitation. A new international federation of journalists, the West's answer to the Communist IOJ, elected a famed British labor leader as president.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Chaya Brasz

AbstractLiberal Judaism remained absent in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century but finally became successful in the early 1930s under the influence of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London and the establishment of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in 1926. It had a specific Dutch character which was more radical than the German refugees who joined in were used to. The Shoah barely left survivors of the prewar congregations, but Liberal Judaism made a remarkable comeback in the Netherlands and had a key role position for Liberal Judaism on the continent of Europe. In a much smaller Jewish community than the French one, the Dutch Progressive congregations for a considerable period formed the largest Progressive community on the continent, next to France. Even today, while comprising ten congregations, it still has a growing membership.


1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamilton Wright

The International Opium Commission proposed by the United States and accepted by Austria-Hungary, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam convened at Shanghai on the 1st of last February, completed its study of the opium problem throughout the world, and based on that study, issued nine unanimous declarations. The Commission adjourned on February 27th.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Lynn Voskuil

The terms “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” name ideas that have long figured prominently in the practices, the methods, and the unexamined assumptions of Victorian studies. These categories also shape the study of plants, both now and in the nineteenth century, along with related terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “hybrid.” “Invasion biology,” for example, currently describes the study of how nonnative species spread around the world, and the phrase “nativism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy” has been used to describe the impasse between different approaches to global plant distribution and migration. This paper will put these variable disciplinary conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” into conversation with each other, offering a methodological reflection with the goal of clarifying their meanings and applications in and for current scholarship of the Victorian period. If ecological uses of these ideas, like aesthetic and political uses, are rooted in the nineteenth century, their disparate strands have not yet been sufficiently disentangled. What difference does it make to speak of invasive plants as compared to human invaders? How does our sense of cosmopolitanism, empire, and invasion change when pressure is exerted from other fields? Perhaps most importantly, what are the ethical dimensions of these concepts, especially when nonhuman entities are included?


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