Ornithological insights from Taylor White's birds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vida Javidi ◽  
Robert Montgomerie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
The West ◽  
Body Regions ◽  
Modern Bird ◽  
The World ◽  
Mcgill University ◽  
High Level ◽  
Scarlet Macaw

The Taylor White Collection of paintings from the 1700s, held at the McGill University Library, includes 661 paintings that illustrate 832 birds from around the world. With illustrations of 443 species in 30 avian orders, this collection represents a substantial proportion of the bird species known at the time and is one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of coloured bird illustrations made during the eighteenth century. Most of the paintings were made by Charles Collins and Peter Paillou from live birds or dead specimens in the cabinets and aviaries of White and his contemporaries. We compared a large sample of the paintings with the same birds depicted in modern bird guides to assess quantitatively the accuracy of the illustrations with respect to the colours and patterns of plumages and soft parts. We found that fewer than 3% of the paintings contained errors, and usually only in one of the 28 body regions that we assessed. Given this high level of accuracy, we identified a small red macaw from the West Indies as likely representing a previously unknown but now extinct subspecies of the Scarlet Macaw, and two other paintings of species that could not be convincingly matched to any known species.

The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-256
Author(s):  
Mark Quintanilla
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
The West ◽  
Tropical Crops ◽  
The World ◽  
Alexander Campbell

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.

The Parasites of the Coffee Leaf-Miners (Leucoptera spp.) in Africa

1936 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ch. Ferrière
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
The West ◽  
Leaf Miners ◽  
The World ◽  
Leucoptera Coffeella

The coffee leaf-miners of the genus Leucoptera, Hübner, are serious pests of coffee wherever it is cultivated and they have often caused great anxiety to planters in many parts of the world. Leucoptera coffeella, Guér., is known from the West Indies, Central and South America, Central Africa, Madagascar, Réunion and Ceylon. Another species, L. daricella, Meyr., seems to be responsible for still more damage in Africa.

Invisible Occidentalism: Eighteenth-Century Indo-Persian Constructions of the West

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Juan R. I. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
The West ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
The World ◽  
The Fantastic

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.—Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesMarco Polo's encounter with Kublai Khan, which Italo Calvino made the framework for his exploration of the fantastic in urban life, stands as a useful parable for the nature of the interaction of West and East in the period between 1200 and 1700, when myriads of Europeans produced journals and accounts of their journeys into the rest of the world.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Douglas Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

Settling Up

Worldview ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Cottle
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Council House ◽  
As If ◽  
Settling Up

Beatrice Waters lives in the corner flat on the top floor of a council house in the Islington district of London. She spent four years of her life making the arrangements to rent a flat in this particular block of council houses. Four long years of speaking with this or that authority and arguing with her husband over whether they had made the right decision. At fifty, Henry Waters doubted he could survive still another move. He couldn't even remember all the places in which he had lived, as if immigrating from the West Indies to England wasn't significant enough. “Don't you think,” he would ask Beatrice, “there comes a time that people just settle down, no matter how good or bad a deal they've made for themselves? How long do you keep changing homes just to prove you're really getting somewhere in the world?’

First Round the World: 1519–22

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-466
Author(s):  
E. G. R. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Far East ◽  
The West ◽  
The Far East ◽  
World Geography ◽  
The World ◽  
Secret Knowledge

In 1518 a Spanish gentleman, just back from the West Indies, addressed a Summary of World Geography to his King. In the Dedication he pointed out that since the Pope's Line, which parted the Portuguese and Spanish spheres, ran through the mouth of the River Amazon, 28°W. of Ferro, all the World beyond 150°E. (i.e. 130°E. of Greenwich) lay open to exploitation by Spain. And according to the World Map of the day the area included Java, Japan, King Solomon's Ophir, and (best of all) the Spice Islands or Moluccas from which the Portuguese were already making fabulous fortunes. This gentleman was not the only person to speak to the young King on this matter. The captains and pilots who had opened up the Spice Islands for Portugal were dissatisfied with the rewards which their own King had given them, and a number of them offered their services and their special and secret knowledge to his rival. Ferdinand Magellan was one of them. From his experience in the Far East he was of the opinion that the Moluccas could be safely approached from the west, by way of the Great Ocean. And it should be emphasized that in suggesting this he had no romantic notions about becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe. He put forward a business pro position which the Spanish King accepted. Immediately the most thorough preparations were set on foot. They included the making of new charts, new globes, new sea-quadrants and sea-astrolabes, by the best pilots and craftsmen of the day, of whom the most were Portuguese.

“One of the Finest and Most Fruitful Spots in America”: An Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Carriacou

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beck Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Information Costs ◽  
The West

Analysis of the 1776 and 1790 agricultural censuses from Carriacou overturns the notion that only farmers with small holdings cultivated cotton in the West Indies. The evidence shows that cotton squeezed out all other crops on Carriacou during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. The island's cotton planters were socially diverse; the yeomanry with their small their farms often competed successfully with the owners of the large plantations financed by wealthy metropolitan investors. Despite the viability of the more modest operations in this industry, however, the largest estates offered creditors comparatively lower transaction and information costs. Furthermore, the data from 1790 indicate that the largest estates achieved the highest output per hand, provided that the “gangs” of enslaved laborers were sufficiently monitored by free workers.

British Policy and Spanish America, 1783–1808

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lynch
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The West ◽  
Potential Market ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
British Policy

‘The liberation of South America’, wrote Castlereagh in 1807, ‘must be accomplished through the wishes and exertions of the inhabitants; but the change can only be operated…under the protection and with the support of an auxiliary British force’. The argument, familiar in political debate, was rare in official policy. Britain, it is true, had long regarded Spanish America as a source of strength for her rivals and a potential market for her manufactures. After the Peace of 1783 interest became more intense as British observers, impressed by the vulnerability of empires, claimed to see signs of rapid decline in the empire of Spain. Intelligence reports on Spanish America accumulated in government departments; plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area. Yet, apart from the conquest of Trinidad in 1797 and the attempted conquest of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, British policy towards Spanish America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent. There were, indeed, compelling reasons why Spanish America should remain on the margin of British policy. Britain's existing European and imperial interests necessarily dominated her policy and absorbed her resources. Until 1806, moreover, existing channels of trade in Europe and the rest of the world were sufficient to take the bulk of British industrial production. And military resources were usually insufficient to release troops either from Europe or the West Indies for major operations in a new theatre of war.

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