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Reminiscing about his many visits over the years to the home of his dear friend and scientific colleague Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Britain's leading botanist for much of the second half of the nineteenth century, noted that a regular feature of those visits was joining Darwin on his noontime walk: ‘away we trudged through the garden,’ recalled Hooker, ‘where there was always some experiment to visit’ (F. Darwin 1887 : II. 27). Hooker's description – despite the begrudging ‘trudge’ – captures nicely the multiple roles that the garden
Charles Darwin ( Figure 14.1 ) discussed the evolution of dogs in the first main chapter of On the Origin of Species (1859). He gave the different types of domesticated dogs as an example of ‘artificial selection’, that is, selective breeding to produce desirable traits in animals and plants for human needs. He aimed to persuade readers that, if humans could produce such variety in dogs, as seen in the difference between the Great Dane and the Pug, in just thousands of years, the greater powers of
In the framework of contemporary ecocritical theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Fisiologia del dolore and Upilio Faimali in tension with proanimal essays by Ouida and Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.
that violence has placed around our wrists, demanding our sacrifices and reaffirming its necessity. Notes 1 This point was made by Critchley in a filmed interview with the production Big Think discussing the Psychology of Murder. Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ7noA0zJwk (accessed 10 July 2019). 2 This idea is central to social Darwinism and the development of notions of ‘nature’ that can be scientifically explained and verified. 3 On this, see Foucault’s work on the history of race and how it connects to notions of the
resolve them. Notes 1 We wish to thank World Vision National Office staff who have been invaluable in progressing this concept and acknowledge Dr Jonatan Lassa and Associate Professor Akhilesh Surjan from the Disaster and Emergency Management Programme at Charles Darwin University for their critical support
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows that in January 1939 marines and navy personnel made up more than a third of the American community in Shanghai, and was twice as numerous as any other occupational group. The British arrived on the China coast confident of their moral and cultural superiority over a declining and even degraded civilisation. The book also shows how East Asian history can be illuminated by a similar approach. It suggests that the changing treatment of Christians in nineteenth-century Sichuan was a side effect of the demographic and political upheavals brought about by Qing colonisation of the province in the previous century. The chapter also suggests that the availability of Korean and Taiwanese manpower was of comparable importance to Japanese expansion in East Asia.
Masters and servants explores the politics of colonial mastery and domestic servitude in the neighbouring British tropical colonies of Singapore and Darwin. Like other port cities throughout Southeast Asia, Darwin and Singapore were crossroads where goods, ideas, cultures and people from the surrounding regions mixed and mingled via the steam ships lines. The focus of this book is on how these connections produced a common tropical colonial culture in these sites. A key element of this shared culture was the presence of a multiethnic entourage of domestic servants in colonial homes and a common preference for Chinese ‘houseboys’. Through an exploration of master-servant relationships within British, white Australian and Chinese homes, this book illustrates the centrality of the domestic realm to the colonial project. The colonial home was a contact zone which brought together European colonists, non-white migrants and Indigenous people, most often through the domestic service relationship. Rather than a case of unquestioned mastery and devoted servitude, relationships between masters and servants had the potential not only to affirm but also destabilise the colonial hierarchy. The intimacies, antagonisms and anxieties of the relationships between masters and servants provide critical insights into the dynamics of colonial power with the British empire.
The stereotype of the forward, sexually precocious female botanist made its first appearance in literature in the turbulent revolutionary climate of the 1790s. The emergence of this figure illustrates both the contemporary appeal, particularly to women, of the Linnaean Sexual System of botanical classification, and the anxieties surrounding female modesty that it provoked. This book explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, it discusses British women's engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. The book also explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. It investigates the cultivation of the female mind and its implications for the theories of the feminised discourse of botanical literature. The book also investigates a process of feminisation of botany in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Priscilla Wakefield's letters on botany; these were literary and educational texts addressed specifically to women. Linnaean classification exemplified order, making botany an ideal discipline for young British women in the eighteenth century. Erasmus Darwin's explicit discussion of sexuality related to the aura of illicit sexuality that had surrounded Sir Joseph Banks. Richard Polwhele appropriates Collinsonia's image of the promiscuous female to allude to Mary Wollstonecraft's sexuality, drawing on forward plants in Darwin and Thomas Mathias. The book finally looks at early nineteenth-century debates and demonstrates how scientific botany came into conflict with the craft of floristry.
The Victorian private solider was a despised figure. Yet in the first sixteen months of the Great War two and a half million men from the UK and many more from the empire, flocked to the colours without any form of legal compulsion. This book is the result of reflection on one of the most extraordinary mass movements in history: the surge of volunteers into the British army during the first sixteen months of the Great War. The notion that compulsory service in arms was repugnant to British tradition was mistaken. The nation's general state of mind, system of values and set of attitudes derived largely from the upper middle class, which had emerged and become dominant during the nineteenth century. The book examines the phenomenon of 1914 and the views held by people of that class, since it was under their leadership that the country went to war. It discusses the general theoretical notions of the nature of war of two nineteenth-century thinkers: Karl von Clausewitz and Charles Darwin. By 1914 patriotism and imperialism were interdependent. The early Victorians directed their abundant political energies chiefly towards free trade and parliamentary reform. It was the Germans' own policy which jolted the British into unity, for the Cabinet and the nation were far from unanimously in favour of war until the Germans attacked Belgium. Upper-class intellectual culture was founded on the tradition of 'liberal education' at the greater public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge.
This book has explored the relationship between British colonialism and domestic service in Singapore and Darwin from the 1880s to the 1930s. Darwin was colonised in 1869 with the intention that it would become a bustling port city in the image of Singapore. The British and white Australian residents of the town mimicked the lifestyles of the British in Singapore, donning