Science in the British Colonies of America
Author: Raymond Phineas Stearns
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1970
Total Pages: 822
ISBN-13: 9780252001208
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American Curiosity
Author: Susan Scott Parrish
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2012-12-01
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 0807838896
DOWNLOAD EBOOKColonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.
Science and Colonial Expansion
Author: Lucile H. Brockway
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2002-01-01
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780300091434
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis widely acclaimed book analyzes the political effects of scientific research as exemplified by one field, economic botany, during one epoch, the nineteenth century, when Great Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Lucile Brockway examines how the British botanic garden network developed and transferred economically important plants to different parts of the world to promote the prosperity of the Empire. In this classic work, available once again after many years out of print, Brockway examines in detail three cases in which British scientists transferred important crop plants--cinchona (a source of quinine), rubber and sisal--to new continents. Weaving together botanical, historical, economic, political, and ethnographic findings, the author illuminates the remarkable social role of botany and the entwined relation between science and politics in an imperial era.
Science at the End of Empire
Author: Sabine Clarke
Publisher: Studies in Imperialism
Published: 2018-09-05
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 9781526131386
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is open access under a CC BY license. This is the first account of Britain's plans for industrial development in its Caribbean colonies - something that historians have usually said Britain never contemplated. It shows that Britain's remedy to the poor economic conditions in the Caribbean gave a key role to laboratory research to re-invent sugarcane as the raw material for making fuels, plastics and drugs. Science at the end of empire explores the practical and also political functions of scientific research and economic advisors for Britain at a moment in which Caribbean governments operated with increasing autonomy and the US was intent on expanding its influence in the region. Britain's preferred path to industrial development was threatened by an alternative promoted through the Caribbean Commission. The provision of knowledge and expertise became key routes by which Britain and America competed to shape the future of the region, and their place in it.
Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire
Author: Sarah Irving
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-09-30
Total Pages: 198
ISBN-13: 1317315227
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRepresents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.
Colonialism in Global Perspective
Author: Kris Manjapra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-05-07
Total Pages: 291
ISBN-13: 1108425267
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.
Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776
Author: Robert V. Wells
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-03-08
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 1400871735
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book Robert V. Wells presents an exhaustive survey of recently discovered census data covering 21 American colonies between 1623 and 1775. He thus provides the first full-scale determination of basic demographic patterns in all parts of England's empire in America before 1776. Following an examination of the adequacy of the censuses, the author describes the population patterns of each colony for which a census is available. He presents information on size and growth of population; race, age, and sex composition; degree of freedom; household size and composition; marital status; military manpower; and birth and death rates. He concludes by describing important variations in demographic patterns from one part of the empire to another and the possible significance of those differences. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers
Author: Allan Kulikoff
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-02-01
Total Pages: 501
ISBN-13: 0807860786
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.
The History of the Thirteen Colonies of North America, 1497-1763
Author: Reginald Welbury Jeffery
Publisher: London : Methuen
Published: 1908
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican States of Nature
Author: Mark Somos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-01
Total Pages: 509
ISBN-13: 0190909560
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican States of Nature transforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term "state of nature" played a crucial role. "State of nature" typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, "state of nature" appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. In this groundbreaking book, Mark Somos focuses on the formative decade and a half just before the American Revolution. Somos' investigation begins with a 1761 speech by James Otis that John Adams described as "a dissertation on the state of nature," and celebrated as the real start of the Revolution. Drawing on an enormous range of both public and personal writings, many rarely or never before discussed, the book follows the development of America's state-of-nature discourse to 1775. The founding generation transformed this flexible concept into a powerful theme that shapes their legacy to this day. No constitutional history of the Revolution can be written without it.
