'A masterpiece of biography ... a vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great cultural shifts of the modern era' John Gray, New Statesman 'The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through some branch of this sprawling family tree' The Guardian In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the seemingly endless survey mission of HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species, one among many. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and - perhaps above all - as public lecturers, educators and explainers. Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original new book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women. 'This is history with the engaging intimacy of a novel. Bashford brilliantly marries intellectual history with the story of four generations in a literary tour de force' Professor Jim Secord, author of Visions of Science

Contents:
Introduction
Contagion, Modernity and Postmodernity, Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker
Contagion and Cultural Histories of the Modern World
1. The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphore, Margaret Pelling
2. Foreign Bodies: Vaccination, Contagion and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century, Alison Bashford
3. Moral Contagion and the Will: The Crisis of Masculinity in Fin-de-Siécle France, Christopher Forth
4. Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution, Warwick Anderson
5. Leprosy and the Management of Race, Sexuality and Nation in Tropical Australia, Alison Bashford and Maria Nugent
6. Sanitary Failure and Risk: Pasteurisation, Immunisation and the Logics of Prevention, Claire Hooker
Contaminating Capacities in Postmodernity
7. Vulnerable Bodies and Ontological Contamination, Margrit Shildrick
8. A Pig's Tale: Porcine Viruses and Species Boundaries, Marsha Rosengarten
9. Taking the HIV Test: Self-Surveillance and the Making of Heterosexuality, Lisa Adkins
10. The Promiscuous Placenta: Crossing Over, Jane-Maree Maher
11. Carrier - Becoming Symborg, Melinda Rackham

The Cambridge History of Australia offers a comprehensive view of Australian history from its pre-European origins to the present day. Over two volumes, this major work of reference tells the nation's social, political and cultural story. Volume 1 examines Australia's indigenous and colonial history through to the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Volume 2 opens with the birth of the twentieth century, tracing developments in the nation through to the present day. Each volume is divided into two parts. The first part offers a chronological treatment of the period, while the second examines the period in light of key themes, such as law, religion, the economy and the environment. Both volumes feature detailed maps, chronologies and lists of further reading. This is a lively and systematic account of Australia's history, incorporating the work of more than sixty leading historians. It is an ideal work of reference for students, scholars and general readers.

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture.
Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity.
The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth.   This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental sciences? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis? By carefully examining these questions, New Earth Histories sets an ambitious agenda for how we think about the earth.   The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and how empire has been conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse—from cultural history and visual and material studies to ethnography, geography, and Indigenous studies—and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire.

This book examines the coercive and legally sanctioned strategies of exclusion and segregation undertaken over the last two centuries in a wide range of contexts. The political and cultural history of this period raises a number of questions about coercive exclusion. The essays in this collection examine why isolation has been such a persistent strategy in liberal and non-liberal nations, in colonial and post-colonial states and why practices of exclusion proliferated over the modern period, precisely when legal and political concepts of 'freedom' were invented. In addition to offering new perspectives on the continuum of medico-penal sites of isolation from the asylum to the penitentiary, Isolation looks at less well-known sites, from leper villages to refugee camps to Native reserves.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203405226

Oceanic Histories is the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water. Leading historians trace the history of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans and seas, from the Arctic and the Baltic to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea, over the longue duree. Individual chapters trace the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions, with special attention given to the histories of circulation and particularity, the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. Showcasing oceanic history as a field with a long past and a vibrant future, these authoritative surveys, original arguments and guides to research make this volume an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike.

Oceanic Histories is the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water. Leading historians trace the history of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans and seas, from the Arctic and the Baltic to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea, over the longue duree. Individual chapters trace the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions, with special attention given to the histories of circulation and particularity, the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. Showcasing oceanic history as a field with a long past and a vibrant future, these authoritative surveys, original arguments and guides to research make this volume an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike.

Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon that informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states, to feminist ambitions for birth control, to public health campaigns, to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust: the popularity of eugenics in Japan, for example, comes as a surprise. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research in what has become a sprawling but ever more important field. Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as part of the question of how experts think about the connections between biology, human capacity and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, where the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making. This volume offers both a nineteenth-century context for understanding the emergence of eugenics and a consideration of contemporary manifestations of, and relationships to eugenics. It is the definitive text for students and researchers to consult for careful and up-to-date summaries, new substantive fields where very little work is currently available (e.g. eugenics in Iran, South Africa, and South East Asia); transnational thematic lines of inquiry; the integration of literature on colonialism; and connections to contemporary issues.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Australia explores Australia's history from ancient times through to Federation in 1901. It begins with an archaeological examination of the continent's Indigenous history, which dates back 50,000 years. This volume examines the first European encounters with Australia and its Indigenous people, and the subsequent colonisation of the land by the British in the late eighteenth century, providing insight into the realities of a convict society and how this shaped the nation's development. Part I traces the dynamic growth in Australia's economy, demography and industry throughout the nineteenth century, as it moved towards a system of liberal democracy and one of the most defining events in its history: the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Part II offers a deeper investigation of key topics, such as relations between Indigenous people and settlers, and Australia's colonial identity. It also covers the economy, science and technology, law and literature.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Australia covers the period 1901 to the present day. It begins with the first day of the twentieth century, which saw the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia. In Part I the fortunes of the nation-state are traced over time: a narrative of national policies, from the initial endeavours to protect Australian living standards to the dismantling of protection, and from maintenance of the integrity of a white settler society to fashioning a diverse, multicultural one. These chapters relate how Australia responded to external challenges and adapted to changing expectations. In Part II some distinctive features of modern Australia are clarified: its enduring democracy and political stability, engagement with a unique environment, the means whereby Australians maintained prosperity, the treatment and aspirations of its Indigenous inhabitants. The changing patterns of social relations are examined, along with the forms of knowledge, religion, communication and creativity.

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the "population bomb" in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both "earth" and "life." Global Population traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet's surface came deeply to shape the characterization of "civilizations" with different standards of living. It forged the very ideas of development, demographically defined three worlds, and, for some, an aspirational "one world." Drawing on international conference transcripts and personal and organizational archives, this book reconstructs the twentieth-century population problem in terms of migration, colonial expansion, globalization, and world food plans. Population was a problem in which international relations and intimate relations were one. Global Population ultimately shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas. They explore what the Atlantic and Pacific new worlds--from the Americas and the Caribbean to New Zealand and Tahiti--meant to Malthus, and how he treated them in his Essay. Bashford and Chaplin reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust. Elegantly written and forcefully argued, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus relocates Malthus's Essay from the British economic and social context that has dominated its reputation to the colonial and global history that inspired its genesis.

A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth.   This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental sciences? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis? By carefully examining these questions, New Earth Histories sets an ambitious agenda for how we think about the earth.   The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and how empire has been conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse—from cultural history and visual and material studies to ethnography, geography, and Indigenous studies—and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire.

'A masterpiece of biography ... a vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great cultural shifts of the modern era' John Gray, New Statesman 'The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through some branch of this sprawling family tree' The Guardian In his early twenties, poor, racked with depression, stranded in the Coral Sea on the seemingly endless survey mission of HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves. In innumerable fields observing both nature and culture, they worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and - perhaps above all - as public lecturers, educators and explainers. Their speciality was evolution in all its forms - at the grandest level of species, deep time, the Earth, and at the most personal and intimate. They shaped great organizations - the Natural History Museum, Imperial College, the London Zoo, UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund - and they shaped fundamentally how we see ourselves, as individuals and as a species, one among many. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's marvellously engaging and original new book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women. 'This is history with the engaging intimacy of a novel. Bashford brilliantly marries intellectual history with the story of four generations in a literary tour de force' Professor Jim Secord, author of Visions of Science

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the "population bomb" in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both "earth" and "life."

"Global Population" traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet's surface came deeply to shape the characterization of "civilizations" with different standards of living. It forged the very ideas of development, demographically defined three worlds, and, for some, an aspirational "one world."

Drawing on international conference transcripts and personal and organizational archives, this book reconstructs the twentieth-century population problem in terms of migration, colonial expansion, globalization, and world food plans. Population was a problem in which international relations and intimate relations were one. Global Population ultimately shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.

Winner of the Cantemir Prize of the Berendel Foundation Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research. Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts attempted to connect biology, human capacity, and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, in which the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making.

The Cambridge History of Australia offers a comprehensive view of Australian history from its pre-European origins to the present day. Over two volumes, this major work of reference tells the nation's social, political and cultural story. Volume 1 examines Australia's indigenous and colonial history through to the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Volume 2 opens with the birth of the twentieth century, tracing developments in the nation through to the present day. Each volume is divided into two parts. The first part offers a chronological treatment of the period, while the second examines the period in light of key themes, such as law, religion, the economy and the environment. Both volumes feature detailed maps, chronologies and lists of further reading. This is a lively and systematic account of Australia's history, incorporating the work of more than sixty leading historians. It is the ideal work of reference for students, scholars and general readers.

The first comprehensive account to place the Pacific Islands, the Pacific Rim and the Pacific Ocean into the perspective of world history. A distinguished international team of historians provides a multidimensional account of the Pacific, its inhabitants and the lands within and around it over 50,000 years, with special attention to the peoples of Oceania. It providing chronological coverage along with analyses of themes such as the environment, migration and the economy; religion, law and science; race, gender and politics.