Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains
Author: Mark A. Ragan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 857
Release: 2023
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0197643035

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains explores the history of the idea that there is more to the living world than plants and animals. Progressing chronologically through philosophical, religious, literary, and other pre-scientific traditions, leading molecular systematist Mark A. Ragan traces how transgressive creatures such as sponges, corals, algae, fungi, and diverse microscopic beings have been described, categorized, and understood throughout history. The book also explores how the concept of a "third kingdom of life" evolved within the fields of scientific botany and zoology, and continues to evolve up to the present day.

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains
Author: Mark A. Ragan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Biology
ISBN: 9780197643051

"This work explores how living organisms have been classified at the highest level. The earliest ideas of nature emphasised transformation. Aristotle recognised that certain objects in the sea share properties of plants and animals; these became known as zoophytes. The narrative follows zoophytes and other transgressive beings through subsequent philosophical and religious traditions, myths, travellers' tales, the occult literature, alchemy, scholasticism, the consolidation of vernacular languages, and the rise of scientific botany and zoology. Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microscopic beings, and Trembley studies on Hydra, complicated the plant-animal dichotomy. Transformation returned as Needham, Buffon and others observed plant material to generate motile animalcules; Linnaeus proposed a Regnum Chaoticum. New challenges arose as the Great Chain of Being was abandoned, algae were observed to liberate free-swimming zoospores, and cell theory was refined. Biology developed differently in France, Germany and Britain, and we follow the rise and fall of supernumerary kingdoms in each environment. Haeckel positioned Protista as one of two, three or four kingdoms. In the Twentieth century the living world was divided between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, while mitochondria and plastids were recognised as descendants of endosymbiotic bacteria. Molecular evidence revealed three domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukaryota), although many genomes are linked in a dynamic network of genetic relationships. Environmental genomes now threaten to undermine Eukaryota as an independent domain of life"--

Five Kingdoms

Five Kingdoms
Author: Lynn Margulis
Publisher: Henry Holt
Total Pages: 520
Release: 1998
Genre: Biology
ISBN: 9780716730279

An all-inclusive catalogue of the world's living diversity, Five Kingdoms defines and describes the major divisions, or phyla, of nature's five great kingdoms - bacteria, protoctists, animals, fungi, and plants - using a modern classification scheme that is consistent with both the fossil record and molecular data. Generously illustrated and remarkably easy to follow, it not only allows readers to sample the full range of life forms inhabiting our planet but to familiarize themselves with the taxonomic theories by which all organisms' origins and distinctive characteristics are traced and classified.

Visions of Empire

Visions of Empire
Author: Krishan Kumar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691192804

"In this extraordinary volume, Krishan Kumar provides us with a brilliant tour of some of history's most important empires, demonstrating the critical importance of imperial ideas and ideologies for understanding their modalities of rule and the conflicts that beset them. In doing so, he interrogates the contested terrain between nationalism and empire and the legacies that empires leave behind."--Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University "This is an excellent book with original insights into the history of empires and the discourses and rhetoric of their rulers and defenders. Kumar's writing is lively and free of jargon, and his research is prodigious. He manages to bring clarity and perspective to a complex subject."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide "A masterly piece of work."--Anthony Pagden, author of The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present

The Trouble with Empire

The Trouble with Empire
Author: Antoinette M. Burton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199936609

While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism. The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life. By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period 1840-1955, Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.0.

Visible Empire

Visible Empire
Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226058530

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia

Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia
Author: Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316347885

The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BCE) was a vast and complex sociopolitical structure that encompassed much of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and included two dozen distinct peoples who spoke different languages, worshipped different deities, lived in different environments and had widely differing social customs. This book offers a radical new approach to understanding the Achaemenid Persian Empire and imperialism more generally. Through a wide array of textual, visual and archaeological material, Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre shows how the rulers of the Empire constructed a system flexible enough to provide for the needs of different peoples within the confines of a single imperial authority and highlights the variability in response. This book examines the dynamic tensions between authority and autonomy across the Empire, providing a valuable new way of considering imperial structure and development.

Mythras (Hardback)

Mythras (Hardback)
Author: Pete Nash
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-02-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781989028155

Mythras Core rules Mythras is the acclaimed roleplaying game from The Design Mechanism. For those new to the game, Mythras is a straightforward, roll-under percentile system. In Mythras your characters are defined by their culture, career, community, background, comrades, skills, magic and cults. Progression is through skill advancement - not levels or similarly abstract concepts. As your characters adventure and quest, their capabilities improve and their relationships deepen and strengthen. Players and Games Masters have complete flexibility over what can be achieved, and the way characters develop is entirely dependent on choices players make, depending on their characters' aspirations and motivations. Games Masters receive a huge amount of support through the Mythras rules. All the concepts and game mechanics are explained clearly with options and considerations explored and presented for ease of use. You need only this rulebook for many years of exciting and imaginative play. Mythras contains everything needed for play, except for dice and friends. It includes five magic systems, innovative combat, over 60 creatures, and copious guidance on how to use the rules and run Mythras games! Come and try one of the best roleplaying systems around...

Dividing the Spoils

Dividing the Spoils
Author: Robin Waterfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199931526

A gripping account of one of the great forgotten wars of history, revealing how Alexander the Great's vast empire was torn asunder in the years after his death

Liberalism in Empire

Liberalism in Empire
Author: Andrew Sartori
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2014-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520281683

While the need for a history of liberalism that goes beyond its conventional European limits is well recognized, the agrarian backwaters of the British Empire might seem an unlikely place to start. Yet specifically liberal preoccupations with property and freedom evolved as central to agrarian policy and politics in colonial Bengal.Ê Liberalism in Empire explores the generative crisis in understanding propertyÕs role in the constitution of a liberal polity, which intersected in Bengal with a new politics of peasant independence based on practices of commodity exchange. Thus the conditions for a new kind of vernacular liberalism were created. Andrew SartoriÕs examination shows the workings of a section of liberal policy makers and agrarian leaders who insisted that norms governing agrarian social relations be premised on the property-constituting powers of labor, which opened a new conceptual space for appeals to both political economy and the normative significance of property. It is conventional to see liberalism as traveling through the space of empire with the extension of colonial institutions and intellectual networks. SartoriÕs focus on the Lockeanism of agrarian discourses of property, however, allows readers to grasp how liberalism could serve as a normative framework for both a triumphant colonial capitalism and a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of peasant property.