The Family of Man: Cosmopolitanism and the Huxleys, 1850-1950

This essay considers the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and his twentieth-century grandson Julian Huxley as cosmopolitans. Perhaps their foundational shared question was how to comprehend human unity and human difference, both biologically and politically; how to comprehend humans as one. Both Huxleys insisted on the singularity of the human species, but as evolutionary theorists insisted also on individual biological variation and distinction. For this reason, they offer the opportunity to consider the history of cosmopolitanism alongside the intellectual history of thought on species, and on the species: Homo sapiens. They were both deeply engaged with the idea of human unity—variously biological, cultural, political—while remaining confident about their own epistemological privilege and capacity to pronounce on humanity as a whole. The history of cosmopolitanism is ill-served by attempts to pinpoint the truest, purest, exponents. The Huxleys’ flawed metropolitan cosmopolitanism was perhaps the commonest sort in practice

Diphtheria and Australian public health: bacteriology and its complex applications, c. 1890-1930.

During the 1890s, the childhood infectious disease of diphtheria became closely identified with the emerging science of bacteriology and the new laboratory-based public health.' Along with the organisms causing typhoid fever and tuberculosis, the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus was one of the earliest to be clearly isolated (in 1883) and causally linked to disease. Compared with other illnesses, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria had a clear bacteriological presence and an apparently simple mode of action, and, despite ongoing debate over the laboratory data in the 1880s and 1890s, many physicians and public health officials saw possibilities for engineered intervention into its spread and progress. Particularly after the widely-publicized failure of tuberculin in the early 1890s, and the success of antitoxin therapy for diphtheria from 1894, the management of diphtheria came to stand for new bacteriological modes of infectious disease control and prevention. For example, in 1896 a contributor to the Journal of State Medicine wrote: "Preventive Medicine has become more and more lost in Bacteriology. To many a micro-organism is allsufficient; they would summarily dispose of Diphtheria in three simple steps-examine all mouths, find Klebs-Loeffier bacillus, isolate the subject"

Terraqueous Histories

In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world historians well. The term returns the ‘globe’ to global history, it signals sea as well as land as claimable territory, and in its compound construction foregrounds the history and historiography of meeting places. If the Vere Harmsworth Chair of Imperial and Naval History has recently turned from ‘imperial’ into ‘world’ history, so might its ‘naval’ element become terraqueous history in the twenty-first century.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X1600043

‘Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland’

Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland’s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, ‘Gondwana’ has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This prospectus sets out a program for a highly unusual ‘transnational’ project, involving scholars of India, Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa and South America. Unpredictably across the five continents of former Gondwanaland, the term itself signals depth of time and place across the spectrum of Indigenous land politics, coal-based extractive politics, and, paradoxically, nationalist environmental politics. All kinds of once-living Gondwanaland biota deliver us fossil fuels today – the ‘gifts of Gondwana’ some geologists call southern hemisphere coal, gas, petroleum – and so the modern history of Gondwanaland is also a substantive history of the Anthropocene

Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney

Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites encompass multivalent histories of defence, quarantine, immigration and leisure. Both also host a continuum of mark-making practices, from informal graffiti to monuments aspiring to direct national narratives. Elaborating the rich and complex layering of histories at each site, we trace the semiotic and emotive circuits marked by their endorsed and vernacular inscriptions. In particular, we question the work done when individual or even surreptitious texts are appropriated – or marketed – within formal narratives of inclusiveness, reverence and homogeneous nationalism. Drawing upon scholarship from archaeology, history, geography and heritage studies, this analysis argues that formalised commemoration never escapes the potential for counter-readings – that authority and authorship never entirely coincide

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family

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