Internationalism and Empire: British Dilemmas, 1919-1939

These lectures were given as the James Ford Lectures in British History at Oxford University in the Spring of 2014. They incorporate material that was later included in my book, "The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire", which was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. That book is a history of the origins and workings of the mandates system of the League of Nations and its impact on the international and imperial order as a whole. These lectures concentrate more narrowly on Britain’s involvement in the construction of that system and on its unexpected effects on British strategy and power. The fourth lecture, on British dilemmas around the Italo-Ethiopian crisis, has not been published elsewhere; the third lecture (and to a lesser degree the first and sixth lectures) also incorporate material not found in that book. A fully international account of all the themes discussed can be found in The Guardians

Dilemmas of a Liberal Descent -- or, the Ladies Vanish

This is a talk about the difficulties the genre of political biography poses for historians writing about a female subject. It discusses the detective work I undertook to recover the ways a number of forgotten women -- her mother, her sister, and her lifelong partner, Elizabeth Macadam -- facilitated Eleanor Rathbone's political and parliamentary career, and discusses why both Rathbone and Macadam sought to disguise the importance of that collaboration. It also reflects on the subterfuges biographers themselves resort to (and that I certainly resorted to) when trying to recover personal material

Women and the Quest for Equal Citizenship: The Eleanor Rathbone Social Justice Lecture, 2016

This lecture looks back to Eleanor Rathbone's thinking about the roots of gender inequality. Women's disadvantage, she argued, stemmed almost entirely from society's unwillingness to value, economically and morally, the work of care -- work that is typically done by women. It then turns to the course of social policy in recent decades, showing how the Anglo-American drive to prioritize wage-earning while still neglecting the problem of care has left women and children still disproportionately poor. It then looks at three main proposals offered to compensate better for the work of care and thus to combat women carers' systematic disadvantage. It concludes by challenging our tendency to identify market-rationality with morality, and points to Rathbone's own commitment to Kantian principles as a better moral framework

National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politicsof Colonial Policy-making

This analysis of the Kikuyu female circumcision controversy of the 1920s discusses how issues of sexual practice and sexual order proved useful vehicles for both Kenyan nationalist, and British nationalist and imperialist, agendas. The complex and acrimonious debate brought ideals of cultural self-expression, women's rights, and imperial hegemony into open conflict. On its most overt level, the debate in Britain shows how the tensions between feminist, imperialist, and nationalist interests could immobilize individuals and fragment campaigns. It can also help us to understand these early twentieth-century Britons' conception of female sexuality and, more broadly, of the place of women in national life

From National Crisis to "National Crisis": British Politics, 1914-1931

Reviews of National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926-1932 by Philip Williamson; The British General Election of 1931 by Andrew Thorpe; and British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915-1918 by John Turner

Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England

A discussion of the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts, published in 1795-98, as a broad evangelical assault on late eighteenth-century popular culture

Xyloglucan is released by plants and promotes soil particle aggregation

Soil is a crucial component of the biosphere and is a major sink for organic carbon. Plant roots are known to release a wide range of carbon-based compounds into soils, including polysaccharides, but the functions of these are not known in detail. Using a monoclonal antibody to plant cell wall xyloglucan, we show that this polysaccharide is secreted by a wide range of angiosperm roots, and relatively abundantly by grasses. It is also released from the rhizoids of liverworts, the earliest diverging lineage of land plants. Using analysis of water-stable aggregate size, dry dispersion particle analysis and scanning electron microscopy, we show that xyloglucan is effective in increasing soil particle aggregation, a key factor in the formation and function of healthy soils. To study the possible roles of xyloglucan in the formation of soils, we analysed the xyloglucan contents of mineral soils of known age exposed upon the retreat of glaciers. These glacial forefield soils had significantly higher xyloglucan contents than detected in a UK grassland soil. We propose that xyloglucan released from plant rhizoids/roots is an effective soil particle aggregator and may, in this role, have been important in the initial colonization of land

A 16S rRNA gene and draft genome database for the murine oral bacterial community

A curated murine oral microbiome database to be used as a reference for mouse-based studies has been constructed using a combination of bacterial culture, 16S rRNA gene amplicon, and whole-genome sequencing. The database comprises a collection of nearly full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences from cultured isolates and draft genomes from representative taxa collected from a range of sources, including specific-pathogen-free laboratory mice, wild Mus musculus domesticus mice, and formerly wild wood mouse Apodemus sylvaticus. At present, it comprises 103 mouse oral taxa (MOT) spanning four phyla—Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes—including 12 novel undescribed species-level taxa. The key observations from this study are (i) the low diversity and predominantly culturable nature of the laboratory mouse oral microbiome and (ii) the identification of three major murine-specific oral bacterial lineages, namely, Streptococcus danieliae (MOT10), Lactobacillus murinus (MOT93), and Gemella species 2 (MOT43), which is one of the novel, still-unnamed taxa. Of these, S. danieliae is of particular interest, since it is a major component of the oral microbiome from all strains of healthy and periodontally diseased laboratory mice, as well as being present in wild mice. It is expected that this well-characterized database should be a useful resource for in vitro experimentation and mouse model studies in the field of oral microbiology

Biological conversion assay using Clostridium phytofermentans to estimate plant feedstock quality

BACKGROUND: There is currently considerable interest in developing renewable sources of energy. One strategy is the biological conversion of plant biomass to liquid transportation fuel. Several technical hurdles impinge upon the economic feasibility of this strategy, including the development of energy crops amenable to facile deconstruction. Reliable assays to characterize feedstock quality are needed to measure the effects of pre-treatment and processing and of the plant and microbial genetic diversity that influence bioconversion efficiency. RESULTS: We used the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium phytofermentans to develop a robust assay for biomass digestibility and conversion to biofuels. The assay utilizes the ability of the microbe to convert biomass directly into ethanol with little or no pre-treatment. Plant samples were added to an anaerobic minimal medium and inoculated with C. phytofermentans, incubated for 3 days, after which the culture supernatant was analyzed for ethanol concentration. The assay detected significant differences in the supernatant ethanol from wildtype sorghum compared with brown midrib sorghum mutants previously shown to be highly digestible. Compositional analysis of the biomass before and after inoculation suggested that differences in xylan metabolism were partly responsible for the differences in ethanol yields. Additionally, we characterized the natural genetic variation for conversion efficiency in Brachypodium distachyon and shrub willow (Salix spp.). CONCLUSION: Our results agree with those from previous studies of lignin mutants using enzymatic saccharification-based approaches. However, the use of C. phytofermentans takes into consideration specific organismal interactions, which will be crucial for simultaneous saccharification fermentation or consolidated bioprocessing. The ability to detect such phenotypic variation facilitates the genetic analysis of mechanisms underlying plant feedstock quality

Glucose tolerance is associated with differential expression of microRNAs in skeletal muscle: results from studies of twins with and without type 2 diabetes.

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: We aimed to identify microRNAs (miRNAs) associated with type 2 diabetes and risk of developing the disease in skeletal muscle biopsies from phenotypically well-characterised twins. METHODS: We measured muscle miRNA levels in monozygotic (MZ) twins discordant for type 2 diabetes using arrays. Further investigations of selected miRNAs included target prediction, pathway analysis, silencing in cells and association analyses in a separate cohort of 164 non-diabetic MZ and dizygotic twins. The effects of elevated glucose and insulin levels on miRNA expression were examined, and the effect of low birthweight (LBW) was studied in rats. RESULTS: We identified 20 miRNAs that were downregulated in MZ twins with diabetes compared with their non-diabetic co-twins. Differences for members of the miR-15 family (miR-15b and miR-16) were the most statistically significant, and these miRNAs were predicted to influence insulin signalling. Indeed, miR-15b and miR-16 levels were associated with levels of key insulin signalling proteins, miR-15b was associated with the insulin receptor in non-diabetic twins and knockdown of miR-15b/miR-16 in myocytes changed the levels of insulin signalling proteins. LBW in twins and undernutrition during pregnancy in rats were, in contrast to overt type 2 diabetes, associated with increased expression of miR-15b and/or miR-16. Elevated glucose and insulin suppressed miR-16 expression in vitro. CONCLUSIONS: Type 2 diabetes is associated with non-genetic downregulation of several miRNAs in skeletal muscle including miR-15b and miR-16, potentially targeting insulin signalling. The paradoxical findings in twins with overt diabetes and twins at increased risk of the disease underscore the complexity of the regulation of muscle insulin signalling in glucose homeostasis.JB-J was supported by a grant from the Danish PhD School for Molecular Metabolism. The study was supported by grants from the Danish Medical Research Council, the Danish Strategic Research Council. The Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. DSF-T was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council project grant BB/F-15364/1. SEO is a British Heart Foundation Senior Fellow (FS/09/029/27902).This is the final version of the article. It was first published by Springer at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00125-014-3434-