Roy M. MacLeod

The First World War is often called the ‘chemists’ war’. But few realise precisely how, or the extent to which modern chemistry became a significant factor in the struggle, and would be in turn deeply shaped by it. Gathering momentum at first, by 1916, success in applying scientific knowledge to ‘frontline and factory’ became a measure of a nation’s capacity to win an industrial war. In the end, the titanic contest was won in large part through the command of raw materials and industrial output. This book represents a first considered attempt to study the factors that conditioned industrial chemistry for war in1914-18. Taking a comparative perspective, it reflects on the experience of France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Britain, Italy and Russia, and points to significant similarities and differences. It looks at changing patterns in the organisation of industry, and at the emerging symbiosis between science, industry and the military, which contributed to the first ‘academic-military-industrial’ complex of the 20th century. At the same time, it reflects on the world’s first, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to monitor ‘dual-use’ chemical technologies, and so restrict the proliferation of an important category of weapons of mass destruction.

Fired by Darwinian ideas, nineteenth-century naturalists within and around the Pacific rim worked to further Darwin's programs in their own research: in Seattle, conchologist P. Brooks Randolph; in Honolulu, evolutionist John Thomas Gulick; in Adelaide, botanist Richard Schomburgk; and in Malaysia, biogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace. Lesser-known enthusiasts furnished Darwin with fresh material and replied to his endless inquiries, while young aspiring biologists from Cambridge tested Darwinian ideas directly in the "laboratory" of the Pacific. But the implications of Darwinism for the understanding of human nature and history turned it into a public theory as well as a scientific one. Anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, politicians, and social commentators - from Australia to Japan - all found ways to adapt Darwinism to their own agendas. Darwin's Laboratory demonstrates the variety and richness of Darwinian ideas in the Pacific and, in so doing, shows how the region functioned as a testing ground for the theory of evolution. Further, it illustrates how Darwinian ideas and their European contexts helped invent and define the particular conception we have of the Pacific. Both the general reader and the specialist will find controversy, illumination, and entertainment in this, the first book to probe the extent of Darwinism and Darwinian thinking in the Pacific. No scientific traveler was more influenced by the Pacific than Charles Darwin, and his legacy in the region remains unparalleled. Yet the extent of the Pacific's impact on the thought of Darwin and those who followed him has not been sufficiently grasped. In this volume of essays, sixteen scholars explore the many dimensions - biological, geological, anthropological, social, and political - of Darwinism in the Pacific.