Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Archaeology in Oceania

Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds.

Article Excerpt
Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds By David W. Steadman University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2006. ISBN 0-226-77141-5, US$110 (hb); 0-226-77142-3, US$45 (pb), Pp. 594.

During his eight-year stay in the Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russell Wallace killed and collected 125,660 specimens of natural history, including more than 8000 birds of more than 1000 species (on average about three birds every day). In the 19th century, taxonomic biology was an important scientific discipline, associated with the extractive enterprise of empire. The extraction of knowledge, indigenous people and natural resources was accompanied by a widely-held view of the periphery as existing unchanged for millennia until the arrival of European science and industry. Victorian-era civilization, it was believed, had the physical means, moral determination and intellectual capacity to alter the culture and religion of distant peoples, while the economic needs of the industrialized metropolises inevitably caused environmental change, species extinction and societal collapse far from the great centres of science and commerce. The great biologists of the 19th century such as Wallace, Bates, Darwin and Hooker were in the vanguard of globalisation because in a rapidly transforming world they had to be. And, since non-European indigenous people were conceived as...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!