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The carbon balance of an 80 yr old deciduous oak plantation in the temperate oceanic climate of the south-east of Britain was measured by eddy covariance over 12 yr (1999-2010). The mean annual net ecosystem productivity (NEP) was 486 gCm-2y-1 (95% CI of ±73 gCm-2 y-1 ), and this was partitioned into a Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) of 2034±145 gCm-2 y-1, over a 165 (±6) day growing season, and an annual loss of carbon through respiration and decomposition (ecosystem respiration, Reco) of 1548±122 gCm-2 y-1. The interannual variation of NEP was large (coefficient of variation (CV) 23%), although the variation for GPP and Reco was smaller (12%) and the ratio of Reco/GPP was relatively constant (0.76±0.02 CI). Some anomalies in the annual patterns of the carbon balance could be linked to particular combinations of anomalous weather events, such as high summer air temperature and low soil moisture content. The Europe-wide heat-wave and drought of 2003 had little effect on the C balance of this woodland on a surface water gley soil. Annual variation in precipitation (CV 18%) was not a main factor in the variation in NEP. The inter-annual variation in estimated intercepted radiation only accounted for ∼ 47% of the variation in GPP, although a significant relationship (p < 0.001) was found between peak leaf area index and annual GPP which in turn played an important role in modifying the efficiency with which incident radiation was used in net CO2 uptake. Whilst the spring start and late autumn end of the net CO2 uptake period varied substantially (range of 24 and 27 days, respectively), annual GPP was not related to growing season length. Severe outbreaks of defoliating moth caterpillars, mostly Tortrix viridana L. and Operophtera brumata L., caused considerable damage to the forest canopy in 2009 and 2010, resulting in reduced GPP in these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing principally upon a rich vein of previously unexploited business records, this paper analyses the experience of British firms in Indonesia between the achievement of independence and the beginnings of the Suharto regime. As in The Netherlands East Indies, British enterprises occupied a significant position in post-colonial Indonesia in plantations, oil extraction, shipping, banking, the import-export trade, and manufacturing. After the nationalization of Dutch businesses from the end of 1957, Britain emerged as the leading investing power in the archipelago alongside the United States. However, during Indonesia's Confrontation with British-backed Malaysia (1963–1966), most UK-owned companies in the islands were subject to a series of torrid (albeit temporary) takeovers by the trade unions and subsequently various government authorities. Most of these investments were returned to British ownership under Suharto after 1967. But, in surviving the Sukarno era, British firms had endured 15 years of increasing inconvenience and insecurity trapped in a power struggle within Indonesia's perplexing plural polity (and particularly between the Communist Party and the military). Indeed, the Konfrontasi takeovers themselves, varying in intensity from region to region and from firm to firm, were indicative of deep fissures within Indonesian administration and politics. The unpredictable and unsettled political economy of post-colonial Indonesia meant that the balance of advantage lay not with transnational enterprise but with the host state and society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents survey evidence concerning the UK poplar (Populus spp.) plantation with particular emphasis applied to production systems, markets, and trends. Our results are based on primary data and information that were sourced from a survey of poplar growers in summer 2000. The results show a growing interest in planting poplars throughout the 1990s. Between 1989 and 1998, poplar plantations were established mainly on land previously used for arable purposes and pastureland, and to a lesser extent, on other lands. Growers perceive that a robust value-added market for poplar products may be developed providing poplar cultivars are properly managed. The most common interamericana clones planted are the varieties Beaupré and Boelare. Specifically, plantation sites are currently using the polyclonal system and are growing on sites that have a diversity (mixture) of other forest species. Loss of resistance to disease organisms (e.g., rust fungi of the genus Melampsora) appears to be one of the main current threats to successful poplar exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pests and diseases are an existential threat to trees in forests and woodlands. There is, therefore, a pressing need to use ecological and bioeconomic models to inform forest managers on control and mitigation strategies. For example, the incidence of Dothistroma needle blight in the UK has increased rapidly since the 1990s, and it is a significant threat to the productivity of commercial forestry. Climatic changes are expected to exacerbate this problem further. Control of the disease in the UK primarily focuses on good stand management through pre-commercial thinning; similar practices are widely used in commercial forests worldwide. Forest managers would benefit from evidence on the effectiveness of this precautionary strategy (in comparison to its alternatives) to reduce disease impacts and increase the value extracted from timber. In this paper, we develop a bioeconomic model to determine the economically optimal harvesting regime – in terms of thinning and rotation – of an even-aged plantation under the risk of an invading pest. We extend a Schaefer–Faustmann model to include a compartmental epidemiological system that governs timber growth and disease spread. We analyse a set of management regimes, including the timing of the final clear-felling of the forest and the timing and level of earlier thinning. Thus, in our approach, forest managers decide whether and when to thin and must balance (i) harvesting before infection destroys the timber's value and (ii) exploiting the forest's density-dependent growth. We use a sensitivity analysis with respect to the disease spread and impact on the tree dynamics to demonstrate that, in the presence of disease, thinning can significantly improve the net present value of the plantation if applied correctly. Furthermore, if thinning reduces the transmission rate significantly, the priority is to protect the final harvest, and rotations extend while the thinning time shortens. Our study provides a framework to help design appropriate forest management strategies in the presence of disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera has influenced popular culture since its debut. Its 1729 sequel, Polly, has been understudied by literary critics, perhaps because of its suppression in Gay's lifetime. However, Polly offers scholars new views on British imperialism before an active abolition movement in Britain. Gay confronts the evils of colonialism through his theatrical use of disguise. While other Caribbean plays of the period allow white characters to reinvent themselves abroad, in Polly disguise only intensifies the self, while the higher stakes of plantation space are where the characters meet the fates originally designated for them in The Beggar's Opera. Although the play contains a slave rebellion and many white characters referred to as slaves, the absence of actual Black characters suggests an inability to deal directly with the effects of chattel slavery on Britain and its victims as well as the impossibility of Black guilt in a system that otherwise indicts all participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1897 British Friends established the first African mission corporately endorsed by Britain Yearly Meeting--a commercial clove plantation employing freed slaves on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania. Rather than following existing missionary models which focused on conversion, education, and health, Quakers attempted an enterprising approach, developing an ' industrial mission' which could become financially self-sustaining. However, lacking experience on the African continent, with ambivalent support from Friends in Britain, and little engagement with the needs and desires of the freed slaves, meant that Quaker missionaries were not successful in winning converts nor in creating a sustainable plantation. This paper argues that the possibility for Quakers to bring something new and beneficial to the missionary field was mostly unachieved. Further, Friends may even have contributed to the power structures which stopped freed slaves from becoming truly liberated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Dent's political satire titled Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man the Master has been uniformly categorized as a proslavery cartoon. However, elements of the visual satire invoked by the image invite a critique of the institution of slavery that tacitly endorses some abolitionist arguments. This article more fully situates Dent's caricature in the specific historical moment of its publication as a response to both the abolitionists opposed to the slave trade and the advocates propounding the great benefits of plantation slavery. Thus, the politics of the cartoon are more complex than the term proslavery implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common dormouse is a European protected species that is considered at risk during forest management operations in the UK. Historically, they were believed to exist principally in scrub and broadleaved woodlands, especially hazel coppice, but recent evidence has shown that they are present in some conifer sites at low density. Operations to restore conifer plantations on ancient woodland sites (PAWS) with native broadleaves may be especially hazardous to dormice populations, since dormouse densities are generally lower here so sudden perturbations may cause local extinction. Recent policy for restoring PAWS to broadleaved and the need to comply with European legislation has emphasised the need to devise appropriate but pragmatic forest management protocols involving the phased removal of conifers over time. Dormice were handled and individually marked on a single 12 ha conifer PAWS site from 2000 and a density index calculated from 2002 to 2007. In four adjacent study areas, a different form of PAWS restoration was carried out in 2003 to remove c. 33% of conifers. The effects on dormouse numbers, damage to artificial hibernation nests, and regeneration of suitable habitat were recorded. Monitoring indicated that dormouse populations were sustained in each study area after management, suggesting that at this site, conifer removal operations did not have a significant detrimental effect on the dormouse population. Damage to artificial hibernation nests was significantly different between the four study areas. The least damage occurred in the study area containing large group fells due to potential refuge areas, and worst in the traditional standard overall thinning. Measured differences in shrub vegetation throughout each study area showed that numerous small group fells or a few larger group fells subsequently regenerated to form a better vegetation structure for dormice than the traditional standard overall thinning. The implications for forest managers of the results from this single site are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Barbadian sugar industry was interpreted by the English scientific community in the latter seventeenth century. In particular it focuses upon the spread of ingenios (sugar mills) to Barbados from Brazil, and how this process was understood and chronicled by England’s early scientific community of experimental philosophers. It then contrasts these narratives against archived plantation documents from this period, demonstrating how these writers, despite explicit claims to the contrary, were relatively unconcerned with creating an objective account of sugar-making. Rather, they highlighted specific elements of the industry in order to make the ‘invention’ of sugar appear congruent with their new experimental methodology. These scientific narratives thus ignore a host of factors within the early Barbadian industry, particularly the critical sugar-making knowledge embodied within the plantation’s servile workforce. Rather than illuminating this facet of the industry, experimental philosophers efface these workers and portray ingenios as the laudable product of a few ingenious, experimenting white planters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world. This article examines some of the implications of these encounters by focusing on the place of indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies (from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean). It builds on recent scholarship to argue that while colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. Naturalists credited their informants not as individual authors, but as members of groups whose collective experiences and observations gave them unique understanding of New World nature. Colonial naturalists appropriated such expertise while simultaneously asserting that it represented mere know-how, rather than genuine knowledge. Colonials suggested that their own ways of knowing were necessary in order to turn the collective know-how of enslaved and free Africans and Amerindians into stable, universal knowledge suitable for enlightened European audiences. By translating vernacular knowledge into a universal key, colonials suggested that they became authors of new matters of fact about American nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between slavery, the slave trade and British economic development remains a contested field of eighteenth century history. This article examines one hitherto unexplored aspect of the subject, the significance, if any, of profits derived from the slave-based economies of the Atlantic in Scotland's Great Leap Forward in the later eighteenth century. It is argued that because of the distinctive nature of Scottish development, compared to that of England, and the intimate connections between Scotland and plantation economies the question does merit serious consideration. The article, however, supports the traditional view that slave trading direct from Scottish ports was very limited, although Scottish merchants and mariners were often heavily involved in slave trafficking from London, Bristol and Liverpool. The key Scottish link was with the tobacco and sugar trades, plantation ownership in the Caribbean and as merchants, physicians, attorneys and overseers in the plantation economies. It is argued that in terms of both capital transfers and market opportunities slavery can indeed be considered one of the factors facilitating development in Scotland and was possibly a much more significant influence north of the border than in the industrialisation of England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of fortifications, garrisons, and militia service in the English East India Company's early settlements in Asia and the Atlantic. Affecting everything from the physical space of such a settlement to the status and rights of its inhabitants, the institutions and ideologies of a variety of forms of military service revealed the degree to which Company leadership had early on come to understand their settlements in Asia not as mere trading factories, but as colonial plantations, and their role as a government in Asia. Even if their lofty ambitions rarely met expectations, the Company sought within them to cultivate law, jurisdiction, and a robust civic life that could in turn ensure an active, obedient, and virtuous body of subjects and, in a sense, citizens. The attitudes toward and policies concerning soldiering also revealed the degree to which the Company's seventeenth-century regime, so often treated as unique amongst English overseas ventures and Europeans in Asia, in fact drew and innovated upon models of governance across Europe, the Atlantic, and Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel or emergent ecosystems arising from human action present both threats and opportunities for biodiversity. It has been suggested that exotic species can "facilitate" or "inhibit" native biodiversity through habitat modification. In Britain, there is a discussion over the contribution to biodiversity of plantations of exotic conifer species as these are commonly thought to have little relevancy as a habitat for native biodiversity. To address this we compared the species richness of a range of different taxonomic groups (lichens, bryophytes, fungi, vascular plants, invertebrates and songbirds) in exotic and native forest stands of differing structural stages in northern and southern Britain. In terms of overall native species-richness there was no significant difference between the exotic and the native stands. In the north, six species groups showed higher values in the exotic Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) stands with the remaining six showing higher values in the native Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) stands. Most notably, lichen species richness was much lower in the exotic stands compared to the native stands, whereas bryophyte and fungal species richness was proportionately higher in the exotic stands. In the south, five species groups (all invertebrate taxa) showed higher species richness in exotic Norway spruce (Picea abies) stands compared to native oak (Quercus robur) stands. Five species groups had higher species-richness in the oak stands, in particular lichens and fungi. It is concluded that emergent ecosystems of exotic conifer species are not irrelevant to biodiversity. Where already well-established they can provide habitat for native species particularly if native woodland is scarce and biodiversity restoration is an immediate priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's indigo imports grew rapidly from the 1720s, but the mid-century wars (1739–48, 1756–63) had a devastating effect on the European textile industries and hence on the indigo trade. Britain's indigo market, however, boomed in wartime on the bases of prize indigo captured from France and Spain and of indigo imported from South Carolina. The rise of South Carolina's trade from the mid-1740s was not caused, as the historiography claims, by its monopoly of the British market—such a monopoly never existed—but because the depression in South Carolina's major staple, rice, compelled a remodelling of the South Carolina plantation system, which produced an elastic supply of indigo. Carolina indigo was blighted by a poor reputation, not, as is usually argued, because British merchants maligned unfairly its quality, but because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent production standards. Carolina indigo nevertheless succeeded in displacing French and Spanish indigo in the British and in some continental markets, reflecting the demand for cheap dyestuffs from manufacturers of low-cost textiles, the fastest-growing sectors of the European textile industries at the onset of industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]