Established in 1859, Singapore’s Botanic Gardens has served as a park for Singaporeans and visitors, a scientific institution, and a testing ground for tropical plantation crops. Each function has its own story, while the Gardens also fuel an underlying narrative of the juncture of administrative authority and the natural world. Created to help exploit natural resources for the British Empire, the Gardens became contested ground in conflicts involving administrators and scientists that reveal shifting understandings of power, science and nature in Singapore and in Britain. This continued after independence, when the Gardens featured in the “greening” of the nation-state, and became Singapore’s first World Heritage Site. Positioning the Singapore Botanic Gardens alongside the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and gardens in India, Ceylon, Mauritius and the West Indies, this book tells the story of nature’s colony—a place where plants were collected, classified and cultivated to change our understanding of the region and world.
Established in 1859, Singapore’s Botanic Gardens has served as a park for Singaporeans and visitors, a scientific institution, and a testing ground for tropical plantation crops. Each function has its own story, while the Gardens also fuel an underlying narrative of the juncture of administrative authority and the natural world. Created to help exploit natural resources for the British Empire, the Gardens became contested ground in conflicts involving administrators and scientists that reveal shifting understandings of power, science and nature in Singapore and in Britain. This continued after independence, when the Gardens featured in the “greening” of the nation-state, and became Singapore’s first World Heritage Site. Positioning the Singapore Botanic Gardens alongside the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and gardens in India, Ceylon, Mauritius and the West Indies, this book tells the story of nature’s colony—a place where plants were collected, classified and cultivated to change our understanding of the region and world.
Offering access to an extensive and resource-rich hinterland, eastern Sumatra was an important trading region between the Melaka Straits and the Minangkabau highlands of Sumatra prior to colonial rule. Traditionally under the control of Johor, the various communities in eastern Sumatra were united under the leadership of an adventurer named Raja Kecik in the early eighteenth century and formed an independent community along the Siak River. Over the next century Raja Kecik and his descendents attempted to gain control over the trade that flowed through the Straits, while keeping the numerous communities within their territories united by means of marriage alliances, warfare, raiding, trade, and myth. By the end of the eighteenth century the multiple centres of authority that constituted Siak represented the dominant Malay community in the Straits of Melaka, only to fall into decline due to the rise of British trading communities in Singapore and Penang. This book, based on VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) archives and traditional Malay texts, examines the rise of a Malay state in the early modern era. It focuses on the ecological frontier of eastern Sumatra, with its multi-ethnic communities, and how they were able to transform themselves, in the words of an English visitor, into a summit of prosperity by the end of the eighteenth century. Particular emphasis is placed on the methods used by Siak leaders used unite the disparate communities in the region, and how this was viewed in other Malay communities.
A chemocentric view of the molecular structures of antibiotics, their origins, actions, and major categories of resistance Antibiotics: Challenges, Mechanisms, Opportunities focuses on antibiotics as small organic molecules, from both natural and synthetic sources. Understanding the chemical scaffold and functional group structures of the major classes of clinically useful antibiotics is critical to understanding how antibiotics interact selectively with bacterial targets. This textbook details how classes of antibiotics interact with five known robust bacterial targets: cell wall assembly and maintenance, membrane integrity, protein synthesis, DNA and RNA information transfer, and the folate pathway to deoxythymidylate. It also addresses the universe of bacterial resistance, from the concept of the resistome to the three major mechanisms of resistance: antibiotic destruction, antibiotic active efflux, and alteration of antibiotic targets. Antibiotics also covers the biosynthetic machinery for the major classes of natural product antibiotics. Authors Christopher Walsh and Timothy Wencewicz provide compelling answers to these questions: What are antibiotics? Where do antibiotics come from? How do antibiotics work? Why do antibiotics stop working? How should our limited inventory of effective antibiotics be addressed? Antibiotics is a textbook for graduate courses in chemical biology, pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, and microbiology and biochemistry courses. It is also a valuable reference for microbiologists, biological and natural product chemists, pharmacologists, and research and development scientists.
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