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This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
Since the 18th century, people from Europe, Africa, India and China have made Mauritius their home. The result is a charming mix of cultural and religious traditions, against the backdrop of a tropical paradise. The dramatic landscapes of Mauritius feature high mountain peaks, white beaches and untouched rainforest, as well as rich fauna and flora. This is a welcoming country, where the people live in harmony with their natural surroundings.This selection of postcards from André de Kervern's collection is a timeless record of Mauritius. Each chapter focuses on a different region including the north, south, centre and the capital Port Louis, as well as on the island's people. Classic scenes of sugar cane plantations, railways, parades, horse races and verdant landscapes were all widely circulated fragments of cinéma-vérité. Complete with detailed captions and essays by Yvan Martial, these postcards offer glimpses of life in Mauritius from the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Reprinted. Originally published: Baton Rouge: Louisiana Genealogical and Historical society, 1963.
This volume provides the origins and meanings of the names of genera and species of extant vascular plants, with the genera arranged alphabetically from M to Q.
From the Foreword Umberto Quattrocchi has brought us some amazing and useful works through the various dictionaries that he has compiled. This time it is for two very important plant families the palms and the cycads that are synthesized here in these two volumes. Each entry is fascinating not just for the botany and full nomenclature of the plant species but for all the associated uses, folklore and interactions with other organisms. ...These entries are fascinating glimpses of natural history. ... Botanists, conservationists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, geographers, bird watchers, naturalists, historians and those of many other disciplines will find these volumes a most valuable and u...
The Mascarene islands in the southern Indian Ocean - Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues - were once home to an extraordinary range of birds and reptiles. Evolving on these isolated volcanic islands in the absence of mammalian predators or competitors, the land was dominated by giant tortoises, parrots, skinks and geckos, burrowing boas, flightless rails & herons, and of course (in Mauritius) the Dodo. Uninhabited and only discovered in the 1500s, colonisation by European settlers in the 1600s led to dramatic changes in the ecology of the islands; the birds and tortoises were slaughtered indiscriminately while introduced rats, cats, pigs and monkeys destroyed their eggs, the once-extensive for...