Zoë Laidlaw

Herpes viruses hedge their bets

Static latency is the hallmark of all herpes viruses. The varicella zoster virus, for instance, causes varicella (chickenpox), and after a latent phase of between 5 and 40 years, it can give rise to herpes zoster (shingles). This latency and the subsequent reactivation has intrigued and puzzled virologists. Although several factors have been suggested, it is unknown what triggers reactivation. However, latency can be explained with a simple evolutionary model. Here, we demonstrate that a simple, yet efficient, bet-hedging strategy might have evolved in a number of viruses, especially those belonging to the herpes virus family and most importantly in varicella zoster virus. We show that the evolution of latency can be explained by the population dynamics of infectious diseases in fluctuating host populations.

BREAKING BRITANNIA'S BOUNDS? LAW, SETTLERS, AND SPACE IN BRITAIN'S IMPERIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empires impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’ experience. This article critically reviews recent interventions, which extend and challenge these approaches by seeking new ways to juxtapose the macro with the micro, and balance the exceptional with the quotidian; by adopting a more transnational (or global) approach to colonialism; and by rethinking the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘colonizer’. Collectively, these works question the traditional frameworks within which both colonialism and the British empire have been understood. In conclusion, the article considers their impact on the vibrant field of Britains colonial legal history.

Some notes on the combinatorial properties of haplotype tagging

Tagging haplotypes with a small number of genetic markers is becoming an increasingly interesting and important problem. Surprisingly little work has been done to characterize the mathematical framework of this problem. In this paper we present a mathematical frame, based on Boolean algebras, that adequately describe the structure of a set of genetic bi-allelic markers and the corresponding set of haplotypes. We derive a number of results that relate the number of markers required to tag a set of haplotypes to the set of markers themselves.

“Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery

This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britains settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britains politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britains empire.

Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture

Settler Society in the Australian Colonies is a rather staid title for this capacious and original work. On the one hand, Woollacott returns to some old themes: the growth of the Australian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century; the attainment of responsible government within a wider imperial context of settler devolution; schemes for systematic colonisation; and the operation of master and servant legislation. On the other, her book diverges from previous accounts by placing frontier violence, race, and gender at the centre of its analysis, transforming the range of possible conclusions about what constituted Australian settler society. Woollacott’s clear geographical frameworks shape our sense of that society, too: she eschews the normal bias towards the continent’s southeast, instead deliberately exploring developments across all the Australian colonies. She also stresses the powerful influence of imperial connections in shaping Australian settlers’ sense of themselves. To underscore these relationships, Woollacott deploys carefully researched family and life stories that stretch both between Britain’s colonies, and from the colonies to Britain. The result is an effective synthesis of recent and older scholarship, as well as a work of extensive archival research. Woollacott begins by placing settler family networks in their imperial context. Her first chapter’s intergenerational account of the sprawling and influential Macleay-DumaresqDarling connection tracks the reader across India, Cuba, Mauritius, Canada, Malta, the Crimea and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Through the individuals’ life stories, the military background of many Australian settlers, their exposure to slave systems, and knowledge of other settler colonial contexts are explored; these connections underpin the book’s argument. But these family correspondences, with their quotidian detail about colonial life, prejudices and anxieties, are also more broadly revealing. The routine nature of imperial mobility, the determination to secure land, the ambiguous attitudes towards those of mixed race, or nonwhite backgrounds, all contribute to our understanding of what it meant to be a ‘settler’ in mid-nineteenthcentury Australia. Subsequent chapters address systematic colonisation in Australia; the settlers’ role as masters of labour; the empire-wide move to settler self-government; debates about the role and rights of women; and the incorporation of frontier violence into definitions of settler manliness; before

Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century

In 1854, William Westgarth was sent by the Government of Victoria to investigate the causes of the Eureka Revolt, an armed rebellion by gold prospectors resisting governmental regulation and taxation. As he approached the goldfields along the Loddon Valley, Westgarth came across a community that he had not expected to encounter. Establishing camp one evening, he ‘met … with a man of [the Djadja Wurrung] tribe who spoke English well’. He ‘had been trained here [and] had afterwards settled in the neighbourhood … [he] had married a wife of his own people, built himself a hut… and lived somewhat like ourselves, by his daily labour’. This man demonstrated the resilience of Aboriginal people in the face of an overwhelming invasion, first of pastoralists and then of prospectors over the previous two decades. His presence surprised Westgarth, who had assumed that Aboriginal people had effectively disappeared from the landscape of the Victorian gold-fields. The Djadja Wurrung man was called Beernbarmin, and he went on to inform the commissioner of many interesting particulars of his countrymen. He remembered when the first white man came to this part of the country, about seventeen or eighteen years ago … He was, at the time, a young boy of about eight years of age, and his tribe numbered, according to his estimate, more than 500 of all ages; they were now, he said, reduced to about sixty. He spoke of some great assemblage of black tribes that was shortly to take place in this vicinity at which he expected 600 or 700 Aborigines — the gatherings from far and wide.1

Macaulay and son: architects of imperial Britain

been at all feasible. Planning might have gone ahead for such schemes even during the war; but that, one might suggest, had become the nature of planning. Surely more significant, particularly so when ‘progression’ and ‘innovation’ are concerned, are the plans being drawn up in the last part of the war to utilise air power more directly in offensive plans, whether for carriers and torpedocarrying aircraft, or Herbert Richmond’s tri-service combined operations in the Mediterranean. But Grimes does not refer to these, giving a somewhat false idea of how planning developed during the war. Admittedly, he does briefly refer to planning for important operations that were carried out – at the Dardanelles and Zeebrugge – but the effect is a little mixed: the former suggests to him that large-scale Baltic operations were not really on (211); Zeebrugge, however, is seen as a model for larger and more distant attacks (223), and while one might well doubt that, it fits in more easily with the argument elsewhere in the book. All in all, Grimes has made a brave attempt finely to analyse the succession of pre-war plans. His summaries of the plans are in themselves very useful; moreover, he demonstrates a line of continuity between at least some of them. But he cannot substantiate the broader case he is trying to make. To this reviewer, the attempt to find precedents well back in the nineteenth century is unconvincing, while suggestions that the plans and planners were generally justified by the war itself are unsustainable.