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The chapter sets out the goals and approach of the book. It introduces the various explanations offered in historiography for the patterns of social change and economic development in the pre‐industrial period, and for the regional differences in this process. It proposes to use a combination of new institutional economics and an analysis of the social distribution of power and property in order to better understand these differences. It argues that the relevant factors are located at the regional level and showed strong path‐dependency. It will test this approach for the Low Countries, starting from the hypothesis that the regional socio‐institutional structures formed in the early and high Middle Ages exercised a determining influence on later development, resulting in distinctive paths of regional development.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on regional diversity and unity in Great Britain. The results suggest that Britain was a unity in diversity. The analyses of various indicators of national identity indicate that through the 19th century the ‘British nation’ was made. Though there was no uniform tendency operating in all fields simultaneously, England, Scotland, and Wales were in certain respects more closely bound together than they ever were in the past.

This chapter assesses the quantitative position of ‘traditional’ industries in the economy. Traditional industry — which accounted for the largest number of gainfully occupied workers — developed steadily in the modern era and continued to provide opportunities to workers that were not absorbed by the modern industrial sector. The role of the traditional commerce and service industries is emphasized, which functioned as a ‘buffer’ for economic fluctuations. The regional diversity of these industries is also analyzed using the statistical method of principal component analysis.

Although there is a common perception that deserts support few species, some deserts have high local diversity, largely because organisms are able to exploit patches of high productivity. This chapter differentiates between local species richness (also called α diversity), β diversity, which is also known as species turnover or the change in species among sites, and γ diversity, which is regional species diversity. Productivity-diversity relationships have been well studied in some deserts and have helped us understand the factors controlling ecosystem function at a large spatial scale. Studies of convergence of desert communities and consideration of the similarity of desert communities with neighbouring mesic communities are some of the best elucidated of this genre. The chapter also considers the major differences and similarities among desert taxa in the various deserts of the world, to draw inferences on the major biogeographic patterns.

This chapter examines the identity of Great Britain as it was manifested in language, literature, religion, politics, business, education, music, and sport during 19th century. It investigates the triangular relations between, and the internal dynamics within England, Scotland, and Wales. It also examines the conflicting trends of preserving regional diversity and promoting integration and unity and identifies the various factors that served to unite or divide the regions.

This chapter discusses patterns of regional and community diversity. It addresses the following questions: how does the diversity, defined simply as number of species or species richness of these plant and animal mutualists, differ among biogeographic regions, including islands, and along gradients of temperature, rainfall, and elevation? What is the diversity and structure of local communities of these plant and animal mutualists? To what extent does community structure differ in different biogeographic regions? Do quantitative community assembly rules exist for these plant and animal mutualists, and, if so, are these rules the same in different biogeographic regions?

This chapter examines the role of language, literature, and music in uniting or dividing England, Wales, and Scotland. It suggests that language was both a link and barrier to integration and that the central issue of conflict was the relationship between a master language used administratively and the claims of minority language to parity. The link between the English language and the English national had long ceased to be exclusive, even within Britain. There was also great diversity in terms of music and literature.

This chapter examines the role of sport and patriotism in creating regional diversity or unity in Great Britain. The emergence of sports in its modern form in the 1860s had unexpected consequences for the maintenance and reinforcement of national and regional loyalties within Britain. The tensions which have become familiar in other aspects of British life reappeared in the world of sport and it proved difficult to strike a balance both between the north and the home countries and between England, Scotland, and Wales.

This chapter examines the role of religion and the church in creating regional diversity or unity in Great Britain. The splintered condition of 19th century British Christianity was in itself a testimony to the difficulty of the Church in reconciling a theoretical commitment to unity with the remorseless disposition of believers to reject uniformity in worship, doctrine, and doctrine. All the various churches of England, Scotland, and Wales carried the traditions which they believed to be deeply embedded in the spiritual life of their peoples.

This chapter examines the role of science and education in creating regional diversity or unity in Great Britain. It cites evidence indicating that there existed a unified ‘British mind’. There were also occasions when the growth and dissemination of knowledge took place in Anglo-Scottish contexts.

This chapter reviews current knowledge about patterns in the distribution and diversity of marine fish species in the context of the enormous spatial and temporal variation that results from oceanographic variability. This chapter also discusses processes commonly implicated in controlling the distribution and regional diversity of marine fishes. Broader study of the genetics of putative species, especially widespread coral reef species and open-ocean species may reveal significantly greater cryptic species diversity. In addition, recent analysis indicates no decline in the rate of morphospecies descriptions of tropical shore-fishes in recent decades. The chapter is also couched within the prevailing concept of species. Broader application of a phylogenetic species concept, recently advocated for coral-reef fishes, would result in an increase in overall species diversity and a concomitant decrease in average species range.

Californians know they are living in the midst of historic growth and change, and they are clearly worried about it. More than 80 percent of residents said in the surveys that they expect their regions to grow either fast or modestly in population over the next ten years. This chapter looks beyond 2000 and offers some general ideas about how forces such as political distrust, racial and ethnic change, and regional diversity are likely to play out in the state's political and policy process. Some recommendations are offered that will help the state find better ways to cope with the many challenges looming before it.

Productivity–diversity relationships have been well studied in some deserts and have helped us to understand the factors controlling ecosystem function at a large spatial scale. Studies of convergence of desert communities and consideration of their similarity with neighbouring mesic communities are some of the best elucidated of this genre. One of the main differences between floras and faunas of the world, particularly in deserts, occurred because of the break-up of Pangaea and the later split between the southern Gondwanan continent and the northern Laurasian continent. Although there is clear derivation of many desert organisms from their mesic adjacent taxa, cases of convergent evolution of desert forms abound, presumably because of the similarities in selection pressures placed on these organisms. There are also some interesting cases of ecological character displacement in deserts that may occur when any two or more species overlap in a crucial aspect of their niches.

This chapter deals with the general features of plant diversity and distribution on the Sea of Cortés islands and to a lesser extent with adaptive features of plants such as morphology and phenology. This review is based mainly on the plant lists in appendixes 4.1-4.5 describing the island floras, endemics, and relicts. In our interpretations of these lists we draw from various floristic, systematic, and distributional works that pertain to the Gulf of California region and beyond. After an introductory section, we work from broader biogeographical questions to matters that have more local, specific, or taxonomically restricted perspectives. There must be few experiences in the biologist’s world to compare with approaching a “new” island by boat. The ingredients are adventure and suspense, mystery and perhaps even a little danger. There are feelings of discoveries to be made, knowledge to be extended, curiosity to be both piqued and satisfied. Such feelings are shared not only among natural historians but by any adventurous and curious traveler; the more difficult the island is to reach, the keener the excitement of the visit. The islands in the Sea of Cortés would seem ideally qualified to generate this sort of bioadventurism. They are mostly uninhabited and have been little explored biologically, and the mounting of small-scale expeditions to successfully reach (and leave) the islands is not always a trivial matter. First appearing as blurry, near-colorless breaks between the unrelenting blue of gulf and sky, the islands leave early impressions of abrupt topography and a seeming lack of vegetation. The dull-green smudge of plant life on foothill outwash fans and in the arroyos eventually becomes apparent, but almost up to the point of a landing the islands preserve the impression of rock masses broken only occasionally by bajadas on which a few cardons (Pachycereus pringlei) are conspicuous. Islands larger than a few square kilometers have well-developed drainage courses that reach the coasts as dry arroyos and provide breaks in the generally steep coastal cliffs. The beaches where the larger arroyos reach the coast are logical landing points, and here the visitor gets the first close look at the vegetation.

Further research (following Chapter 31) on anomalies in the supposed unity of Roman Italy shows the abundant (and mysteriously neglected) evidence, which does much to question the ‘standard view’ of the topic, as enshrined in Toynbee, ‘the political unification of the Peninsula by Rome…led eventually to the population of the whole Peninsula becoming uniform in language and culture’. We are talking about explicit evidence in authors of the late Republic and early Empire about ample and specific instances of regional diversity.

This chapter examines the State Department's programs to distribute books among foreign audiences (particularly in central and eastern Europe)—books which were carefully chosen to convey American values or to further policy priorities. Unlike the art program, the book programs remained quite conservative in their artistic tastes and included very little modernism, framing what modernist titles they did feature as representative not only of freedom and individualism, but of America's regional diversity. Following the influential arguments of Arthur Schlesinger and others, the book programs presented modernism as being congenial to or even constitutive of Cold War liberalism. The chapter concludes by recounting William Faulkner's participation in the cultural-diplomacy program as well as the equivocal and cautious way the book programs included and presented his difficult works.