Winter wheat in England and Wales, 1923 - 1995: What do indices of genetic diversity reveal?

Genealogical data have been used very widely to construct indices with which to examine the contribution of plant breeding programmes to the maintenance and enhancement of genetic resources. In this paper we use such indices to examine changes in the genetic diversity of the winter wheat crop in England and Wales between 1923 and 1995. We find that, except for one period characterized by the dominance of imported varieties, the genetic diversity of the winter wheat crop has been remarkably stable. This agrees with many studies of plant breeding programmes elsewhere. However, underlying the stability of the winter wheat crop is accelerating varietal turnover without any significant diversification of the genetic resources used. Moreover, the changes we observe are more directly attributable to changes in the varietal shares of the area under winter wheat than to the genealogical relationship between the varieties sown. We argue, therefore, that while genealogical indices reflect how well plant breeders have retained and exploited the resources with which they started, these indices suffer from a critical limitation. They do not reflect the proportion of the available range of genetic resources which has been effectively utilized in the breeding programme: complex crosses of a given set of varieties can yield high indices, and yet disguise the loss (or non-utilization) of a large proportion of the available genetic diversity.

Missionary children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European context, 1843-c.1914

In the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of children in Europe and beyond were organized into battalions of fundraisers for overseas missions. By the end of the century these juvenile missionary organizations had become a global movement, generating millions of pounds in revenue each year. While the transnational nature of the children’s missions and publications has been well-documented by historians, the focus has tended to be on the connections that were established by encounters between the young western donors, missionaries overseas and the non-western ‘other’ constructed by their work. A full exploration of the European political, social and cultural concerns that produced the juvenile missionaries movement and the trans-European networks that sustained it are currently missing from historical accounts of the phenomenon. This article looks at the largest of these organizations, the Catholic mission for children, the French Holy Childhood Association (L’Œuvre de la sainte enfance), to understand how the principles this mission sought to impose abroad were above all an expression of anxieties at home about the role of religion in the family, childhood and in civil society as western polities were modernizing and secularizing in the nineteenth century.