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Over the past two decades, numerous field and experimental studies on the ecology and evolution of animal and plant interactions have been reported by botanists, zoologists, and ecologists. This book offers a comprehensive summary of this extensive and widely scattered research literature, presenting the subject as a coherent, accessible discipline.

The Letters of Richard Cobden (1804-65) aims in four printed volumes to provide the first critical edition of Cobden's letters, publishing the complete text in as near the original form as possible, accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, together with an introduction to each volume re-assessing Cobden's importance in their light. As a whole these volumes will make available a unique source of the understanding of British liberalism in its European and international contexts, throwing new light on issues such as the repeal of the Corn Laws, British radical movements, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-French relations, and the American Civil War. The second volume, drawing on over fifty archives world-wide, follows the career of Richard Cobden from that of the 'Manchester Manufacturer' who had gained celebrity in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 to that of the dominant Radical leader on the British political scene between 1848 and 1853, widely considered by contemporaries equal in importance to the leaders of the Whig and Conservative parties. Cobden in this period was concerned with an inter-connected series of movements which sought in different ways to reduce aristocratic power in Victorian Britain. These included the reform of parliament (especially through the secret ballot), of landownership, of government finances, of the British empire, as well as the introduction of state education. At the same time we see the emergence of Cobden 'the International Man', with a cosmopolitan following, playing a pivotal role in the global peace movement, and articulating a wide-ranging critique of British foreign policy, with regard to the dangers of French invasion, the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, British expansionism in India, and the ramifications of the Eastern Question as Britain drifted towards war in the Crimea. Although in his own day, Cobden's radical ideas increasingly separated him from many contemporaries, in the longer term they became a vital tributary of nineteenth-century British and international liberalism.

The Letters of Richard Cobden (1804-1865) provides, in four printed volumes, the first critical edition of Cobden's letters, publishing the complete text in as near the original form as possible. The letters are accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, together with an introduction to each volume which re-assesses Cobden's importance in their light. Together, these volumes make available a unique source of the understanding of British liberalism in its European and international contexts, throwing new light on issues such as the repeal of the Corn Laws, British radical movements, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-French relations, and the American Civil War.The fourth and final volume, drawing on some forty-six archives worldwide, is dominated by Cobden's search for a permanent political legacy at home and abroad, following the severe check to his health in the autumn of 1859. In January 1860, he succeeded in negotiating the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty, a landmark in Anglo-French relations designed to bind the two nations closer together, and to provide the basis for a Europe united by free trade. Yet the Treaty's benefits were threatened by a continuing naval arms race between Britain and France, fuelled by what Cobden saw as self-interested scare mongering in his tract The Three Panics (1862). By 1862 an even bigger danger was the possibility that British industry's need for cotton might precipitate intervention in the American Civil War. Much of Cobden's correspondence now centred on the necessity of non-intervention and a campaign for the reform of international maritime law, while he played a major part in attempts to alleviate the effects of the 'Cotton Famine' in Lancashire. In addition to Anglo-American relations, Cobden, the 'International Man', continued to monitor the exercise of British power around the globe. He was convinced that the 'gunboat' diplomacy of his prime antagonist, Lord Palmerston, was ultimately harmful to Britain, whose welfare demanded limited military expenditure and the dismantling of the British 'colonial system'. Known for a long time as the 'prophet in the wilderness', in 1864 Cobden welcomed Palmerston's inability to intervene in the Schleswig-Holstein crisis as a key turning-point in Britain's foreign policy, which, together with the imminent end of the American Civil War, opened up the prospect of a new reform movement at home. Disappointed with the growing apathy of the entrepreneurs he had once mobilised in the Anti-Corn Law League, Cobden now promoted the enfranchisement of the working classes as necessary and desirable in order to achieve the reform of the aristocratic state for which he had campaigned since the 1830s.