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These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879–82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith and a rolling sequence of assistant editors and advisers who eventually comprised a significant fraction of the leading members of what used to be called the ‘Darwin industry’. Smith passed away in 1988 (volume 7 notes his legacy). Burkardt too left this world in 2007 – volume 16, part 1 includes an obituary, but his name has been retained and Cambridge University Press still ask that the series be cited as ‘Burkhardt et al.’ Duncan Porter took over for volumes 8–15, again with a sequence of fellow editors and assistants, after which James Secord became head of the project through its final years. The dedications of successive volumes record the efforts of individual scholars who have aided the teams and the involvement of the many institutions and foundations that have leant moral and material support over the years. For those of us with Cambridge connections, the University Library will not seem the same without the presence of the team it supported.

These reflections were invited by the editors of this special issue to provide a frame for analysing the significance of this set of articles on “Higher education and the state in Greater China.” They are framed around the three elements of modernity identified by Francis Fukuyama in his book The Origins of Political Order – the modern state, the rule of law and accountable government. They also highlight comparative dimensions among the three societies of Greater China.

How do you explain the Cold War to a generation who did not live through it? For Jörg and Anna Winger, co-creators and showrunners of the Deutschland series, you bring it to life on television. Part pop culture reference, part spy thriller, and part existential crisis, the Wingers’ Cold War is a fun, fast-paced story, “sunny and slick and full of twenty-something eye candy.” A coproduction of Germany's UFA Fiction and Sundance TV in the United States, the show premiered at the 2015 Berlinale before appearing on American and German television screens later that year. Especially popular in the United Kingdom, it sold widely on the transnational market. It has been touted as a game-changer for the German television industry for breaking new ground for the German television industry abroad and expanding the possibilities of dramatic storytelling in Germany, and is credited with unleashing a new wave of German (historical) dramas including Babylon Berlin, Dark, and a new production of Das Boot.

1. Functional traits mechanistically capture plant responses to environmental gradients as well as plant effects on ecosystem functioning. Yet most trait-based theory stems from terrestrial systems and extension to other habitats can provide new insights. 2. Wetlands differ from terrestrial systems in conditions (e.g. soil water saturation, anoxia, pH extremes), plant adaptations (e.g. aerenchyma, clonality, ubiquity of bryophytes) and important processes (e.g. denitrification, peat accumulation, methane emission). Wetland plant adaptations and trait (co-)variation can be situated along major plant trait trade-off axes (e.g. the resource economics spectrum), but soil saturation represents a complex stress gradient beyond a simple extension of commonly studied water availability gradients. 3. Traits that affect ecosystem functioning overlap with patterns in terrestrial systems. But wetland-specific traits that mediate plant effects on soil redox conditions, microbial communities and on water flow, as well as trait spectra of mosses, vary among wetland types. 4. Synthesis. With increasing availability of quantitative plant traits a trait-based ecology of wetlands is emerging, with the potential to advance process-based understanding and prediction. We provide an interactive cause-and-effect framework that may guide research efforts to disentangle the multiple interacting processes involved in scaling from environmental conditions to ecosystem functioning via plant communities.

Silicon Valley has emerged as the key metaphor of the innovation-led economic development in the 21st century. As the Valley’s technology monopolies and utopias expand, there is a growing need for critical histories that help to ground and contextualize the futures that are spreading from San Francisco Bay. In this review essay, I suggest that a settler-colonial approach offers interesting possibilities for the creation of such histories. To demonstrate how such an approach works, I develop a settler-colonial reading of Margaret O’Mara’s recent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). By critically analysing the key metaphors in O’Mara’s celebrated book, the global and violent face of the Valley becomes visible. The settler-colonial approach, I conclude, offers one possible analytical approach to breaking the stranglehold of America-centred understanding typical of the histories of Valley.