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East Indies. The East Indies (or simply the Indies) is a term used in historical narratives of the Age of Discovery. The Indies broadly refers to various lands in the East or the Eastern Hemisphere, particularly the islands and mainlands found in and around the Indian Ocean by Portuguese explorers, soon after the Cape Route was discovered.
Alfred Russel Wallace died aged 90 in Broadstone, England, 7 November, 1913. When he died, he was the most famous biologist in the world. Science historian George Beccaloni said of him: “There were very long, glowing obituaries in all the world’s papers from Bombay to Boston saying he was the last of the great Victorians.
- Nicolaus Copernicus. Astronomer and mathematician. 1473-1543. For centuries, people incorrectly believed the Earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus theorized otherwise, with the belief that the size and speed of a planet’s orbit depended on its distance from the centralized sun.
- Galileo Galilei. Physicist and astronomer. 1564-1642. Galileo changed how we literally see the world by taking early telescopes and improving their design. The Italian scientist made lenses capable of magnifying objects twenty-fold.
- Robert Hooke. Astronomer, physicist, and biologist. 1635-1703. Englishman Hooke coined the term “cell,” now known as the basic structural unit of all organisms, in his 1665 book Micrographia after observing the cell walls in slices of cork tissue.
- Sir Isaac Newton. Physicist and mathematician. 1643-1727. You probably know about Newton’s three laws of motion, including that objects will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. East Indies, the islands that extend in a wide belt along both sides of the Equator for more than 3,800 miles (6,100 km) between the Asian mainland to the north and west and Australia to the south. Historically, the term East Indies is loosely applied to any of three contexts. The most restrictive.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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- Orientation
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Identification. The East Indians of Trinidad are descendants of indentured laborers who were brought to this island in the West Indies from the South Asian subcontinent during the second half of the nineteenth century. They were called "East Indians" by Europeans to distinguish them from Native Americans. Location. Trinidad (now part of the West In...
From the mid-seventeenth century on, the cultivation of sugarcane by slaves brought from Africa was a major source of prosperity for European owners of plantations in the West Indies. When slavery ended, the sugar cultivators attempted to continue the system by utilizing indentured laborers. Muslims as well as Hindus—deriving from a wide range of c...
The first houses constructed by East Indians in their new settlements were small, mud-walled huts with thatched roofs, essentially similar to those of their northern Indian home villages. In many cases a settlement pattern emerged that was also reminiscent of that of northern India: the more prosperous villagers—often of castes considered higher in...
Subsistence and Commercial Activities.Until the time of the oil boom, the most desired economic activity was rice cultivation: with a piece of rice land (rented or owned), a man could provide basic subsistence food for his family and feel reasonably secure. Land on which sugarcane could be grown could provide cash income but was rarely available. M...
Kin Groups and Descent. Indentured laborers began to form new kinship networks even before they arrived in Trinidad. Close relationships formed on shipboard were maintained for years, even generations. Considering themselves too intimately related to allow their children to marry each other, jihaji bhai,as they were known, helped one another find s...
Marriage.Marriages were for the most part arranged; dating or other association between unmarried and unrelated boys and girls was condemned by almost all East Indians as late as the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly, however, young people were demanding their right to "free choice" (which meant, in practice, the right to see the prospective spou...
Social Organization. Few of the traditional Indian socialstructural elements received any recognition or support within the Trinidad legal or social system, and few survived for long. Nevertheless, in the newly emerging East Indian settlements, powerful—if informal—sentiments maintained such practices as caste endogamy and neighborhood exogamy for ...
Religious Beliefs. The overwhelming majority of Indian indentured laborers considered themselves Hindus, but most of them were from rural, unsophisticated backgrounds; they left theological questions to the priesthood, which had, in fact, relatively few representatives with real knowledge. Furthermore, Trinidad East Indians were cut off from commun...
Klass, Morton (1961). East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence. New York: Columbia UniversityPress. Reprint. 1988. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. Klass, Morton (1991). Singing with Sai Baba: The Politics of Revitalization in Trinidad.Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. LaGuerre, John G., ed. (1974). Calcutta to Caroni: The Eas...
Cambridge and an Easy Degree. Early in 1828, just before his twentieth birthday, Charles Darwin enrolled at the University of Cambridge to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree. After three easy years he received his B.A. degree with marks placing him near the top of the class.
The East India Company ( EIC) [a] was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. [4] It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia ), and later with East Asia. The company gained control of large parts of the Indian ...
