AT TEMPTS TO DEVELOP A NEW MODEL SPACE in which the physical sciences could be investigated are at the center of this chapter. In Britain, physical observatories were based on a blueprint provided by astronomy and propelled forward by an obsession with the mapping of the Earth’s magnetic field. New or repurposed observatories were established to this end in London and Dublin and across the British Empire from the late 1830s onward. Although often positioned as the poor cousin to the pursuit of terrestrial magnetism, the study of meteorology was a critical component of activities at physical observatories both at...

THERE HAS BEEN A RECENT CALL within geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS) literature to examine the spatial imaginaries created by discourses of climate. The primary motivation for this call has been anthropogenic climate change. In Weathered Mike Hulme drew a distinction between the distant, politics-infused, and socially constructed global “climate” and the local, embodied “weather” that is experienced directly and connected to place.¹ However, this binary is too simple to fully explain atmospheric science, which incorporates intermediate scales of analysis such as synoptic or regional-scale systems. One particular dimension is the spatially connected statistical world of climatic...

THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN STATIONS (NAOS) network was developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The ten member states of ICAO’s North Atlantic regional group (Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) agreed to station a number of ships to take upper-air and surface observations, relay radio messages from aircraft and merchant shipping, and serve as navigation beacons that could help aircraft fix their positions during the crossing. For meteorologists promoting the plan in 1946, NAOS was the realization of an...

“WHERE IS THE LEEUWIN CURRENT?” asked Australian oceanographer George Cresswell in 1991. A decade earlier, Cresswell had named the shallow stream of warm low-salinity water after a Dutch East India Company vessel (the Lioness) that had charted the area in the early seventeenth century. When he mused as to its location, Cresswell was asking his readers to turn their gaze from a stretch of sea between Java and Antarctica, to the western maritime fringe of the Australian continent. There, he explained, was the Leeuwin, flowing at the surface from near the Northwest Cape down to Cape Leeuwin, before curling eastward...

AS A NUMBER OF HISTORIANS HAVE DEMONSTRATED over the last decade, nineteenth-and early twentieth-century life assurance can be seen to have played a surprisingly important role in many aspects of British and American history.¹ This is particularly clear in terms of its contribution to the shaping of medical knowledge and practice.² Our own work has begun to explore the extent to which Anglophone, particularly British, life assurance firms similarly engaged with, and possibly helped shape, understandings of climate science.³ We would like to suggest that actuarial discussions of the risks involved with foreign travel and residence did more than just...

OVER RECENT DECADES, there has been a “remapping” of the colonial landscape to incorporate women.¹ Marked shifts in the work on the histories of empire have emerged as the fields of imperial and women’s histories have intersected, informing a wave of scholarship focusing on subaltern women’s voices, and the contribution that white women made to the British imperial endeavor, particularly through the production of popular geographies of “other” places.² Feminist scholars in particular have addressed the involvements of white women and the nature of their location and agency in the process of British colonial domination, offering insight into settler women’s...

AS CAPE TOWN GRAPPLES WITH THE SPECTER of running out of water, history reminds us that this fear has long been with people living in southern Africa’s semiarid environments. Diverse African communities engaged in rainmaking activities for centuries, if not millennia. From the seventeenth century onward, Dutch and, later, British settlers prayed for rain but also speculated about how their land-use practices affected rainfall. In the early twentieth century, some white southern Africans were drawn to the idea that human intervention in the water cycle might increase the amount of rain that fell or make its arrival more predictable. The...

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the Second World War, Great Britain was suffering the effects of a worldwide shortage of edible fats. The country’s larders were low on margarine, and this lacuna in the British diet risked undermining both the health and the morale of a population straining to recover from the trials of wartime. The war also threw new light on the practices and rationales of British colonialism. With the moral justification of imperial rule being questioned with renewed vigor in Britain and beyond, the postwar Labour government advocated a new, more proactive stance toward colonial development. These two...

IN RECENT YEARS THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE on human health have increasingly gripped the public imagination. In report after report, bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have issued warnings about the impact that elevated temperatures, extreme weather events, El Niño, ozone depletion, and the like will have on the incidence of respiratory allergies, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, vector-borne illnesses, and many more.¹ In some ways, if Charles Rosenberg is correct, these concerns represent something of a return to the localism of the ancient Hippocratic tradition with...

ELLSWORTH HUNTINGTON (1876– 1947) wrote extensively on the effects of weather on individuals and the dominant influence of climate on world civilizations. He worked outside of the nascent community of climatologists and became an outsider in geographical circles, relying for income mainly on royalties from his many popular books. His musings on environmental determinism mapped regions of high “climatic energy” with “high civilization”—all located exclusively within Earth’s temperate zones. He further argued for the stimulating effects of the regular passage of storms, locating swaths of exceedingly high energy and correspondingly high civilization along the “storm tracks”— the most influential...

IN THE PERIOD SURROUNDING the Second World War— from the 1930s to the 1950s—mechanical systems of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) became increasingly available and affordable. The so-called thermal comfort that HVAC systems provide is today a thoroughly regulated and standardized condition in many buildings, especially office buildings, commercial institutions, and other spaces of global culture— what Peter Sloterdijk refers to as “the World Interior of Capital.”¹ As Sloterdijk also suggests, such systems contain a range of political and economic consequences: “Air conditioning, in the literal sense,” Sloterdijk wrote in 1999, “will establish itself as the main space-political...