Reading Imperial Skies: Climatology and the Limits of Colonial Planning

When the Austrian climate scientist Eduard Brückner first published his influential theory of universal thirty-five year climate cycles in 1889, he could already rely on a vast collection of climatic information. The data that Brückner used in his research represented an eclectic array of temperature and precipitation series, records indicating the timing of grape harvests, geological evidence on past fluctuations of lakes, and travel accounts with historical information on environmental conditions. While the data sets were most complete for Europe and North America, Brückner had also managed to assemble an impressive amount of climatic information from Africa, Asia, and South America.

Following the trail of Brückner’s data to the places of origin overseas, this paper will explore the production of climatic information in colonial contexts around the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on the rise of colonial climatology as an auxiliary science—and a legitimizing tool—of colonial expansion by probing the rationale behind the collection of climatic data in liminal places of colonial authority—in deserts, swamps, and dense tropical forests. The paper will address the question of how climatic knowledge and data came to feature in arguments for colonial development and environmental transformation.

On a theoretical level, the paper will explore the central dialectic of colonial climatology, which provided both the basis for a new sense of control—with climate data providing useful information on colonial conditions in frontier regions—and a factor adding to colonial insecurity—with the data-backed irregularity and capriciousness of climatic conditions in non-European environments generating a new source of imperial doubt and contingency.