The period between the late 19th century and the early 20th century represents a crucial juncture in the relationship between human society as a whole and climate change. As these presentations suggest, imperialism and capitalism affected cold environments by turning natural resources created by the cold into global commodities. In doing so, landscapes in remote areas were abruptly transformed, affecting the delicate balance between cold temperatures and human communities. The incorporation of cold regions to global networks of capital and imperial expansion occurred at a planetary level in a moment of transition between the end of the Little Ice Age and our current era of anthropogenic global warming, accelerating this process. The four presenters in this session each hone in on different episodes in this historical moment, bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives that unite disparate regions of the world. Sarah Hines examines the early exploration of the Bolivian Andes by local and foreign experts from hydroelectric companies and the Bolivian military, and how they managed to produce knowledge about nature and glaciers in the 1920s. Polar regions like the Arctic were among the last frontiers of Western imperial expansion, and geographical exploration was intended to obtain information from those areas while preparing strategies to colonize and profit from them, as Sarah Pickman explains. Diego Repenning argues that the colonization of cold regions by the state was often deemed as a solution for pressing internal issues, like the creation of a Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia by the USSR. The control of cold temperatures was not only confined to discrete geographical spaces—as Andrew Robichaud analyzes—but expanded to include the massive commodification of natural resources like ice and its adoption in everyday life by Americans in the nineteenth century.

By bringing together historians who work on histories of cold, from diverse disciplinary perspectives (Science & Technology Studies, Environmental History), geographic focuses, and time periods, this panel seeks to investigate what lessons human relationships to cold, broadly construed, can reveal for our current moment. It also attempts to demonstrate what fresh perspectives and interdisciplinary connections are revealed when historians are united in conversation by a theme of temperature, rather than methodology, regional focus, or temporal boundaries. Drawing inspiration from recent work like Hi’ilei Hobart’s concept of “thermal colonization,” we argue that a sensorial and physiological metric like cold opens a world of possibilities for historical collaboration and interventions.