An Empire of Divergent Climates: Knowledge of Weather and Climate Within the Danish Empire

This paper examines how institutional knowledge of weather and climate was produced and circulated across the Danish empire in the nineteenth century, challenging the perception of ‘Denmark’ as a small and climatically uniform power. During this period, the Danish empire spanned multiple climatological zones, encompassing Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands), the Danish Gold Coast (modern Ghana), and three settlements in India. Given that Danish imperial authorities did not operate within a cohesive climatic context, but instead managed territories of a diverse range of climates, systematic tabulation of meteorological observations and measurements was variably seen as beneficial.

By analysing the paper technologies involved in tabulated weather inscription and mapping their circulation through the networks of imperial and regional institutions, my doctoral research situates Danish meteorological practices within broader histories of imperial knowledge production. It engages with scholarship on British and Habsburg scientific networks while demonstrating the distinctive ways a smaller European empire navigated climatic diversity. Unlike existing histories that emphasise, for instance, the Meteorological Institute’s founding in 1872 as an expression of how all Danes “had one thing in common: the weather”, my research argues that Denmark’s meteorological knowledge was also produced and circulated within an imperial context.

This study contributes to a growing historiography which centres weather and climate knowledge in imperial administration. It demonstrates how the collection of meteorological observations was not merely a scientific endeavour but an imperial strategy. Understanding Denmark’s approach to climate knowledge supplements narratives of Scandinavian hitchhiking in imperial history and highlights the entangled relationship between scientific institutions and colonial administration.