Meteorological Frontiers: Climate Knowledge, the West, and US Statecraft, 1800–50

Abstract

This article advances an analytic framework for studying climate knowledge, arguing that the dynamics of how scientists construct the category of climate articulate with practices of government by a process I theorize as “meteorological government.” Using diverse primary print sources, analysis in the present article employs this theorization to reconstruct elements of US statecraft in the period from 1800 to 1850 by tracing the governmental significance of meteorological statistics, military-medical meteorology, and what I term “racial climatology.” Historical analysis shows how these components of climate knowledge were coproduced with state efforts to evaluate, calculate, and monitor (1) the military body in a context of bureaucratization of the US Army; (2) western territories in a context of territorial acquisition and providential nationalism; and (3) a stratified population “legible” by biological understandings of racial hierarchy. The analytic framework I employ draws from and informs existing literature, which challenges assumptions that the dynamics of climate knowledge can be separated from developments in social power. I conclude by discussing the implications of the analysis for how we understand science-state coproduction, both in the case of US meteorology throughout the 1800–50 period and for climate knowledge and the state in other contexts and in recent decades.

Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science

“…Zeke Baker argues that understandings and measurements of weather and climate followed settler colonial priorities. Racial stratification and militaristic expansion, Baker (2018) suggests, underpinned a shift during the first half of the 19th century away from the notion that human activities substantially changed climate. The spread of industry and settler agriculture during the second half of the 19th century across the continental expanse reinforced a twin concern with defining stable climatic regions and tracking atmospheric phenomena across large distances (Baker, 2021).…”

Moral entanglements with a changing climate

“…This confidence is a fantasy, with a kernel of truth. The fantastical part is that we imagine ecologies, animal populations, and climatic systems as stable-or stabilizable-that have in fact always been fluctuating and variable (Clark, 2010;Baker 2018;Hulme, 2010b). The truthful part is that human societies all over the world have indeed energetically reengineered and disciplined nature, draining wetlands to create land where there was none, fortifying settlements to keep the elements at bay, destroying "pests," introducing non-native plant species and making them grow in predictable cycles.…”

Agricultural capitalism, climatology and the “stabilization” of climate in the United States, 1850–1920

“…Scientists advancing climatic theory in the US up to the mid‐19th century focused on two major issues that resonated with the Euro‐colonial meteorological community: American climate change and the climate‐disease relationship. Self‐consciously American natural philosophers and physicians brought international debates about American climate into their efforts to establish regional and national meteorological standards of practice (Baker, 2018). Internationally, the co‐production of climate knowledge and state‐ and empire‐building in the late‐19th century benefited from refined techniques for representing and mapping climates geographically, what Coen (2018) has labeled the process of “scaling.” By elaborating the spatiality of climate, climatologists in diverse contexts informed political and economic interests, ranging from land use policy to global imperial ambitions and racially coded geopolitical ideology (Coen, 2018; Mahony, 2016; Ratzel, 1896).…”