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Framing Asian atmospheres: imperial weather science and the problem of the local c. 1880–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2021

Fiona Williamson*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore
*
*Corresponding author: Fiona Williamson, Email: fwilliamson@smu.edu.sg

Abstract

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Type
Special Section: Introduction
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science

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References

1 Singapore Chronicle and Commercial Register, 29 January 1829, p. 2.

2 Angelo Matteo Cagliotti, ‘Meteorological imperialism: colonialism and the making of meteorology in liberal and Fascist Italy, 1870–1940’, PhD dissertation, 2017; Mahony, Martin, ‘For an empire of “all types of climate”: meteorology as an imperial science’, Journal of Historical Geography (2016) 51, pp. 2939CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carter, Christopher, Magnetic Fever: Global Imperialism and Empiricism in the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009Google Scholar.

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4 For more on these topics in an Asian context see Liu Fang-yu, ‘Chinese meteorology during World War II’, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia (History of Climate), forthcoming 2021; Takarabe, Kae, ‘The Smithsonian meteorological project and Hokkaido, Japan’, History of Meteorology (2020) 9, pp. 123Google Scholar; Henry, Matthew, ‘Assembling the weather: expertise, authority and the negotiation of trans-Tasman aviation forecasts’, History of Meteorology (2017) 8, pp. 179201Google Scholar; Aso, M., ‘How nature works: experts, ecology, and rubber plantations in colonial southeast Asia, 1919–1939’, in Uekötter, Frank (ed.), Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton: Environmental Histories of the Plantations, New York: Campus Verlag, 2014Google Scholar.

5 Republican China is not considered an empire officially, but its territorial expansion and political domination regionally offer an interesting contrast and close comparison.

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9 These tensions have been extensively charted in other contexts. See Crawford, Matthew J., ‘Science as statecraft: imperial ideology, botany, and monopoly in the Spanish Atlantic world (1742–1790)’, in Rotenberg-Schwartz, Michael and Czechowski, Tara, eds., Global Economies, Cultural Currencies in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Abrahams Magazine Service (AMS) Press, 2012Google Scholar; Edwards, Paul N., Gitelman, Lisa, Hecht, Gabrielle, Johns, Adrian, Larkin, Brian and Safier, Neil, ‘AHR conversation: historical perspectives on the circulation of information’, American Historical Review (2011) 116(5), pp. 13931435CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Safier, Neil, ‘Itineraries of Atlantic science: new questions, new approaches, new directions’, Atlantic Studies (2010) 7(4), pp. 357–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Shapin, Steven, ‘The invisible technician’, American Scientist (1989) 2, pp. 554–63Google Scholar. For recent work in this field see Fara, Patricia, A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018Google Scholar; Roger Turner, Weather Workers: The Unseen Scientific Labor behind Air Transport (2018), at https://t2m.org/weather-workers-the-unseen-scientific-labor-behind-air-transport; Parolini, Giuditta, ‘From computing girls to data processors: women assistants in the Rothamsted Statistics Department’, in Schafer, Valérie and Thierry, Benjamin (eds.), Connecting Women: Women, Gender and ICT in Europe, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015Google Scholar; Endfield, Georgina and Morris, Carol, ‘Exploring the role of the amateur in the production and circulation of meteorological knowledge’, Climatic Change (2012) 113, pp. 6989CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vetter, Jeremy, ‘Lay observers, telegraph lines, and Kansas weather: the field network as a mode of knowledge production’, Science in Context (2011) 24, pp. 259–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Mahony, Martin and Cagliotti, Angelo Matteo, ‘Relocating meteorology’, History of Meteorology (2017) 8, pp. 113, 13Google Scholar.

14 Fan, Fa-ti, ‘Science in cultural borderlands: methodological reflections on the study of science, European imperialism, and cultural encounter’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2007) 1(2), pp. 213–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strauss, Sarah, ‘Weather wise: speaking folklore to science in Leukerbad,’ in Strauss, Sarah and Orlove, Benjamin (eds.), Weather, Climate, Culture, New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 52–3Google Scholar.

15 Coen, op. cit. (1), esp. pp. 4–20.