




































    

Corresponding author  

Fiona Williamson, Singapore Management University, fwilliamson@smu.edu.sg  

 

 

 

A Question of Scale: Making Meteorological Knowledge and Nation in 

Imperial Asia 

 

Fiona Williamson and Vladimir Janković  

 

 

 

Introduction 

This special issue of History of Meteorology explores processes of making, 

communicating, and embedding modern meteorological knowledge in late nineteenth and early 

twentieth century imperial Asia. Its focus is on the institutionalisation of meteorology in key 

nation-building activities such as developing agricultural services, synoptic mapping to predict 

storms, and participation in scientific organisations and initiatives. Collectively, the essays 

explore the intersection of local, regional, and international scales and processes in generating 

new forms of state-sponsored meteorological practices and institutions, though complex multi-

layered networks involving different actors and modes of information flow across multiple 

scales. In so doing, they reveal the dynamism and mobility of people, objects, inscriptions, 

information, careers, ways of knowing, and so on across space and place. They build from the 

paradigm that mastering the means of understanding and—significantly—making use of the 

weather in Asia involved working with manifold modes of meteorological knowledge drawn 

from multiple origins.  

Thanks to the efforts of many scholars in the history of science, it is now generally 

accepted that knowledge is not produced within national borders but shaped by global trends, 

local information and needs, and relationships between scientific organisations and people, 

often across vast geographic and cultural regions and traditions.1 In the history of meteorology, 

however, such trends have only more recently been explored.2 The scholarship has generally 

been Western in theme and, although often ground-breaking in its own right, perspectives and 

explorations of meteorological practices have been primarily confined to European or 

                                                           
1 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–

1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific 

Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 

2 Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire and the Problem of Scale (Chicago University Press, 2018); Martin 

Mahony and Angelo Matteo Caglioti, “Introduction to Relocating Meteorology,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 1–14; 

Zhenghong Chen, Guifang Yang, and Robert A. L. Wray, “Shiyan Tao and the History of Indigenous Meteorology in China,” 

Earth Sciences History 33, no. 2 (2014): 346–60; Masumi Zaiki and Togo Tsukahara, “Meteorology on the Southern Frontier 

of Japan’s Empire,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 1, no. 2 (2007): 183–203; Vladimir Janković, “Science 

Migrations: Mesoscale Weather Prediction from Belgrade to Washington, 1970–2000,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 1 

(2004): 45–75; A. Udías, Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories 

(Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).  

mailto:fwilliamson@smu.edu.sg


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American contexts.3 Whilst this collection of essays does not seek to overturn this trend, it does 

aim to delve a little deeper into Asian stories to reveal meteorological science as a more 

globally-distributed scientific practice, ultimately demonstrating the complex origins of its 

adoption and modernisation in Asia.4 Although Western imperialism did play a significant role 

in facilitating and distributing knowledge in Asia, the binary disjunct that Western narratives 

have raised has obscured the fact that modern meteorology was the sole property neither of 

Western actors nor of colonial needs. Asian interests and demands, public opinion, and Asia-

based scientists and scientific networks were critical. Western-centric narratives have also left 

gaps in considering how Asian imperialism drove scientific endeavour, despite the similarity 

of motives behind using meteorology as a state-advancing tool. Japan, for example, began its 

own program modernisation in the mid-nineteenth century, establishing research stations and 

observatories across the country and, after expanding overseas, undertook the same process in 

Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. The first formal observatory in Taiwan, for instance, was 

established in 1896 by the Japanese authorities and, by the 1920s, the Japanese had also 

established a meteorological department at the imperial university for weather monitoring and 

forecasting. During the twenties and thirties, they became strong leaders in the field of Asian 

agricultural meteorology and gained recognition in tropical storm science (Fujiwara Sakuhei), 

atmospheric science (Wasaburo Oishi), and urban heat science in Osaka and Tokyo.5 

Elsewhere, during the short-lived Japanese occupation of countries such as Singapore and 

Hong Kong, observatories and meteorological facilities were taken over and weather records 

held secret as part of the war effort.  

Rising interest in, and support for, meteorology reflected pragmatic concerns of 

governance and exploitation of space. Trade and exploration were vulnerable to weather 

conditions, shaping access, extraction, and transport of commodities,6 and it was a matter of 

scientific and mathematical perspicuity to use climatic theories in making decisions about 

geographical, material, and political conquests of new territories. Meteorology and 

mathematical climatology were used in planning to help increase nations’ profits by either 

lowering costs of extraction and transport or raising labour productivity. For European traders, 

imperialists, and settlers, newly-discovered climates possessed the economic virtue of literally 

saving labour by producing commodities, from foodstuffs to timber to minerals to humans. 

Climates thus acquired a tangible value extracted by means of observation and prediction. For 

instance, in a feat of foolhardy mathematical brilliance, Jean Pierre Purry, a Swiss wine 

merchant turned colonial adventurer, determined an arithmetic formula for the “best” climate 

                                                           
3 Jamie L. Pietruska, “Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: the Meteorological Infrastructure of American Empire in the West 

Indies,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 4 (2016): 418–45; Deborah R. Coen, “Imperial 

Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan,” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 45–65; Gregory T. Cushman, “Humboldtian Science, 

Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America,” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 16–

44;  

4 On ways in which the “gaze/scale” has been constructed, Tsing writes: “We describe the landscape imagined within these 

claims rather than the culture and politics of scale making.” Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, 

no. 3 (2000): 327–60, 330. See also: Louis Lebel, Po Garden, and Masao Imamura, “The Politics of Scale, Position and Place 

in the Governance of Water Resources in the Mekong Region,” Ecology and Society 10, no. 2 (2005): 18–37; Greg Mitman, 

Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, “Introduction: A Cloud over History,” in Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and 

Illness in Modern Environments (Osiris Vol. 19), eds. Greg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1-17; Erick Swyngedouw, “Excluding the Other: The Production of Scale and Scaled 

Politics,” in Geographies of Economies, eds. Roger Lee, and Jane Wills (London: E. Arnold, 1997), 171–80.  

5 An overview of Japanese UHI developments can be found in: Takeshi Sekiguti, ‘Progress of Climatology in Japan’, Bulletin 

American Meteorological Society 35:0 (1954): 428-32 and Masatoshi Yoshino, ‘Development of Urban Climatology and 

Problems Today,’ Energy and Buildings 15-16 (1990/91): 1-10.  

6 Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 



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on Earth and persuaded the British government to fund colonization of the American Carolinas 

(with disastrous consequences for Swiss settlers maladapted to swamps and malaria).7 Asian 

state and district leaders were doing the same thing internally, tracking rainfall patterns to boost 

agricultural yields and monitoring harvest and blossoming seasons in Korea, China, and Japan. 

A century later, environmental and climatological sciences drew legitimacy from 

institutional grounding. Imperial powers led the way on the global table, as did Jesuit activities 

across the Americas and in Asia. Understanding and putting to use the knowledge of newly-

discovered weather patterns, unfamiliar seasonal changes, extremes of heat, winds, rains, 

unusual ocean currents and tides, convective storms, and non-routine events such as hurricanes 

and droughts—not to mention the medical conditions associated with the physiological and 

epidemiological qualities of non-European atmospheres—called for institutional means of 

information monitoring and delivery.8 Institutional initiatives geared towards investment and 

organization of meteorological knowledge in non-European geographies thus became the  

norm among colonial governments and were made available to colonial promoters, traders, 

prospectors, botanists, and physicians. Weather charts, as Simon Naylor puts it, followed 

interests and geographies that “conformed to the contours of Britain’s imperial interests”.9 

Similarly, the colonial interest in North American climates, as Anya Zilberstein has recently 

demonstrated, expressed real concerns with their impact on settler demography, labour 

productivity, prospecting for raw materials, and health in places unfamiliar to Europeans.10 

Likewise, Jesuits in Asian entrepôts such as Shanghai and Manila demonstrated a keen interest 

in scientific innovation—in methods and instruments especially—in demonstrating the use of 

meteorology for improving local agriculture, for reducing risks in trading expeditions, and 

improving scientific education in the East. This was reflected in the establishment of Jesuit 

observatories and established institutional networks and research centres across the region11 

The Jesuit practices were also rooted in long-established ties with their counterpart 

meteorological observatories in South America, Africa, and China, and in strong collaborations 

across the typhoon-affected China Seas region. 

Authors in this volume provide further evidence that the development of meteorological 

activities in imperial settings served as a risk-hedging pursuit intended to optimize weather-

sensitive activities by means systematic monitoring, communication, and prediction of 

meteorological conditions and seasonal changes. Our authors demonstrate an evolving system 

of practical knowledge developed in parallel to infrastructures of commerce and commodities 

markets: shipping informed new monsoon research, farming spurred work in forecasting, 

resource extraction depended on seasonal anomalies, and merchant navigation depended on 

weather bulletins and warning systems. For example, British Indian officials’ concern over 

revenue-depleting droughts raised questions about the possibility of developing methods to 

                                                           
7 Vladimir Janković, “Climates as Commodities:  Jean Pierre Purry and the Modelling of the Best Climate on Earth,” Studies 

in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41 (2010): 201–207. 

8 Morten A. Skydsgaard, “It’s Probably in the Air: Medical Meteorology in Denmark, 1810–1875,” Medical History 54 (2010): 

215–36; Vladimir Janković, Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine (New York: 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century 

India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 

9 Simon Naylor, “Log-Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth 

Century,” Isis 106, no. 4 (2015): 771–97. 

10 Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Climate: Making Climate Change in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 

11 Aitor Anduaga, ‘Spanish Jesuits in the Philippines: Geophysical Research and Synergies between Science, Education and 

Trade, 1865-1898’, Annals of Science, 71:4 (2014): 497-521.  



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determine the regularity of monsoon onset. Likewise, Asian states adopted and adapted modern 

meteorological methods, often cherry-picked to suit local circumstances and weathers.12  

This collection shows how meteorology operated across a multiplicity of scales yet, 

despite this fluidity, in many respects formed its own knowledge space that underpinned and 

transcended imperial interests. The essays all present assessments of how meteorology was 

embedded within the national development strategies of both “home” and “foreign” 

environments within imperial Asia. They explore how knowledge was communicated, 

constituted, represented, and articulated across networks of people and institutions within these 

contexts and also show how meteorology still operated at transnational scales. Scales thus 

conceived can be geographic and corporeal, or perceptive and representative. The essays also 

collectively emphasise hybridity in the knowledge exchanges that took place within the spaces 

of meteorological science, even within colonial space, rather than presenting a dual or binary 

construction of Eastern or Western practices that met somewhere in the middle. The papers 

span the Japanese and European imperial periods in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 

Asia. They showcase the research of relatively early-career scholars whose work engages with 

the need to re-locate the spaces and places of meteorology and, in particular, seeks to re-

evaluate meteorological science within Asian geographical perimeters and social 

frameworks.13   

Seeing Across Scales: Local Needs, National Interests, Global Reach 

Kae Takarabe shows how meteorology in Japan developed at place-specific as well as 

national scales with some of the first institutionalised efforts to collate instrumental weather 

observations at the regional headquarters of the Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Development 

Commission), several years before the establishment of the Tokyo Observatory. Ostensibly an 

office dedicated to settle and develop what was then considered a wild and uncultivated island, 

the Kaitakushi quickly realised the importance of climatic information to achieving this task. 

This was never a solely Japanese story, however. Kiyonaru Kuroda, the man in charge of the 

Kaitakushi, actively sought input from key figures on the emergent American meteorological 

scene to advise and inform scientific direction in Hokkaido. This initiated a process of 

international knowledge exchange through the movement of people, information, 

methodologies, and instruments to and from Japan and the US through the Smithsonian 

Meteorological Project. The Project’s first secretary, Joseph Henry, was a firm supporter of 

open communication in science, believing that science would not progress if it was confined 

within national borders. Intellectual exchange across transnational settings was vital to 

advancing scientific endeavours. The Smithsonian was not only a hub and dissemination point 

for scientific research, Takarabe argues, but also dealt with very practical elements of the 

science, orchestrating the methodologies for collecting, tabulating, and broadcasting weather 

data in two-way exchanges. 

A large proportion of the early meteorological efforts in Hokkaido were connected to 

agriculture, as indeed was the case in many parts of the world. It is perhaps surprising, then, 

that agricultural meteorology has received so little attention within the history of meteorology 

and the history of science more broadly. Two of the essays in this collection (Takarabe, 

Parolini) connect with this important subject, shedding light on its role in improving imperial 

capacities and national development. Giuditta Parolini directly addresses national and 

international scales, rooting her discussion in the meetings and correspondences of the 

                                                           
12 Chen et al, “Shiyan Tao and the History of Indigenous Meteorology”. 

13 Mahony and Matteo Caglioti, “Introduction to Relocating Meteorology”. 



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International Meteorological Organisation’s (IMO) technical commission on agriculture. This 

commission operated for thirty years from the 1910s onwards, with brief disruptions during 

each World War. The commission operated as a melting pot for scientific exchange with 

members who actively contributed to the knowledge-making process. Parolini argues that 

members’ interests were diverse and transnational in scope with participants drawn from 

almost forty nations as far afield geographically and culturally as Argentina, China, Egypt, and 

Japan. Whilst a large number of the members were trained in Europe or in the US, their working 

experiences and nationalities went far beyond Western borders, their personal participation in 

commission activities and daily jobs enabling cross-fertilisation of embryonic macro- and 

micro-agricultural, ecological, and meteorological ideas. This dynamic was essential not only 

to furthering scientific research but also to economic success in producing and sustaining 

commodities and crops, especially for emergent and imperial economies. First-hand experience 

of working with “new” plants in “foreign” environments to produce worthwhile cash crops was 

an important road to successfully developing commercial agricultural capabilities.14  

Takarabe also explains how the invention, movement, and purchase of scientific 

instruments (for example, barometers) offer a different way of conceptualising the traditional 

centre-to-periphery colonial framework for knowledge dispersal. She notes how the 

Americans, via the Smithsonian Project, were requested by their Japanese counterparts to send 

meteorological instruments to the country in aid of burgeoning agriculture but also how 

instruments were developed or adapted locally. Her observations connect with an important 

yet small strand in the history of meteorology on the movement of instruments and objects 

across global scales.15 However, they also invented, manufactured, and exported their own 

designs which were then sold back into the international market. Thus the instrument market 

operated across multidirectional channels, over international borders, and within Japan itself. 

The movement of people was also important in this process of exchange, offering a channel to 

transfer both information and instruments. Takarabe’s account highlights the movement of 

people between the US and Japan. These were not just short official visits to build political 

relationships, but often entailed the long-term placement of people in one country or the other, 

to work at respective meteorological and agricultural institutions as staff and advisors. These 

people were corporeal conduits through which cross-cultural as well as scientific knowledge 

was shared between the two nations.  

Parolini points to how knowledge operated across disciplines as well as national 

borders. She describes agricultural meteorology as an essentially multi-disciplinary 

phenomenon. Meteorologists did not work alone, but in close association with botanists, 

geographers, and statisticians to manage the complexity of the task at hand. Knowledge-

making in this case was just as unlikely to operate as a single field as it was to operate within 

geographic perimeters. Local knowledge was just as important, perhaps even more so, in the 

successful colonisation of tropical regions. Yet international contexts allowed the 

dissemination of ideas between experts in ways that could not be matched locally. The resultant 

flows of information between East, West, and back again, were evolving and dynamic. They 

enabled the hybridisation of different forms of knowledge in their application to new 

environments and the development of new perspectives and working theories in agricultural 

                                                           
14 Joseph M. Hodge, “The Hybridity of Colonial Knowledge: British Tropical Agricultural Science and African Farming 

Practices at the End of Empire,” in Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–

1970, eds. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 208–31. 

15 Simon Naylor and Simon Schaffer, “Nineteenth-Century Survey Sciences: Enterprises, Expeditions and Exhibitions: 

Introduction,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 73, no. 2 (2019): 135–47; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to 

Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 



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ecology through trial, error, and the application of multiple fields of study. Thus knowledge-

making might be viewed here as something resembling a crosshatch stretching across the globe, 

intersecting at manifold points, scales, and across multiple layers.  

Beth Cullen and Christina Leigh Geros conceptualise scale as an interconnected feature 

of evolving monsoon science as improved ways of understanding local and regional weather 

patterns emerged over the late nineteenth century. In some ways, this understanding also 

connected to the scale of the British Empire itself, and the establishment of linked magnetic 

and meteorological stations across wide areas. In British India, they argue, weather maps 

reflected changing perceptions of scale in geographic and conceptual terms. The early maps, 

such as those created by Henry Blandford in the 1880s, mirrored the extent of British control 

in the region, as the maps directly reflected data points then established by, or available to, the 

British imperial meteorological network. This only changed as the scientific understanding of 

the monsoon advanced alongside the ability to collect deep oceanic data, enabling a far broader 

and significantly more dynamic picture to evolve. By the early twentieth century, they argue 

that a pan-oceanic view of weather had developed, enabling scientists to unfold new thinking 

spaces far beyond the more static pictures of the previous era. More than this, the maps evolved 

multidimensionally, vertically as well as horizontally, reflecting man’s incursion upwards into 

the atmosphere as well as across the lithosphere and hydrosphere. The collation of upper-air 

data developed alongside exploratory missions into higher altitudes, using balloons and kites 

to further the empire’s reach metaphorically and physically.  

Cullen and Geros’ maps can be viewed as visual representations of colonial knowledge-

making about weather, weather science, and India. This particular form of knowledge 

potentially ran roughshod over traditional indigenous understandings of the same climatic 

phenomenon that the British sought to make comprehensible. Cullen and Geros explore how 

the monsoon has been conceptualised within evolving scientific and chronological frames that 

cut across geographic, though not necessarily national, borders. Their lens is also colonial and 

Western, hemmed in by British (and, to a lesser extent, American) imperial ambitions, 

contemporary scientific networks, and trading routes. Their account perceives of scale as at 

once global, national, and local, operating within a worldwide forum yet bounded by domestic 

interests and homegrown science. Their account argues that weather maps emerged not only 

as a useful tool but as a way of rendering the intangible tangible. This of course connected with 

the nineteenth-century, predominantly Western method of doing meteorology; that is, by 

collecting and systematising weather information alongside the integration of increasingly 

sophisticated theory and prevision.16 The weather map—often created around imperial 

shipping trajectories and trading routes17—therefore said perhaps more about colonial lenses 

and mindsets than about the weather itself, offering one way to understand the values of a 

particular time, place, and culture. As Mike Hulme has argued, climate is best understood as a 

cultural construct, viewed through its tools, practices, and artefacts.18 In other words, weather 

and climate are not atmospheric givens but realms of experience that are made to correspond 

to forces of nature that affect the human world through science.   

                                                           
16 Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 2005); James R. Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). 

17 Naylor, “Log-Books and the Law of Storms”. 

18 Mike Hulme, “Climate and Its Changes: A Cultural Appraisal,” Geography and Environment 2 (2015): 1–11, doi: 

10.1002/geo2.5. 

 



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Marlon Zhu’s lens is also set within an imperial landscape, but he shows how British 

scientific authority was circumscribed by the nationalities and allegiances of the key actors in 

his story. He explores how the nineteenth-century English language presses available in the 

China Seas region helped shape perceptions of the role and responsibilities of meteorological 

science through their reporting of controversies between some of the contemporary key players 

in weather science. Honing in on two specific disputes, the first between the Jesuit fathers who 

ran the Manila Observatory and William Doberck, their counterpart at the Hong Kong 

Observatory, and the second between the US Weather Bureau and its counterpart in the UK, 

Zhu argues that the press played an important role in presenting and representing both 

arguments. In the Asian case, the press represented the interests of the international inter-port 

mercantile community whose ideas were firmly set against Doberck personally, tarnishing and 

misrepresenting the dispute to favour Manila. Zhu offers a tantalising glimpse into the soft 

power of the multi-national merchant community who, through appropriation of the English-

language news channels, exerted their influence on the direction and outcome of disputes 

critical to the livelihood of people living under the threat of typhoons in China, Hong Kong, 

and the Philippines. The typhoon dispute, though essentially developed out of personal 

antagonisms, sheds light on the ways in which scientific knowledge and, critically, perceptions 

of scientific knowledge were fashioned and directed via the intervention of sundry competing 

interests operating across different scales.  

Indeed, interest in regional typhoon forecasting was essentially localised to the China 

Seas region, yet it affected trade across the world and attracted international commentary. 

Meteorology was critical to the successive Spanish and American regimes’ navies, enabling 

their respective militaries to safely navigate and patrol local waters in the China Seas. Trading 

interests were also protected by accurate forecasting, at which the Manila Observatory Jesuits 

excelled. If any further argument was needed as to the science’s importance, the occupation of 

the Philippine Weather Bureau by the Japanese during World War II as a critical institution 

ought to leave no doubt. Integrated into new agricultural initiatives and disaster risk-

management and reduction, the Philippine science also had a broad-spectrum remit beyond 

seafaring. In agriculture, the Weather Bureau’s inquiries by this time interconnected with all 

major aspects of developing a modern agriculture department, including crop and animal 

disease research, harvest yield and productivity, irrigation and hydraulic management, even the 

health of farmers themselves. In managing disaster, the Bureau aided the government with 

forecasting floods, typhoons, and droughts, and even with research into seismic and volcanic 

activity. It managed all these processes through a network of registering stations and research 

outposts all linked to the central Bureau and observatory by telegraph, cable, and post, with 

operations enhanced by locally-developed and imported instruments. As a maturing nation with 

one of the highest number of natural disasters in the world, agriculture and disaster 

management were critical to successful national development.     

In the ports and mercantile communities of the China Seas, Zhu argues, meteorological 

sovereignty was tantamount to national sovereignty, with the arguments between Manila, 

Shanghai, and Hong Kong centred in on older national and international interests and 

affiliations. Meteorology became caught up in a race for supremacy, a desire to be the first 

observatory to control and head the scientific services for the region, representing in many 

ways the race to power and antagonism between different colonial and non-colonial powers in 

the regions. A similar theme emerges in Cullen and Geros’ account of the establishment of the 

Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in 1875. Concerned with centralising the study of 

the climate in one place, this was not a question of geographic convenience, but a way of 

imposing British dominance on weather science across the region. The IMD was intended to 



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be the hub of a network that crisscrossed India, Burma, and eventually the Far East, linking 

centre to periphery and providing active information channels. This network mirrored, in some 

respects, the cartographic representations of the atmosphere, soon to be rendered into synoptic 

charts, a new view and perspective on the monsoon region and a way of asserting (British) 

order onto the unstable monsoonal atmosphere.  

Understanding the monsoon was critical to agricultural fortunes in India and many parts 

of Southeast Asia. Pressure to better forecast the monsoon in order to protect agricultural 

industries, Cullen and Geros argue, led directly to the expansion of data collection and more 

investment in the science from the 1880s. After three serious drought-connected famines 

between 1896 and 1902, pressure only increased as revenue and population both decreased in 

Britain’s “jewel in the crown”. In French Indochina, the subject of Parolini’s research, 

improving the ability to forecast macro- and micro-climatological changes was critical to local 

farmers and to national agricultural output. Indeed, climatology may have benefitted more than 

meteorology, she argues, given that the long-term (say annual) perspective of the climate was 

more important than daily weather in managing farming operations. At the same time, the sheer 

pace at which the meteorological and climatological station networks grew, reflected in many 

ways the grip of French power on the region. Growing from fewer than thirty stations in 1925 

to more than five hundred in only seven years, people from all backgrounds, local, foreign, 

missionaries, and plantation workers, as well as hospital, agriculture, and forestry officers, 

were drawn into the meteorological fold.  

One of the recurring concerns across these essays is the role of meteorological expertise 

in economic activities. In Indochina, and in Hokkaido where the Japanese were investing 

heavily in pioneering agricultural development, meteorology was a critical component in 

successfully developing agricultural strategies. It could even be argued, as Parolini does in her 

article, that this relationship worked both ways: agriculture acted as a/the catalyst for the 

creation of a systematic weather network. Protection of imperial trade and shipping was also a 

formidable catalyst for meteorological investment in typhoon-inflicted Asia. For the Spanish 

Jesuits in Manila and for Britain’s officials stationed in Hong Kong, finding a workable method 

of predicting the onset and intensity of an incoming typhoon was paramount. This situation 

was also reflected in India where the monsoon had the potential to change agricultural fortunes, 

and thus determine the health and stability of the region’s populace. Weather maps were 

produced as result of the extreme climatic situation that colonial officials found themselves in, 

a way of controlling or taming nature through the imposition of orderly systems. Geros and 

Cullen show that Matthew Fontaine Maury’s monsoon charts featured new elements that gave 

them an advantage in optimizing maritime routes, transport costs, speed of travel, and, 

eventually, resource use. Through cartographic visualisations, the monsoon the became an 

object of trade, with ocean currents and winds turning into market internalities, part of a “vast 

and reliable machine” with “revenue-boosting advantages”. Those involved in meteorological 

research considered meteorological monitoring a “subject of the greatest importance from an 

economic standpoint”. In Parolini’s study of Paul Carton’s (1891–1969) meteorological work 

in French Indochina, the logic of agro-capitalism becomes apparent in the state’s programme 

to determine the type of crops most suited to local terrain and climate, and the economic value 

of weather research and observations becomes the precondition for the growing network of 

farm weather stations. By investigating the relationship between plant ecology, soil types, 

radiation, and humidity, agroecology served the French state and business interests in providing 

the practical information needed for the cultivation of hevea, tea, coffee, and rice. Carton 

advocated meteorology as an aid for industrial agronomy and farm management, believing that 

a combination of weather, soil, and ecological data was more useful to the farmer than weather 



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bulletins and short-term weather forecasts. Furthermore, Zhu sees a further dimension in the 

mobility of colonial capital related to maritime security. As the rivalry in issuing typhoon 

warnings escalated between the Manila and Hong Kong Observatories, daily newspapers  

enabled merchants to judge their accuracy first-hand by publishing of the warnings from both 

institutions—and, in addition to being consumers, these merchants also became juries on the 

value of the respective weather services. The use of warnings, as Takarabe’s investigation into 

the adoption of Smithsonian methods of weather observation in Meiji Japan acknowledges, 

testifies to the state’s increasing recognition of the public, agricultural, and industrial value of 

meteorological research and networks. Interestingly, the Americans brought their Smithsonian 

Programme to the Philippines, as they did in Japan, essentially a Western approach to 

systematic and standardised meteorology. One could argue, however, that this system was not 

specific to the West but was already practiced—just under different names and styles—by the 

nineteenth-century Asians. Thus the particularly interesting elements of this scientific crucible 

were that neither system was indigenous to a region but had developed conterminously as direct 

result of contemporary scientific networks and knowledge sharing, as well as the pressures of 

practical necessity.  

Weather and atmosphere gained scientific status in proportion to their relevance to 

government, trade, markets, and—more generally—to an institutional approach of managing 

environmental vulnerability. Trivially a matter of everyday experience, weather commanded 

scientific and public interest especially when the scientific practitioners could demonstrate its 

value in commercial and public life. While such knowledge may appear to have emerged out 

of disinterested inquiry into the quantifiable properties of the aerial fluid governed by universal 

laws, in reality it was a practice—a working knowledge—in which information about the 

likelihood of monsoons, typhoons, and other hazards became relevant to the extent that it 

provided rational grounds for maximizing insurance, security, foresight, and profit-making 

activities.  

 


