When, how, and why did the Himalaya become the highest mountains in the world? In 1800, Chimborazo in South America was believed to be the world's highest mountain, only succeeded by Mount Everest in 1856. Science on the Roof of the World tells the story of this shift, and the scientific, imaginative, and political remaking needed to fit the Himalaya into a new global scientific and environmental order. Lachlan Fleetwood traces untold stories of scientific measurement and collecting, indigenous labour and expertise, and frontier-making to provide the first comprehensive account of the East India Company's imperial entanglements with the Himalaya. To make the Himalaya knowable and globally comparable, he demonstrates that it was necessary to erase both dependence on indigenous networks and scientific uncertainties, offering an innovative way of understanding science's global history, and showing how geographical features like mountains can serve as scales for new histories of empire.

Long-listed, 2024 John Pickstone Prize, The British Society for the History of Science

‘This book outlines the ways in which the imaginative geography of the Himalayas was constituted by western scientific knowledge, indigenous cosmologies and labour in the nineteenth century contributing to a global science of mountains. Here East India Company surveyors and naturalists jostle with Bhotiya and Tatar mountain guides, their multiple narratives framed through an interdisciplinary lens of botany, biogeography, glaciology, and anthropology. This is environmental history at its best.’

Vinita Damodaran - University of Sussex

‘… [the book] will fascinate anyone interested in how a complex mix of scientific and human acumen, applied against the Himalayan natural history, led to a modern understanding of the 'roof of the world.' … Highly recommended.’

J. W. Dauben Source: Choice

‘This is an unusual and interesting multi disciplinary study of imperial expansion, exploration and scientific achievement showing how the world came to see itself in vertical as well as in horizontal terms. Beautifully illustrated and well ordered, it will be an important contribution to the field as well as an absorbing read for the non scientist.’

Wendy Palace Source: Asian Affairs

‘Science on the Roof of the World is a compelling interrogation of scale, agency, and mobility in the imperial making of putatively global sciences. It deserves the attention of historians of science interested in the interplay of colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, the impact of terrain on scientific technologies and techniques, and the ways in which European empires haphazardly but enduringly reshaped the modern world.’

Thomas Simpson Source: Isis, a journal of the History of Science Society

‘This book will be of keen interest to students and scholars of imperial history, the history of science and the environment, and historical geography.'

Katherine Arnold Source: British Journal for the History of Science

‘The book provides an interesting case study of how science and empire evolved in one particular ‘frontier,’ and its strength is certainly the extent to which Fleetwood recovers Indigenous participation from the archive. Finally, [it] also provides a timely reminder that the questions we ask about our world, the ways that we attempt to answer them, and the manner in which we organize knowledge are inescapably shaped by our political context.’

Amanda Perry Source: H-Net Reviews