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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2018

Zeke Baker
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 731 - 761
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association, 2018 

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Footnotes

Many thanks for critical commentary by anonymous reviewers, John R. Hall, Diana K. Davis, Kelsey Meagher, Angela Carter, Jo Hale, Patrick Carroll, and Stephanie Mudge, and for the wonderful forums organized by the UC Davis Power and Inequality Workshop and the 2017 meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the Historical-Comparative Section of the American Sociological Association.

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