The empire of climate is the first of all empires.Footnote 1
There is a basic difference, however, between our thermal sense and all of our other senses. When our thermal sensors tell us an object is cold, that object is already making us colder. If, on the other hand, I look at a red object it won't make me grow redder, nor will touching a bumpy object make me bumpy. Thermal information is never neutral; it always reflects what is directly happening to the body.Footnote 2
How was knowledge about climate produced in and through the body? To begin to answer this question, this article turns to conversations in late nineteenth-century India about how climate specifically affected different kinds of bodies, and why these effects were so varied. I focus in particular on how late colonial meteorologists, scientists and physicians theorized about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, as well as how ideas about race and racial difference were mapped onto these variably sensitive bodies. In closely attending to these colonial-era conversations about the sensory capacities of differently racialized bodies, I pay particular attention to the problem of heat – which, as I demonstrate, became at least partially reorganized as a problem of light. Given India's geographical emplacement within a region of the world described as ‘tropical’, the problems posed by heat or light to colonial rule were far from minor. And as such, these climatic phenomena and their effects on the body were important to colonial physicians, scientists, meteorologists and even engineers, amongst others.
Certainly, the problems that arose in relation to registering heat were not limited to India, or to the colonies more broadly. Yet the area of the colonial world placed under the sign of tropicality represented a specific configuration of human–environment relations, one in which various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. These bodily effects, I want to argue, emerged as a critical site for empirically knowing and theorizing both race and climate in late colonial India. This article focuses specifically on how the perceived sensory capacities of differently racialized bodies were deployed within late nineteenth-century debates about the effects of climate on human bodies.
An important line of inquiry running through these colonial-era discourses of science, medicine and race focused on how various kinds of bodies were understood to register heat or light, who was capable of properly interpreting these bodily effects, and what this might reveal about the relationship between bodies and climate. This article thereby contributes to conversations in the history of science about the role of embodiment – and embodied experience – in the cultivation of modes of scientific inquiry, specifically by attending to the ways in which bodies during the late colonial period became figured as instruments for understanding climate.Footnote 3
My particular focus on thermal sensation engages with concerns developed in relation to the history of taste, most notably the tension in scientific practice between the oft-stated desire for objective standardization and the reliance on seemingly subjective, embodied forms of judgement. As Steven Shapin has argued in particular, taste provides a paradigmatic example of how subjectivity can operate as a mode of knowledge production. Rather than simply invoke subjectivity in order to critique science's unrealized (and perhaps unrealizable) strivings toward objectivity, Shapin insists that scholars turn their attention to the concrete ways in which varied forms of subjectivity are necessary for the creation of scientific knowledge that can be shared and discussed. In other words, such subjectively produced knowledge is not, according to Shapin, essentially private and idiosyncratic, but potentially an object of intersubjective consensus.Footnote 4
In what follows, I demonstrate how the sensory capacities of the body were variously explicated in and conscripted into colonial-era debates about the effects of climate on the body, alongside more standardized and measurable forms of data like temperature. Such debates might be productively understood in relation to a critical tension between the desire of colonial scientists to produce standardized measurements of heat and their simultaneous dependence on potentially idiosyncratic embodied perceptions of heat. Crucially, the relationship between thermal sensation and thermometric data was not given in advance, but rather worked out through conversations about racialized biologies and sensory capacities in the context of climatic difference.
I begin this article by focusing on the history of meteorology in India, and in particular the articulation of bioclimatic thought with colonial ethnology. This particular synthesis exemplified how racial difference became sutured to climatic science, albeit in often uneven and inconsistent ways. Colonial meteorology is also an important site for examining efforts to produce standardized data about heat. But as I discuss in the section that follows, such forms of data sat uneasily with the ways in which heat was experienced in the body. I analyse the relationship between these forms of knowledge by examining the case of a British woman suffering from what was taken to be heat-related illness in 1870s India. From her case, we learn how self-reported experiences of thermal sensation were not always treated as reliable in and of themselves. Instead, what was required was an interpreter of these feelings or bodily effects, in the form of the scientist or physician. In other words, knowing climate was not simply a matter of reporting one's own embodied experience of that climate – it also required an interpreter with a more or less professionalized knowledge of the body, who could bring together both forms of knowledge through their interpretive work.Footnote 5
The final sections of the article move from this empirical case study to a more theoretical debate in the 1880s about how heat was related, in evolutionary terms, to variations in skin colour. In the course of this debate, the perceived effects of heat on various kinds of racialized bodies were scrutinized in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms that connected climate and biology. How precisely were different bodies affected by heat, and what could account for these varied effects? What emerged was a partial refiguration of the climatic phenomenon under consideration, a displacement of heat in favour of light. Rather than a shift in embodied experience, then, what was proposed was a shift in the cause of that experience. Light, in its varied kinds and properties, could then be theorized in relation to a human biology framed in terms of light-sensitive nerves and light-impervious pigmentation. In concluding, I turn to the potential problem posed to such theories by anomalous bodies – bodies that were ‘white’ in colour and yet not quite white racially – in order to show how such categorical confusion came to be absorbed into an emerging synthesis that linked race, biology and climate in the late nineteenth century.
Colonial meteorology and racial difference
In 1889, Henry Francis Blanford, the imperial meteorological reporter to the British colonial government in India, declared ‘that the sun is hotter in India than in England’.Footnote 6 Blanford's statement would have been met with little protest. Heat – specifically what was understood to be tropical heat – was figured as a persistent obstacle for the British presence in India, threatening the health of British bodies while troubling dreams of permanent settlement. British soldiers and officers, it was feared, were incapable of withstanding the tropical heat. ‘It would be a grave mistake’, Blanford insisted, ‘to suppose that exposure to the sun in Madras can be incurred with the same impunity as exposure to the summer sun in England’.Footnote 7 Temperate hill stations and occasional return trips to Britain offered temporary respite from the heat, but the proposition that arrivals from Britain could be comfortable in the tropics, much less survive long-term settlement in a tropical climate, was a matter of contentious debate.
For many Europeans – from both Britain and the Continent – the figure of tropicality in the long nineteenth century simultaneously signalled lushness and beauty as well as death and disease.Footnote 8 The geographic expanse encompassed by the concept of the tropics extended far beyond India, and India was far from exclusively tropical in climate.Footnote 9 The climatic and environmental heterogeneity of these vast expanses, both within and beyond India, was frequently attested to by those ‘on the ground’, so to speak. Colonial administrators, physicians, scientists, explorers and other travellers articulated these differences in great detail. Nevertheless, India in the colonial imagination remained firmly situated within a broader tropical geography in which the heat and light produced by the sun were figured as threats to fragile British bodies and an equally fragile empire.
The popular colonial assumption of a quasi-uniform tropicality was upheld by a commodity culture in Britain organized around meeting the sartorial needs of travellers headed to various corners of the empire – regardless of the actual climatic and environmental conditions in any particular location.Footnote 10 Pith helmets or sola topis, cholera belts, spinal pads, shirts and undershirts made of specific fabrics, colours and weaves: all were for sale for British travellers headed to the colonies. Such clothing was often designed to mimic the protective qualities ascribed to the dark skin of those native to the tropics. But even while the British drew on local modes of adapting to the heat – in this case, what were perceived to be biological adaptations – they simultaneously strove to maintain a distinction – often framed in terms of racial difference – between ruler and ruled.Footnote 11
Blanford, like other colonial officials located ‘on the ground’, was well aware of the heterogeneity of the tropics, and of India in particular: ‘In describing such a country as India we must speak of its climates rather than its climate, so different are its characteristics in the east and the west, and in the extreme north, as compared with its most southerly provinces.’Footnote 12 Yet he went on to underscore that ‘lying half within the Tropics, India is a very warm country, indeed one of the warmest on the globe’.Footnote 13 While Blanford subscribed to a version of climatic determinism, his professional attention to climatic variation produced a more variegated understanding of the peoples living across the subcontinent. Climate, he maintained, ‘influences [a people's] habits of life, their clothing, food, occupations, and the structure of their dwellings … the character of the people themselves, whether active or inert, is largely controlled by the heat and cold, the dryness or dampness, of the atmosphere in which they live’.Footnote 14 Blanford's insistence that climate shaped customs and habits as well as character suggests the persistent influence of eighteenth-century French thinkers like Montesquieu and de Buffon, and before them, the Hippocratic tradition of airs, waters and places that mapped climate and geography onto both bodily constitution and moral character.Footnote 15
This form of bioclimatic thought dovetailed with an emerging colonial ethnology organized around categorizing and describing the varied ‘people of India’.Footnote 16 As Blanford noted,
In India these influences [of climate] are very apparent. The strongest and most manly races are such as the Patháns, Jats and Rájputs, who inhabit the dry provinces of North-Western India, where the winter is cold. The least energetic, and physically the feeblest, although in some cases mentally the most acute, those of the warmest and dampest provinces. Doubtless original differences of race have contributed to these distinctive characteristics, but those of climate have also operated powerfully to the same end, in conjunction with those of food; and the nature of the people's food is itself in part determined by that of the climate.Footnote 17
While asserting a link between climatic differences and racial types, Blanford also argued that climate-mediated characteristics were superadded to what he described as ‘original differences of race’ – an ambiguous phrase that gestured toward a kind of earlier, non-climate-mediated divergence of humans into largely stable racial types. Notably, climate did more than act directly on the body; it also acted indirectly on bodies by shaping the conditions of possibility of life, such as the kinds of food that could be grown in a region. Along related lines, climate was thought to shape disease environments – such as through the encouragement of pathogenic miasmas (in the nineteenth century) or in the production of conditions amenable to malaria-carrying mosquitos and other vectors of disease (in the twentieth century). As with disease, so also with treatment: British soldiers who fell ill with tuberculosis, for example, were frequently sent home, their condition deemed incurable in the Indian climate.Footnote 18 Rather than operating alone and directly, climate was understood to work alongside biology and often indirectly through the environment to forge racial characteristics and differences.
Despite the rather nuanced catalogue of racial differences offered by Blanford, the Indian heat was nevertheless generally held to adversely affect British bodies, while leaving an often undifferentiated population of Indian bodies unscathed. As with climate (‘tropical’), bodies could be either lumped together and treated as relatively uniform (as Indian or British) or classified along narrower distinctions (as Rajputs, Pathans, men, women, soldiers, officers and so forth). For example, British colonial writings frequently alternated between describing troops as either ‘British bodies’ or ‘European bodies’, despite the heterogeneity of racial categories within Europe (and even within Britain), as well as the heterogeneity of the European presence within India (which included at various points and in varying numbers the Dutch, Danish, Portuguese and French). The uniform ‘Indian body’ emerged most markedly in contrast to an equally uniform ‘British body’ or ‘European body’; on either side of the equation was an ideal type that enabled theorization, administration and, as previously noted, commoditization.
For Blanford, it was ‘unquestionable that prolonged residence in India renders the system very sensitive to changes of temperature’.Footnote 19 In his view, the British ‘system’ could not acclimate to the Indian climate. While this perspective was broadly shared, it was far from universally accepted. With the rise to prominence of bacteriological modes of explaining disease causation toward the end of the nineteenth century, the causes of disease and death could be shifted from climate to microbes – although these were rarely mutually exclusive forms of explanation.Footnote 20 As noted earlier, specific microbes and parasites, for example, were understood to be fostered by the tropical climate. In this sense, the effects of heat increasingly became understood as mediated by the environment.
By contrast to Blanford, others opined that acclimatization might be possible over the course of generations, either through biological adaptation or via intermarriage with local peoples – although this latter option raised concerns about the muddying of racial difference and hierarchy. Even so, heat continued to be taken as an impediment to any British aspiration to long-term settlement in India, one that required specific compromises.Footnote 21 Indians, however, were rarely seen as in need of protection from the perilous heat that the British so feared.
The mandate to study and respond to the far-reaching effects of heat on all aspects of empire brought together various fields of colonial knowledge and expertise, ranging from biology and tropical medicine to physics, photography, botany, meteorology, architecture, urban planning, administration and even clothing manufacture. Knowledge of heat, in both its distribution and its intensity, and in particular in its effects on different kinds of bodies situated in particular environments, was considered to be crucial to maintaining the integrity of the colonial enterprise in India. And in this regard, it is worth noting that Blanford, a meteorologist, seemed quite comfortable making pronouncements about the effects of heat on biological systems, suggesting the porosity of these forms of knowledge and the people who operated within them.
One approach to generating empirical knowledge of heat hinged on quantification, measurement and abstraction. Such an approach demanded more standardized forms of knowledge and knowledge collection. A critical step toward producing such knowledge came with the establishment of the Indian Meteorological Department in 1875, which inaugurated the systematic collection of weather-related data across the country.Footnote 22 Yet registering heat in India proved difficult for a variety of reasons, including differences in thermometer construction (in the amount of mercury used, for example), placement (in the shade or in the sun, on a verandah or in a shed) and reading practices (how quickly one read the temperature, the time of day and so on). Additional problems emerged at scale, in the form of inconsistencies and gaps in the kinds and quality of available data across both space and time, as well as differences in the skills and experiences of those entrusted to collect such data.Footnote 23
Blanford hoped that, through the establishment of standardized procedures, the need for experience and training could be minimized, as could inconsistencies and errors. To this end, he wrote textbooks and guides focused on weather, climate and geography in India, in which he provided detailed instructions for how to consistently and accurately register weather conditions.Footnote 24 Beyond questions of recording and technique, however, arose questions of calculation: how, for example, was mean temperature calculated at different weather stations? Was it based on temperature readings at particular times, or on highs and lows? There were also geographic inconsistencies and gaps in the kinds, quality and availability of data from across the colony (which largely depended on the location of existing observatories). The newspapers in India published both daily and weekly reports of temperatures from weather stations around the country, printing temperature data both from thermometers exposed to the sun and from those that measured air temperature in the shade.Footnote 25 Blanford noted critically that the sun-exposed thermometers produced greater variation. In spite of such irregularities, the publication of this information suggests the existence – or perhaps the creation – of a colonial public, a kind of ‘imagined community’ that extended beyond scientists and administrators – interested in apprehending a quantifiable temperature as a way of knowing the weather.
Recording, calculating and even reading temperatures in the newspaper were forms of interpretation, requiring the conscription of gestural and more broadly embodied knowledges, bodily capacities and experience. Other properties related to heat, however, required different modes of registration undergirded by a sense of heat as both external and yet intimately related to the human body and its sensory capacities. For this reason, the body emerged as an important instrument for the generation of climatic knowledge, given its capacity to both sense and be affected by heat.
Positive knowledge
Such bodily effects – what we might think of as a kind of colonial biology – constituted another way of knowing heat, one that was less numerical, but nevertheless vital to the maintenance of empire. In my reading, the body became a kind of sensing technology, one that was transformed by the heat that it sensed. Observing these bodily effects was a way to know climate, arguably as important as recording data from thermometers or reading temperatures in the newspaper. Put differently, heat and its related properties could be known (and perhaps known most usefully) through their (biological) effects.Footnote 26 Moreover, the effects of heat and light on bodies were understood to depend as much on the properties of bodies (such as race and gender) as they were on the qualities or intensities of the heat itself.
Exposure to tropical heat was thought to lead to increased morbidity, debility and death. Heat was also understood to pathologically alter white bodies, through such processes as feminization (for bodies marked as male) and cerebral softening,Footnote 27 as well as through a general weakening of bodily vitality that was at times glossed as tropical neurasthenia.Footnote 28 A variety of other diagnoses were also possible, ranging from sunstroke and heatstroke to heat ataxia, heat exhaustion and heat cramps. Differentiating between such diagnoses, as well as a range of non-heat-related conditions that manifested through similar symptoms, was a challenging task that could provide an occasion for scholarly conversation about the effects of heat.
Take, for example, a case from 1878: ‘Mrs. S., age 29’, as she was described, was ‘a fair-complexioned woman of previous good health’ and ‘temperate habits’ who had lived in India for two and a half years, most likely in the city of Faizabad (in what is now Uttar Pradesh).Footnote 29 In May of 1878, the heat was particularly ‘intense’, and Mrs S had been feeling the heat ‘more than usual.’ In the recounting by Dr G.C. Gribbon, the use of a descriptor – ‘intense’ – rather than a numerical value to register climatic heat potentially reflects a lack of available or published thermometric data, the absence of a local weather station or a slow adaptation to metrological norms of weather reckoning (given that the Indian Meteorological Department had only been established three years earlier).
What is notable, however, is the pairing of this climatic descriptor (‘intense’) with Mrs S's feeling of the heat. The fact that she was feeling the heat ‘more than usual’ was undoubtedly related to the intensity of climatic conditions, but it was by no means exhausted by it. Gender and race, along with the specificities of Mrs S's bodily condition, were understood as contributing to this sensitivity, which we might think of not only as a vulnerability or lack, but also as a (potentially dangerous) positive capacity for registering heat in and through the body. This might help us to understand better what Lynn Heschong means when she notes (as quoted in the epigraph) that ‘thermal information … reflects what is directly happening to the body’Footnote 30 – and, more broadly, why thermal sensation is distinct from other sensory experiences produced through vision or hearing. This capacity for thermal sensation was augmented (or potentially engendered) by the fact that, in that moment, Mrs S was approximately seven months pregnant. According to Gribbon, she was also extremely agitated. On 10 May – just two days before she arrived at Gribbon's hospital complaining of weakness and cramps in her extremities – she threw herself from her carriage (ghari) twice, frightened by the disquiet of the horses. Her race and gender, her pregnancy, her agitation and fright, all contributed to what appears in Gribbon's account as a kind of quasi-hysteria or neurasthenia.Footnote 31
Yet, for Gribbon, the constellation of her symptoms exceeded such diagnoses. Moreover, Gribbon felt that the knowledge of symptoms acquired by talking to Mrs S was unusually suspect. For example: on 14 May, two days after her first visit to the hospital, Mrs S apparently told a neighbor that ‘she had not “felt the child” since the day before’. But in a subsequent conversation (with whom, we don't know) she apparently admitted that she did in fact feel the child. What might be read as a genuine concern about pregnancy or normal variation in fetal behaviour contributed for Gribbon to a picture of Mrs S as an unreliable narrator of her own condition. While her feelings and bodily conditions were valuable data, the proper interpretation of those feelings and conditions resided with the physician.
Around 14 May, Mrs S also began complaining of feeling ‘very hot’, and that she had ‘ceased to perspire’. Gribbon found these pieces of information unreliable as well: ‘when saying this she had begun to sink and the question was put in a leading form; I therefore incline to think the answer is not of much value per se’. Here, Mrs S's unreliability is tied to the inadvertent persuasiveness of a clinical interviewer, and to a sense of her (gendered) susceptibility to such persuasion.
Gribbon's discounting of Mrs S's speech, memory and self-knowledge – of what I have come to think of as ‘thermal experience’ – is perhaps unsurprising, given Gribbon's and Mrs S's relative positions within hierarchies of gender and authority. Nevertheless, Gribbon's search for proper knowledge did not lead him to entirely bypass the patient in favour of, for example, a numerical reckoning of the weather; rather, he turned to direct observation of his patient.Footnote 32 When Gribbon himself met Mrs S early on the morning of 13 May (up until this point she seems to have met with other doctors), he reported that he was finally able to produce what he called ‘positive knowledge’. What Mrs S had described as ‘cramps’, Gribbon directly witnessed and reclassified as three-minute-long ‘tonic spasms’, eased by immersion in a bath with tepid water. Mrs S, he wrote, was
one mass of prickly heat. From long familiarity with her appearance I was struck at the first glance by a certain unusual look of the eyes – they were somewhat sunken in their orbits and surrounded by a dark shade. Her manner was calm and easy. She said the cramps bothered her – nothing else; no headache or pain elsewhere. Had taken a little Castor-oil which had acted; tongue had a thick brown moist fur; general surface moist; pulse small and quickened.
Some part of this litany of symptoms might be clearly tied to heat (prickly heat, for example, which was due to excess sweat build-up under the skin that blocked the sweat glands, and perhaps the spasms that responded to specifically tepid baths); others, such as sunken eyes and a brown, furry tongue, could easily have had other causes. Nevertheless, the concatenation of these vaguer and more precise symptoms, alongside the ‘intense’ climatic heat and Mrs S's ‘more than usual’ feeling of the heat, directed Gribbon in his suspicions that some form of heat-related malady was Mrs S's primary trouble.
Thinking her condition minor, Gribbon began his treatment with rhubarb and ‘grey powder’, the latter a commonly used mixture in both India and Britain primarily consisting of a combination of mercury and chalk. ‘Mercurials’ were a widely prescribed class of treatments, and grey powder was thought to be amongst the mildest of the mercurials. Grey powder became a controversial therapeutic option in nineteenth-century India as there were reports that, when exposed to heat and light, the mercury oxidized and degraded into black and red oxide, poisonous peroxides of mercury that caused intense vomiting, purging and gastric irritation.Footnote 33 Other mercurial compounds, such as ‘blue pill’ and ‘mercurial ointment’, were found to be less susceptible to spoilage, due – it was thought – to the inclusion of ‘organic material’. For this reason, there was speculation in the medical journals of the time that ‘grey powder’ could be kept safe through the addition of honey or sugar.Footnote 34 Ironically, the treatment for heat-related ailments seemed just as susceptible to the heat as the patient herself.
Despite these widespread concerns about the poisonous effects of denatured mercurials, Mrs S seemed to respond positively to the rhubarb and grey powder – at least at first. Her cramps disappeared almost instantly, and she walked through the hospital chatting with patients. The next morning (14 May), however, she reported to the nurse that she hadn't urinated in the past three days – a fact that she ‘did not like to speak of’, which we might presume is the reason this symptom went unreported for so long. Gribbon recognized that her condition had taken a severe turn:
Saw her at 7 A.M., an alarming change set in; the lichen [bumps on the skin caused by prickly heat] has become of a livid color; eyes greatly sunken and with black circles around them; surface cold and moist; cramps frequent; no vomiting or purging; hypogastric region quite resonant; pulse thready and rapid; pupils like pin-heads, fixed; no pain, quite sensible; voice low but distinct; temp. 103.4 °F. Catheter used but no urine found.
Once again, a combination of observable heat-specific and non-specific symptoms and signs were made visible in and through Mrs S's body, alongside her self-report that she has been unable to urinate. The blue-grey bumps on her skin (‘lichen’) spoke to the continuing effects of prickly heat. A temperature reading (103.4 °F) attested to fever, locating a quantifiable heat within the body that paralleled and possibly manifested as a response to the intensity of climatic heat.Footnote 35 Gribbon added that he was no longer able to discern a fetal heartbeat and reported that he believed the fetus to be dead. Notably, sight (e.g. observable spasms), touch (lichen and moistness) and hearing (fetal heartbeat) worked alongside a more explicit thermal sense (cold skin) to produce thermal knowledge. As Heschong puts it, ‘Clues from other senses can become so strongly associated with a sense of coolness or warmth that they can occasionally substitute for the thermal experience itself.’Footnote 36 Building on Heschong, we can begin to understand how sight, sound and touch could also be used to determine the effects of heat on the body in the clinical encounter.Footnote 37
With the failure of his initial treatment, Gribbon proceeded to cup Mrs S's loins, removing about four ounces of liquid. He then offered her beef tea and stimulants, iced her head and provided her a stimulating enema. None of his efforts seemed to help. Mrs S became increasingly restless, moaning in pain; the surface of her skin (which had earlier been ‘cold and moist’) became warm to the touch, and her temperature steadily increased. When her temperature reached 106 °F, Mrs S became unconscious and unresponsive. She died at 11 a.m. Rigor mortis set in quickly, her temperature reaching a maximum of 106.4 °F just forty-five minutes after her death.Footnote 38
Gribbon ended his report of Mrs S's case in the pages of the Indian Medical Gazette with a plea: ‘I ask your readers of Indian experience, what was this case?’ It is notable that geography featured centrally in his plea. Mrs S's case was not simply that of a white woman, but of a white woman in India, a tropical clime. Gribbon informed his readership that he had initially ruled out both cholera (due to the fever) and heat apoplexy (due to urine retention), but his colleague, a Surgeon-Major Johnson of the Indian Medical Service, had informed him that urine retention was common in ‘the “dark” heat variety [of heat apoplexy] as distinguished from coup de soleil’. This admission reflects something of the complexity of diagnosis, and the rather baroque nosology of heat-related conditions (particularly in the tropics).Footnote 39
Anomalies of racialization, part 1: Alcock
While Mrs S's case revolved around a constellation of observable symptoms, signs and self-reports, the conjoint issues of race and pigmentation remained somewhat backgrounded, except for the mention of her ‘fair complexion’. Six years later, the question of skin colour variation and its relation to heat received a more rigorous and explicit theorization in the pages of Nature. In a short essay titled ‘Why tropical man is black’, a surgeon-major in the Army Medical Department, Nathaniel Alcock, sought to explain the existence of ‘extremes of colour’ among ‘different sections of the human race’.Footnote 40 For Alcock, variations in skin pigmentation became a critical site for theorizing the relationships between emplaced human biologies, race and climate. In his essay, he moved through and dismissed three possible modes of explanation – each of which drew on widely circulating theories in late nineteenth-century colonial science, as follows:
1 Skin colour variation could be explained by humanity's descent from biblical brothers of different hues, one of whom was dark-skinned. Such an explanation was grounded in a reading of Christian scripture as historical fact, buttressed by a polygenist theory of human descent. Alcock rejected this explanation, as it failed to explain the broad variations in human pigmentation, which far exceeded three distinct colours.
2 If ‘tropical man is black’, then it stands to reason that black skin must be best suited to life exposed to tropical climates. The form of adaptation considered here was deliberately narrow, grounded in a functionalist physiological model of how a body survives and thrives in relation to climatic exposure. Rather than consider the tropical milieu in its entirety, the focus is specifically on how bodies adapt to climate. Alcock countered this explanation by analogy with the foolishness of wearing a black coat in the hot sun – which, he insisted, made one hotter.
3 Black skin would have allowed the earliest humans to hide in the shadows cast by trees in the forest, either to avoid predators or to more effectively hunt prey. This form of explanation takes into account a non-climate-focused form of adaptation to the environment. In other words, black skin was an adaptation to the fact of predation or hunger, rather than to heat. According to Alcock, such an explanation required the acceptance of the proposition that the earliest humans were dark-skinned, and that white-skinned humans emerged later (as distinct from the polygenist model underlying the first explanation). For Alcock, a belief in originary blackness required a stretch of the imagination, no doubt indicative of the persistence of theories of originary whiteness proposed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach nearly a century earlier – but even if it were true, he found that this explanation failed to account for contemporary dark-skinned people living in the plains of Africa, bereft of shadowy forest. In the absence of shadows in which to hide, what could explain their dark skin?
The prevalence of dark-skinned humans in the tropics posed, for Alcock, a special kind of problem. ‘Surely’, he opined, ‘there must be some other explanation of the fact that man beneath the vertical rays of a tropic sun has persisted in maintaining a hue of skin which would appear to have the effect only of absorbing and accumulating the intense heat of his surroundings’.Footnote 41 As in two of the failed explanations above, Alcock began from an evolutionary principle that what he observed to be a widespread trait – dark skin in the tropics – must offer some sort of advantage, as only such traits would have endured across generations: ‘In the tropics’, Alcock noted, ‘darkness of skin contributes to survival … the anomaly is reached that in the tropics he is fittest who is hottest, so long as heat is regarded as the only factor in the consideration’.Footnote 42
The crux of Alcock's reasoning was organized around this ‘anomaly’, as he put it. (1) By its ubiquity, dark skin must be a sign of fitness in the tropics; (2) dark skin must therefore offer some evolutionary advantage that enables survival; (3) but doesn't dark skin also make one hotter? And if so, wouldn't this be a distinct disadvantage? There must be, Alcock surmised, ‘some reason why the ryot [peasant farmer] of India can labour in the plains clad only in the scantiest loin-cloth’. How did an evolutionary advantage (dark skin) that presumably made one hotter also make one able to endure the heat?
To find a solution to this anomaly, Alcock reframed the problem: what if the issue of concern was not heat, but light? Following the work of the German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, Alcock argued that the ocular nerves, which make sight possible, are nothing other than specially evolved nerves of sensation: ‘nerves which now see could once but feel’.Footnote 43 Ocular nerves, he argued, are a specialized kind of sensory nerve, and seeing becomes a specialized kind of feeling. Pursuing this line of thought, if eyes can see light, then it stands to reason that unspecialized nerves in the skin can feel light. Here, again, we encounter an elision or continuum of the senses, such that sensations like sight and touch became conscripted into the feeling of heat. Alcock theorized that pigment in the skin effectively blocked both light and heat from exciting the nerves. In the absence of this pigment, the excitement caused by the bombardment of light rays in particular ‘would soon exhaust the individual and degrade the species’.Footnote 44 Rather than a theory of the body as inert material that passively absorbed heat and light, Alcock's vision of the body was a nervous one that filtered, responded and adapted to these external pressures.
The implications from this line of inquiry generated what we might think of as a racialized limit to empire. What were understood to be racialized biological capacities for registering heat and light, either just below the surface of the body (via nerves) or within the body (in organs like the brain), put into question the possibility of adapting to the climate. To minimize the threat to their own bodies, the British established and relied upon large native armies thought to be able to withstand the heat. Given the ever-present fear of military revolt after the Indian rebellion of 1857, such a strategy underscores the centrality of racialized conceptions of climate and biology to the structuring of colonial power. To put it differently, the Indian sun was more threatening to empire than the Indian sepoy.
Within the historiography on climate and empire, debates over acclimatization – specifically whether whites could ever adapt to the tropics, and thereby permanently settle in the tropical colonies – have been described and analysed in great detail. One important thread in these debates focused on the possibility of biological adaptation to tropical climatic conditions over the course of generations. If light rays could ‘exhaust the individual and degrade the species’, as Alcock put it, then was there any hope of developing specifically biological adaptations to defend against these insidious rays?
Alcock answered this question by beginning with a thought experiment: what if all people the world over lived in endogamous tribes, fixed in place and separated by latitude, and what if no one wore clothes? In this fantasy of a divided world, what you would see, according to Alcock, was that the pigmentation of each tribe would be lighter the further they lived from the equator, with some minor deviations produced by the effects of the local environment on thermal and light conditions.Footnote 45 The first several generations to put roots down in the tropics, Alcock maintained, would undoubtedly suffer. But over the course of many generations, Alcock strongly believed, the plasticity of human biology would allow for adaption to local climatological circumstances.
Alcock found what he took to be an exemplary model of intergenerational adaptation in the Jewish diaspora, citing the English physician William Benjamin Carpenter's 1842 Principles of Human Physiology:
we accordingly find that the brunette complexion and dark hair which are usually regarded as characteristic of that race are frequently superseded in the Jews of Northern Europe by red or brown hair and fair complexion, whilst the Jews who settled in India some centuries ago have become as dark as the Hindoos around them.
Alcock, following Carpenter, subscribed to the belief that such Jewish diaspora communities were strictly endogamous, which meant that the darkening of Indian Jews could only be the result of adaptation rather than miscegenation.
Anomalies of racialization, part II: Fraser
It was perhaps the example in Alcock's paper drawn from India that caught the attention of A.T. Fraser, a member of the Corps of Royal Engineers living and working primarily in southern India, an area he described as the ‘Equator of Heat’.Footnote 46 Less than three months after Alcock's paper was published in Nature, a response from Fraser appeared in the pages of the same journal. ‘Hindostan’, according to Fraser, ‘presents an excellent field for amassing information with regard to the effects of an extraordinarily powerful sun on the human frame's exterior’.Footnote 47 In Fraser's imagination, India and its subjects were conscripted into an ideally situated natural laboratory for the study of variations in susceptibility to heat. Drawing on his experience in India – rather than the more ‘armchair’ comparative biological approach pursued by Alcock – Fraser opposed an explanation for skin pigmentation based on Alcock's theorization of the nervous body (and all of this despite the fact that Fraser's training and professional career were as an engineer rather than a physician).
Fraser began his counterargument by refuting on empirical grounds Alcock's thought experiment concerning the effects of the sun on the skin colour of endogamous tribes: ‘It has to be noticed that, taking the centre of Europe as the standard of whiteness, it is not only going south that the population becomes successively blacker, but that there is a dark-skinned tendency in the races lying in the other direction, towards the Polar regions.’Footnote 48 Alcock's thought experiment became, in the hands of Fraser, a natural experiment, one that negated Alcock's theory of a direct relationship between latitude, sunlight and pigmentation.
Like Alcock, Fraser offered his own theory of pigmentation by presenting what appears to be a paradox, or ‘anomaly’ in Alcock's terms, organized around white skin:
Exposure in the bright days of August on the moors in the British Isles has the effect of browning the white skin exposed to light, and making it on the face and hands for a short time only a shade lighter than the lightest Indians. This can only be by the solar rays producing pigment in the skin … On the contrary, the experience of Europeans in India is that the sun there does not burn; if anything, it rather whitens them and pales the complexion. It is only on certain occasions, when the sun is obscured by rain-clouds, it is cool, and the diffused light is of a particular but unascertained actinic quality, that the skin of a European is sunburnt. One may ride all day in the hottest sun and have no trace of sunburning.Footnote 49
White skin on the British moors turned dark, whereas white skin in India (mostly) whitened – how was this possible? To resolve this anomaly, Fraser, like Alcock, turned to light rather than heat.Footnote 50 Unlike Alcock, however, Fraser was specifically interested in the various qualities and mediations of light: when the sun was covered by clouds, when it was cool, and when the light was of a particular actinic quality. Actinism referred to the specific quality or property of light that allowed it to produce biological effects, an aspect of what might more broadly be understood as photobiology. Actinic rays were understood to occupy a non-visible portion of the spectrum.Footnote 51 Fraser was also concerned about the angle of the sun – ‘What is dread by Europeans all over India, and extending into Afghanistan, is the “Indian sun”, when it is elevated more than ten or fifteen degrees above the horizon’ – in relation to specific body parts: the head, and in the writings of other colonial scientists and physicians, the neck and spinal column.Footnote 52
But what specifically was Indian about the ‘Indian sun’ at this angle, and what specifically rendered white bodies more susceptible to this sun? Fraser noted that the white man in Australia could undertake hard labour in sunlight or shade, at high temperatures, and experience no deleterious effects; by contrast, the same labour performed in India, even at lower temperatures, while wearing a hat, and in the shade, would result in the ‘destruction of the European's powers of exertion’.Footnote 53 Like Alcock, Fraser too conceived of the surface of the body as composed of nerves. But unlike Alcock, Fraser was not interested in the specialization of nerves. Nerves of the skin, he argued, were relatively homogeneous in their response to heat. Moreover, they were also ‘insensible’, he wrote, ‘to minute differences of heat … so that no sense, so to speak, is conveyed by them’. For this reason, he maintained that humans were incapable of consciously engaging in a kind of ‘reception and discrimination’ of heat; ‘we do not’, he wrote, ‘consciously see by heat’. Here, a specifically thermal sense, one that could be meaningfully utilized in a manner similar to the ways in which humans made use of sight, was discounted. While nerves responded to heat, they were relatively unsubtle in their response.
Fraser instead turned to the differentiation of the various types of rays that composed sunlight: ‘the sun's rays of Hindostan must contain rays not found in the sunlight of most other parts of the world, which moreover penetrate the European's white tissues and clothing, while the natives can let it beat upon their bared heads with complete impunity’. He continued,
In many respects the West India Islands are as tropical as the East Indies, but those who have resided in the former and coming to the latter declare there is some quality they feel in the Indian sun that is absent in the West Indies; they can wear a simple straw hat in the one place, but could not attempt it anywhere throughout India.Footnote 54
From Fraser's argument, we can distill a series of differentiations and non-differentiations. First, there were differences amongst the types of rays that composed the light of the Indian sun. Second, some subset of these rays lent Indian sunlight a particular ‘quality’ that was not shared by the light in other places, both other tropical places and non-tropical places. While India remained undifferentiated as a whole in Fraser's analysis, the tropics became differentiated as sites of different kinds of light (in the example provided by Fraser, the West Indies versus the East Indies). Third, the undifferentiated Indian body could endure this quality of light without consequence, in a way that the white body could not. In this regard, the careful dissection of different kinds of natives and native climates we found in Blanford is left aside (at least for the moment – we'll see how Fraser introduces further distinctions in the final section of this article). The primary distinction for Fraser was between Indian and white bodies. Finally, the nerves themselves remain undifferentiated – not necessarily because Fraser found no difference between, for example, nerves in the eyes and in the skin, but rather because this specialization was irrelevant to his larger claim.
Given his dismissal of a ‘sense’ of heat – what we might call thermoception – it is perhaps paradoxical that the grounds of Fraser's argument could in fact be found in sensation:
The only test available is sensation at present, but this is unmistakable, because, in addition to the burning feel of 140° Fahrenheit, there is a peculiarly unpleasant sensation even in the shade, whether it is that of a tree, an umbrella, a thin tent, or even a walled room with a window, if there is no veranda. This can only come from invisible rays to which all but the thickest coverings are pervious, and which the skin and tissues admit freely.
In this short passage, Fraser relied on a hypothetical quantitative measure of the climatic heat (140 °F) and a related set of feelings or sensations (‘burning feel’ and ‘peculiarly unpleasant sensation’). That such sensations can be felt through canopy cover, fabric and windows fuelled Fraser's speculation that the inciting external factor must consist of ‘invisible rays’. Unable to directly decipher the composition of light, Fraser instead turned to the effects of light as registered by white bodies. Such bodies became, for Fraser, sensing instruments capable of feeling a quality of light that could not be directly observed. Bodies, for Fraser, could not sense differences in quantities of heat, but they could sense differences in the quality of light – and here light became a kind of proxy for something like heat. The sensation itself did not differ – rather, Fraser simply displaced the cause of that sensation from heat to light. In so doing, Fraser also negotiated a resolution between objective measures and subjective experience by arguing for a form of sensitivity to light that only white bodies were capable of experiencing, and that was best known through embodied sensations such as discomfort, lethargy and burning.
Within this configuration, the white body was more than a victim of the Indian sun. It was also an instrument of knowledge production, an indirect means of registering the effects of these invisible rays that could only be known through these effects (as we've already seen in the case of Mrs S). Moreover, subjectively reported feelings (burning and unpleasantness) became for Fraser the modes of registering these effects, of much greater value than a quantitative measure of temperature (which, in its lack of differentiating information, can only lead to suppositions organized around heat understood as a single quality differing only in intensity). Critically, Indian bodies, inured to the Indian sun, were for Fraser unable to experience these sensations, and therefore unable to offer the kind of knowledge required for Fraser's inquiry. And while there were certainly experimental methods for determining the existence of such rays – for example, by observing the chemical reactivity of paper soaked in silver chloride – Fraser was specifically interested in the effects of light on human bodies. As such, human experience (and human skin) became the appropriate register over the more readily observable chemical reaction.
The figure of the human as register threatens to blur the line between biology and technology, between the qualitative human and its quantitative other. The existence of this line is in fact a kind of recent invention: well into the seventeenth century, and even earlier, the body was regularly figured as an instrument of scientific registration.Footnote 55 As Kath Weston puts it,
From the period of medieval Islamic science through the heyday of natural philosophy in early modern Europe, researchers routinely enlisted the body as a sensing and measuring device. The eye did not simply see; it registered changes in what we might now call ‘data.’ The nose did not simply smell; it gauged acidity. The fingers might touch, but in so doing they could also render judgments about granular fineness.Footnote 56
What this leaves us is a rethinking of what it means for the human to become instrument, and for the instrument to perhaps become more human. In his well-known essay on technology, Martin Heidegger maintains that our taken-for-granted ideas of technology as either instrumental (a means to an end) or anthropological (a form of human activity or manipulation of materials) are inadequate, arguing instead that we might better understood technology as a form of poiesis, a mode of revealing the world. Following this line of thought, the registering of heat by the human body does more than reduce the human to technology, because technology itself is more than instrumental – it is a way of knowing that is also a mode of relating to the world.
A note here: while the history of nineteenth-century psychology and physiology – specifically in relation to questions of visuality, perception and attention – witnessed efforts to standardize and quantify ‘sensation’, there remained in Fraser's thought a less reductive conception of sensation, one that continued to depend on description and articulation rather than measuring and quantification. Such sensations were not idiosyncratic but emerged from specifically racialized experiences of particular climates, what we might think of as forms of ‘local biology’ – or, more precisely, biologies that became localized in relation to particular environmental and climatological (rather than cultural) circumstances.Footnote 57 Put differently, sensation might be thought of as a kind of embodiment of the thermometer or barometer, but one that exceeds the kind of instrumentalist relation to the world critiqued by Heidegger in favour of a relation more closely aligned to revelation – more precisely, a joint revelation between body and world, or body and climate, in which the body does not simply register the climate in general, but instead registers its own specific embodied relation to the climate.
For Fraser, however, there remained a limit to what the white body could register, what it could endure. ‘European colonists’, he wrote, in reference to long-term settlers, ‘are, happily for themselves, unknown in India, and the race would immediately die out, as it is only by frequent visits to temperate climates that a European can preserve health. But if they did exist it is open to doubt if a white skin would ever become black’. Beyond the sensations and symptoms engendered by heat and light in the white body, skin colour remained for Fraser largely immutable over the course of a lifetime (with the exception of tanning). For this reason, skin colour and racial difference were the preconditions for certain forms of registration. Fraser wrote,
As a rule, the higher the caste and the higher in the scale a native of India is, the whiter he is; and the lower the caste and hotter the mean temperature of the place, the blacker. But this is not invariably the case, as the outcasts who work in leather in Upper India are rather lighter than some of the Brahmans. However, latitude has most effect, and wherever the sun is hottest all the year round the blacker the natives, down to the equator of heat shown on the atlases. The configuration of the country, however, shows that the shades of colour are due to successive waves of conquest from the north, and the Northern Asiatics, who were nearly white at first, degenerate the farther south they come, and are unfit for labour. A blackness of skin, therefore, confers an immunity from the effects of the sun, so that those having it can labour in the heat in a way that would soon cause the lighter races to give in.
In this passage, Fraser undid some of what he had previously established. He differentiated amongst the ‘natives’ along the lines of latitude (as Alcock did in his thought experiment), along the hierarchy of caste, and in relation to ideas about racial migration (rendered as conquest) and degeneration – in a way that neatly justifies labour in the heat as the natural condition of those who are dark-skinned, impossible for those who are lighter-skinned. Race became for Fraser a proxy for both sensory capacity and a capacity for insensitivity, thereby naturalizing a hierarchy of labour. Fraser explained the heat-resistant properties of dark skin in terms of the radiative capacities of colours: ‘Black radiates quicker than white … the black skin of the labourer would throw off accumulated heat much more quickly than if white.’ In and of itself, this explanation is deeply unsatisfactory, as black also absorbs heat more quickly than white, and white reflects light more effectively than black – precisely the grounds of Alcock's ‘anomaly’, as discussed in the previous section. But Fraser clarifies that:
the real protection consists in there being a few of the invisible solar rays of the spectrum in tropical light injurious to man, which nevertheless possess unusual penetrative energy, and go through a thickness of what are ordinarily considered opaque substances, but which are intercepted by the contents of the epidermic pigment cells largely developed in the African, a little more sparingly in Hindoos, and not absolutely wanting in the sunburnt excursionist or sportsman in our own country.Footnote 58
Where Fraser leaves us is with a pair of related explanations organized around geographic and racial difference: (1) Indian sunlight includes invisible rays that can penetrate through surfaces, including buildings and clothing; (2) dark skin is protective because the pigment cells cannot be penetrated by these invisible rays.
Anomalous whiteness
Thus far, I have largely focused on the ways in which heat and light were understood to affect white bodies in the tropics. But in the work of both Alcock and Fraser, we find strange references to what we might think of as exceptional – or perhaps, to use Alcock's language, anomalous – whiteness, a kind of whiteness that departs from and yet draws upon more standard classifications of race, as a means of further understanding the effects of climate on the body.
Let's begin with Alcock. At the very end of his essay, he turns to examine a footnote in Carpenter's 1842 Principles of Human Physiology, one which for Alcock pointed to the direct relationship between pigmentation and light. This ‘very curious example’ related to an enslaved forty-five-year-old man in Kentucky (frequently characterized as subtropical due to its hot, humid summers) who ‘was born of black parents, and was himself black until twelve years of age’. This is indeed a curious formulation, one in which blackness seems to refer to something more superficial and malleable than race (understood in terms of heredity). At twelve years of age, a band of skin and hair about an inch wide, just above the man's hairline, began to whiten. Subsequently, a white spot emerged near the corner of his left eye which spread gradually across his face and then his body over the course of a decade. ‘But for his hair, which was crispy and woolly’, Carpenter wrote, ‘no one would have supposed at this time that his progenitors had offered any of the characteristics of the negro – his skin presenting the healthy vascular appearance of a fair-complexioned European’. After this decade of whitening, Carpenter noted that ‘dark copper-coloured or brown spots’ started to manifest on the man's face and hands, limited specifically to those areas exposed to sunlight. Alcock concluded from Carpenter's write-up of this case that ‘the black skin of the negro is but the smoked glass through which alone his widespread sentient nerve-endings could be enabled to regard the sun’.Footnote 59
As quickly as he raised this anomaly, Alcock explained it away. The unspecialized nerves of the skin continue to respond to heat and light, almost like eyes ‘regard[ing] the sun’. However, their exposure to the sun is mediated, even blocked, through the ‘glass’ (skin) obscured by ‘smoke’ (pigmentation). While Alcock didn't offer an explanation for why the enslaved man's skin first whitened and then darkened, the fact that these pigmented spots only appeared on parts of the body exposed to the sun likely cemented his theory that skin colour was a biological adaptation to climate.
In April of 1885, the year after his exchange with Alcock, Fraser too offered a case of ‘exceptional whiteness in tropical man.’Footnote 60 Upon arriving in the village of Jeykondasholapurm (what is present-day Karur in Tamil Nadu), the former capital of a ‘native dynasty’ (the Cheras) now ‘reduced to nothing’, Fraser ‘observed an apparently white woman sitting on a doorstep by the side of the road, with flaxen-coloured hair, but having in other respects the characteristics of natives attacked by leprosy’.Footnote 61 This woman, he learned, belonged to a family with many other ‘white’ members. He was told that the family was, for the most part, born ‘white’ and remained so throughout their lives – and therefore their condition could not be leprosy (and for this reason their neighbours did not fear them).
Fraser continued in an almost ethnographic register:
It did not take long to reach the hut in which the family of albinos were to be found. They are of the Hindu blacksmith caste. The father and mother are stated to be of the ordinary blackness of natives of India, but were not seen on that occasion. A son, aged twenty-two, was there working at his trade, with the white colour, features, and light flaxen hair of a European, the only difference being a coarseness of the textures of the skin, and a slightly vacant expression. There was, beside him, an apparently elder brother, quite dark, and a native Hindu in every respect. It was said that albinos had occasionally appeared in the family, one of the uncles, for instance, having been white.Footnote 62
If skin colour, in the work of both Alcock and Fraser, was usually born out of the relationship between biology and climate, anomalous whiteness was a kind of exception that proved the rule. In Fraser's estimation, whiteness emerges within this family as an inherited trait (albinism), one that allowed biology to work against climate rather than in relation to it. Such antagonism was more than metaphoric:
On being questioned as to whether there was any difference between the albinos and the ordinary natives, it was at once said that the former could not stand being in the sun, which reddened and inflamed the skin … Evidently some cause has interfered with the production of pigment in the cells of the skin, with the effect of rendering the albinos highly sensitive, and more so than a European, to the invisible heat rays of the spectrum, which are so injurious to the constitution in India.Footnote 63
The fragile whiteness that Fraser associated with the European body in the tropics is – once again, as an exception – given over to the Indian subject. Moreover, Fraser maintained that the vulnerability of the ‘white’ members of this family was heightened, beyond that of ordinary white Europeans. In both Alcock's and Fraser's writing, the question of physiological and biological equality between whites and non-whites became a matter of serious reflection. ‘It would be worth while’, Fraser remarked, ‘to transport such individuals to a cold climate, where they would be exposed to no inconvenience … there can be no doubt that one of these white Hindus, early taken, and educated in a European climate, would from palpable observation of the specimen now described be absolutely indistinguishable as a native of India’.Footnote 64
If we focused exclusively on this particular example, Fraser might be taken as arguing that race is, after all is said and done, quite literally skin-deep. To take this view of Fraser's argument, however, would be to trivialize the significance and complexity of skin. Within the history I've detailed in this article, skin – which includes both nerves and pigmentation – was figured as a critical component of a biological apparatus that allowed for certain kinds of bodies to be taken as climate-sensitive instruments. Specifically for Fraser, white bodies were capable of registering the actinic properties of Indian light, in a way that so-called native bodies could not. The case of ‘exceptional whiteness’ described by Fraser only served to solidify this general principle. Given this line of thought, it would be more precise to say that, within the discourses of colonial science and medicine, race was, amongst other things, about one's sensitivity to the world. Race, in other words, was figured in terms of a capacity for embodied, sensory experience. On one hand, the association of this acute sensitivity with whiteness created a dependence on Indian labour, both in the fields and on the battlefield, a dependence that also saved British bodies from hard labour under the tropical sun. On the other hand, this sensitivity was also thought to allow British bodies to register something special about heat and light, something unavailable to dark-skinned peoples, and to generate knowledge through a kind of embodied empiricism.
Taken together, my analyses of these sources demonstrate how the purported sensory capacities of variously racialized (and often gendered) bodies were deployed in late colonial medical and scientific conversations in order to theorize how climate affected the body. Despite the many kinds of expert involved in these conversations – including meteorologists, physicians and engineers – there was nevertheless an unevenly shared consensus that scientific inquiry into climate, and the effects of climate on bodies, required a kind of embodied empiricism that transformed the racialized body into an instrument of knowledge production. The development of such a bioclimatic mode of scientific inquiry during the colonial era required, as its centre, a theorization of race and racial difference, as we have seen in the writings of Blanford, Gribbon, Alock and Fraser.
Race, in the scientific conversations of the late nineteenth-century colonial world, was intimately tied to one's sensitivity (or insensitivity) to the world – to the capacity for experiencing it in particular ways and the kinds of knowledge that could be produced in and through the body. While white British subjects in places like India were figured as suffering from an acute sensitivity to the tropical heat and light, such a sensitivity was always dense with meaning: as an alibi for not participating in labour, as a justification for their role as overseers, and as a marker of their capacity to register something about heat and light unavailable to those with darker skin. Fraser (and, in different ways, Alcock and Gribbon before him) conceptualized white bodies as instruments for perceiving the semi-unique properties of Indian heat and light. In this sense, pigmentation was most certainly more than skin-deep, a powerful if imperfect marker of racial difference that was also thought to confer specific sensory capacities on some and not others. And it was through these capacities, through the perceived ability of certain bodies (and not others) to register the effects of heat and light, that knowledge of climate became intimately tied to ideas about race and biology.
Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted from the editorial guidance of Rohan Deb Roy, Marieke Hendriksen and Alexander Wragge-Morley. I'm particularly indebted to Alex for his unflagging encouragement during pandemic writing and revision, as well as for his many suggestions that helped me to hone both the argument and the structure of this article. Mara Green read various drafts of the article, offering incisive feedback at every stage. The exceedingly thoughtful and detailed commentary offered by two anonymous reviewers helped to shepherd this piece into its ultimate form. Finally, I'm grateful for my team of undergraduate researchers – the UCLA Heat Lab – and, in particular, Shreya Ramineni, who spent a year reading about the historical relationship between heat and racialization in India. Their enthusiasm and insights have buoyed me during this difficult season.
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