The 'genie of the storm': cyclonic reasoning and the spaces of weather observation in the southern Indian Ocean, 1851-1925

Mahony, Martin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6377-413X (2018) The 'genie of the storm': cyclonic reasoning and the spaces of weather observation in the southern Indian Ocean, 1851-1925. British Journal for the History of Science, 51 (4). pp. 607-633. ISSN 0007-0874

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Abstract

This article engages with debates about the status and geographies of colonial science by arguing for the significance of meteorological knowledge-making in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Mauritius. The article focuses on how tropical storms were imagined, theorised and anticipated by an isolated - but by no means peripheral - cast of meteorologists who positioned Mauritius as an important centre of calculation in an expanding infrastructure of maritime meteorology. Charles Meldrum in particular earned renown in the mid-nineteenth century for theoretical insights into cyclone behaviour and for achieving an unprecedented spatial reach in synoptic meteorology. But as the influx of weather data dried up towards the end of the century, attention turned to new practices of 'single-station forecasting', by which cyclones might be foreseen and predicted, not through extended observational networks, but by careful study of the behaviour of one set of instruments in one place. These practices created new moral economies of risk and responsibility, as well as 'a poetry', as one meteorologist described it, in the instrumental, sensory and imaginative engagement with a violent atmospheric environment. Colonial Indian Ocean 'cyclonology' offers an opportunity to reflect on how the physical, economic and cultural geographies of an island colony combined to produce spaces of weather observation defined by both connection and disconnection, the latter to be overcome not only by infrastructure, but by the imagination.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Special Issue: Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds
Uncontrolled Keywords:	meteorology,mauritius,observation,islands,indian ocean
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Science, Society and Sustainability
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	20 Feb 2018 17:30
Last Modified:	13 Apr 2023 13:54
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/66321
DOI:	10.1017/S0007087418000766

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