Abstract
Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand provides new historical perspectives on local responses to climate and its physical impact on the British colonization of that region. Grounded in the fields of climate history and environmental history,1 Climate, Science, and Colonization acknowledges definitions of “weather” and “climate” both as physical phenomena and as constructed cultural meanings.
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Notes
Generally, climate historians have examined the physical impacts of climates and associated weather patterns. Note the classic works, H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
More recent scholarship includes: Georgina Endfield and Sara O’Hara, “Conflicts Over Water in ‘The Little Drought Age’ in Central Mexico,” Environment and History 3, no. 3 (1997): 255–72;
Richard Grove, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Grove and John Chappell, eds., El Niño—History and Crisis: Studies from the Asia-Pacific Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Raymond S. Bradley and Philip D. Jones, eds., Climate since A.D. 1500 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995);
James Rodger Fleming, ed., Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919–1995 (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1996);
Arne Hessenbruch, ed., Reader’s Guide to the History of Meteorology (London & New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).
For excellent overviews demonstrating the rise of studies of climate, see: Samuel Randalls and Endfield, “Climate and Empire,” in Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History, eds. James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming, 2014);
Ruth Morgan, “Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and Climate Change,” Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 350–60;
Brant Vogel, “Bibliography of Recent Literature in the History of Meteorology Twenty Six Years, 1983–2008,” History of Meteorology 5 (2009) 23–125, and the journal, History of Meteorology, http://www.meteohistory.org/scholarship/journal.html.
Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–76.
Andrew Sturman and Nigel Tapper, The Weather and Climate of Australia and New Zealand, 2nd ed. (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Evident, for example, in some of the work of the editors: Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Beattie, “Climate Change, Forest Conservation and Science: A Case Study of New Zealand, 1840–1920,” History of Meteorology 5 (2009): 1–18;
Matt Henry, “Trans-Tasman Meteorology and the Production of a Tasman Airspace, 1920–1940,” ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand 4, no.1 (2009): 14–36.
Mike Hulme, “Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change,” Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, NS 33 (2008): 5–11, 6.
On recent approaches, see: Tom Griffiths, “The Nature of Culture and the Culture of Nature,” in Cultural History in Australia, eds. Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003), 67, 75; Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire, eds. Beattie, Melillo, and O’Gorman.
For an overview, see: Robin and Griffiths, “Environmental History in Australasia,” Environment and History 10, no. 4 (2004): 439–74.
The others are: Don Garden, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005); Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety.
Note, de Lisle, Sails to Satellites; N. G. Robertson, “The Organization and Development of Weather Observation in New Zealand,” in New Zealand Weather and Climate, ed. B. J. Gardner (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1950), 7–25.
S. Naylor, “Nationalizing Provincial Weather: Meteorology in Nineteenth Century Cornwall,” British Journal for the History of Science 39 (2006): 1–27.
David Lambert and Alan Lester, “Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” in Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Lambert and Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.
Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith with Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000).
J. M. Powell, Environmental Management in Australia, 1788–1914: Guardians, Improvers and Profit: An Introductory Survey (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976); Environmental Histories of New Zealand, eds. Pawson and Brooking (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977);
Linda Bryder, “‘A Health Resort for Consumptives: Tuberculosis and Immigration to New Zealand, 1880–1914,” Medical History 40 (1996): 459–64;
Beattie, “Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation, Towns, Disease and Well-Being in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1830s–1930s,” Environment and History 14, no. 4 (2008): 583–610.
Beattie, “Recent Directions in the Environmental Historiography of the British Empire,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 129–39;
Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005), 31–32.
Keith Jackson and Alan McRobie, Historical & Political Dictionary of New Zealand (Rangiora: MC Enterprises, 2008), 408–9; Templew, Australians, Historical Statistics, 26.
G. Irwin, “Voyaging and Settlement,” in Vaka Moana Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific, ed. K. R. Howe (Auckland: Auckland War Memorial Museum & David Bateman, 2006), 54–91.
David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 45.
Griffiths, “Introduction,” in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, eds. Griffiths and Robin (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 1–16.
On the post-1945 periods and locality, see: Robin, “Global Ideas in Local Places: The Humanities in Environmental Management,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 69–84.
Richard Ibbitt, Ross Woods, and Alistair McKerchar, “Hydrological Processes of Extreme Events,” in Floods and Drought: The New Zealand Experience, eds. M. Paul Mosley and Charles P. Pearson (Wellington: Hydrological Society of New Zealand, 1997), 16; J. M. Salinger, cited in Mosley and Pearson, “Introduction: Hydrological Extremes and Climate in New Zealand,” Floods and Drought, 10.
See also, for example, O’Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (Collingwood, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, 2012), 1–7.
Bill Gammage, “The Wiradjuri War, 1838–40,” The Push 16 (1983): 3–17.
Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007); Brooking and Pawson, Seeds of Empire.
For further details, see Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999);
Powell, Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria, 1834–1988 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989);
Powell, Plains of Promise, Rivers of Destiny: Water Management and the Development of Queensland, 1824–1990 (Bowen Hills: Boolarong Publications, 1991);
Morgan, Running Out? Water in Western Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, forthcoming, 2015).
W. J. Gibbs, Origins of Australian Meteorology, Metarch Papers No.12 (Melbourne: Bureau of Meteorology, 1998), 5–23;
R. W. Home and K. T. Livingston, “Science and Technology in the Story of Australian Federation: The Case of Meteorology, 1876–1908,” Historical Records of Australian Science 10, no. 2 (1994): 109–27.
J. F. de Lisle, Sails to Satellites: A History of Meteorology in New Zealand (Wellington: New Zealand Meteorological Service, 1986), 27.
Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Vladimir Janković, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
See also: O’Gorman, “Colonial Meteorologists and Australia’s Variable Weather,” University of Queensland Historical Proceedings 16 (2005): 67–88;
Tim Sherratt, Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet (Melbourne: Metarch Papers no. 16, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, 2007);
Kirsty Douglas, Under such Sunny Skies: Understanding Weather in Colonial Australia, 1860–1901 (Melbourne: Metarch Papers no. 17, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, 2007); Federation and Meteorology (Melbourne: Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, University of Melbourne, 2001).
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (2014). Introduction. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_1
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