Abstract
As Richard Grove and others have shown, the servants of the East India Company carried a preoccupation with the recording and classification of natural environments.1 This is particularly true of weather and climate. During the early-mid nineteenth century the East India Company established the first systematic meteorological observatories in several territories under their control, including (in chronological order of opening) Madras, Calcutta, St Helena, Bombay and Singapore. However, the tradition of recording meteorological observations extended back significantly further than this, with weather chronologies of a shorter duration available in numerous archives around the world. These derive from medical observations, travel writings, military records, ships’ logs and a variety of personal diaries and correspondences. New territories were assessed for their suitability for European habitation. Likewise, travel ‘tours’ to new trading regions incorporated meteorological readings to assess the likely crop yields and their responses to droughts and floods.2 East India Company naturalists corresponding about a series of global droughts in the 1790s arguably discovered El Niño teleconnections some 130 years before Gilbert Walker first defined the Southern Oscillation.3
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Notes
R. H. Grove (1997), Ecology, Climate and Empire. Cambridge: White Horse Press, pp. 124–146;
R. H. Grove (1998), ‘The East India Company, the Raj and the El Niño: The Critical Role Played by Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections 1779–1930’ in R. H. Grove, V. Damodaran and S. Sangwan (eds.), Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 301–323;
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See, for example, A. P. Hove (1855), Tours for scientific and economical research, made in Guzerat-Kattiawar, and the Conkuns, in 1787–1788. Bombay: Government of Bombay.
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For a fuller discussion of the importance of natural disasters in Indian history see T. Roy (2012), Oxford Short Introductions: Natural Disasters in Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
A brief overview of Indian climate variability over the last millennium has been attempted, although this used secondary sources only and did not generate a chronology. See G. B. Pant, K. Rupa Kumar, N. A. Sontakke and H. P. Borgaonkar (1993), ‘Climate Variability Over India on Century and Longer Time Scales’, in R. N. Keshavamurty and P. C. Joshi (eds.), Advances in Tropical Meteorology. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, pp. 71–84.
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Adamson, G. (2015). Colonial Private Diaries and their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799–1828. In: Damodaran, V., Winterbottom, A., Lester, A. (eds) The East India Company and the Natural World. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_6
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