“Imperial Heat: The Colonial Climates of Southeastern North America”

Jason Hauser (Mississippi State University)

Early colonial forays into southeastern North America forced Europeans to confront their assumptions about the nature of the global climate. While historians have examined the ways in which their attempts to understand erratic and alien weather vacillations bred considerable anxiety about New World environments and grew European climate knowledge, less scholarship exists that interrogates the social impact of colonial climate science in the first centuries of European expansion into North America. For Spanish, French, and British colonizers, proximity to the tropics promised agricultural and mineral wealth, but expeditions to the region found it a threat to both health and empire. Their inaccurate assessments of the climate doomed colonial projects, causing Europeans to search for ways to overcome climatic handicaps to colonization. By examining correspondence, government records, travelogues of colonizers, and promotional literature, this paper traces the process by which the subtropical North American climate emerged as an imperial impediment and economic problem for which some Europeans believed that African slavery offered a possible solution. Understanding the ways in which concerns about the New World’s climate fueled the belief that successful colonization hinged on coerced labor reveals the intimate relationship between racial and climatic considerations during North American’s early colonial history and situates early articulations of the climatic justification for slavery in their appropriate colonial context. Moreover, it reveals how imperial ambitions shaped understandings of the climate, underscoring the inextricable links between climate science and considerations of political economy.

“Climate Change, Natural Knowledge, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Borderlands”

Elaine LaFay (University of Pennsylvania)

Many 18th and early 19th century observers noticed a change in the climate after massive deforestation campaigns in the northeastern United States. Initially, early U.S. settlers greeted milder winters with enthusiasm, extolling the remarkable warming effects of “cultivation and improvement.” A different story, however, unfolded in the Gulf South. Drawing on climatological data, techniques to influence the local climate were given a regional slant in efforts to cool a hot climate, rather than render a cold climate warmer. This paper examines the social and technical solutions contrived in the U.S. Gulf South both to manage a malevolent climate but also to actively change the atmosphere and temperature. This is a story of human-driven climate change. But efforts to tame unruly climates were linked to efforts to tame unruly peoples. Florida’s semi-tropical wilderness, for example, harbored escaped slaves and Native Americans in a site of blatant subversion of the racial order. Climatic data bolstered arguments in favor of clearing swamplands and planting trees, which tied into the imperative to expand the southern way of life into the southeastern borderlands. Urban planners and climatologists turned to tree planting in cities along the Gulf of Mexico for reasons ranging from relief from the heat, to chilling the local climate, and, relatedly, to trying to render the hot, sickly climate hospitable for white settlement. In asking how residents attempted to impose regimentation and clarity onto unwieldy landscapes, I explore how climate-control projects were a means of articulating prevailing social and political hierarchies.

“Exporting the Climate: Water Balances, International Development, and the Globalization of Local Environments”

James Bergman (Michigan State University)

In 1953, the climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite proposed to a conference on “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” that his technique of determining water balances could identify, and help correct, “defects” in the climate. He had begun employing these techniques as a consultant for growers and processers of truck crops in New Jersey, and as the decade wore on, his efforts would expand to other parts of the world, including the Middle East, both through the efforts of his consulting business and through his leadership roles in international institutions, such as the World Meteorological Organization and UNESCO’s Committee on Arid Lands, and even the siting of nuclear reactors in Iran, Israel, and Greece. In doing this, Thornthwaite created, paradoxically, an environmental localism that was global in reach. This paper will trace Thornthwaite’s work, from his work consulting on irrigation in Mexico during World War II, to his use of wastewater from industrial farms and processing plants to “reclaim” defective land, and finally to his work with UNESCO, to “export” his techniques of water balance determination and land reclamation. In doing so, I uncover formal and informal networks of trade, diplomacy, and economic development through which concerns about climate—and climate change—traveled. Underlying these exchanges lay a growing anxiety that climate was growing less and less “balanced” in many parts of the world, especially areas of desertification and desiccation.