ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Empires of time and weather in Brazil: keeping time, predicting weather, and being contested by the public

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 2 - Making Imperial Worlds

English Abstract

This paper examines how scientific and technological infrastructures for timekeeping and meteorology reshaped territorial governance, scientific authority, and public debate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil. During this period, the expansion of communication technologies such as the telegraph made it possible to build global networks of time. As Peter Galison (2004) has noted, these systems formed the basis of what he calls “empires of time”: infrastructures designed to synchronize clocks, coordinate railways, calculate longitude, and extend state and commercial control over populations and territories. In Brazil, these dynamics intersected with major state projects of mapping the territory, maintaining national integration, delimiting borders, connecting the hinterland to the coast, and controlling Indigenous populations. For these purposes, the calculation of time and the use of “time machines” were fundamental, making the activities of the Imperial/National Observatory crucial to these developments. Concurrently, the development of a meteorological network became a key component of nineteenth-century “observatory sciences”. Competing initiatives from the Observatory and the Brazilian Navy in the 1880s reveal the frictions and negotiations through which atmospheric knowledge was organized, leading to a more specialized network in the First Republic. Focusing on the Observatory’s dual role in keeping time and predicting weather, the paper explores how these activities were interpreted, challenged, and reworked in the public sphere. Newspapers often responded to official weather forecasts with irony and humor, exposing the tensions between state-sponsored expertise and everyday experience.

Author

• Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz