ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Meteorological Inscription Within a Fragmented Empire: Regional and Imperial Circulation of Paper-borne Weather Knowledge in Iceland and the Danish West Indies, 1841-1877

• In Event: Natural Extraction: Shifting Epistemic Hierarchies Within the Danish Atlantic Empire, 1770–1940

English Abstract

Until 1917, the formal Danish Empire extended across diverse climates, from the polar environment of Greenland to the tropical Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands). In a period preceding stable telegraphic connections, knowledge of these regions, their weather, and climates depended on paper-borne tables that organised and disciplined daily observations and circulated between the Empire’s dispersed territories and its scientific institutions in the temperate metropole of Copenhagen. The sheer climatic distance between these regions both reflected and intensified the administrative and communicative fragmentation that characterised Denmark’s Empire. This paper argues that paper technologies, principally observational tables wielded by regional actors, functioned as the connective tissue of Denmark’s fragmented Empire. To illustrate the statuses and inscriptive practices of regional actors in the nineteenth century, this paper compares the observational networks of the Icelandic Literary Society (Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag), from 1841 to c. 1857, and an observational network in the Danish West Indies, from 1875 to 1877, organised by a regional physician and maintained by plantation overseers. Both cases are based on archival research in Denmark and Iceland, as well as field research in the former Danish West Indies. While embedded in contrasting assemblages and contexts – the rise of Icelandic patriotism and the post-emancipation plantation economy of the West Indies – both networks, and their paper technologies, demonstrate how regional organisers sought epistemic and material support from imperial knowledge institutions, specifically the Meteorological Committee and the Meteorological Institute. This paper contributes to the growing historiography of empires and meteorology by expanding its geographical scope to include the climatically varied Danish Empire and analysing observational tables as a material element used to paper over its fragments.

Author

• Dann Grotum, European University Institute