ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Proxying Climate and Forecasting Epidemics in Late Colonial India

• In Event: Histories of Climate and Environment 2: Knowing

English Abstract

Climate, epidemiological, statistical and other forms of modelling are now ubiquitous and play a central role in shaping modern science, medicine, and even our social lives. Far less well understood, however, are the historical and colonial antecedents of efforts to predict and spatially visualise future phenomena, from climate changes to epidemic risk. This paper examines the pioneering quasi-modelling work of Sir Leonard Rogers (1868–1962) during the 1920s and 1930s. A retired member of the Indian Medical Service and leading authority on tropical disease developed by a long career in Calcutta, Rogers developed an innovative method for forecasting the regional incidence of major epidemic diseases in India - particularly cholera, smallpox, and plague - by correlating c.50 years of medical data with climatic variables such as temperature, rainfall, and humidity.

Tracing the development of Rogers’s methodology, the paper demonstrates how his forecasting practices relied on the intensive extraction, standardisation, and circulation of colonially produced medical and meteorological data, embedding climatic knowledge within imperial regimes of medical surveillance and governance. It argues that Rogers’s work reconfigured climate from background environmental condition to a predictive scientific variable and, in doing so, reimagined India as a calculable and governable space of pre-emptive health intervention. At the same time, these forecasts depended on the authority of expert interpretation, obscuring the underlying calculations, epistemic uncertainties, and the collaborative labour of largely unnamed colonial doctors and meteorologists. By placing Rogers’s forecasts within the history of science, the paper offers a critical genealogy of contemporary climate–health modelling and contributes to current scholarship on how scientific authority, prediction, and environmental knowledge are constructed and communicated under conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Author

• Philip Jagessar, King's College London