Debjani Bhattacharyya: ATMOSPHERIC POLITICS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

In this talk Debjani Bhattacharyya shows how the underwriting practices that developed with Britain’s imperial expansion in the Indian ocean critically shaped the very parameters of meteorology in the early 19th century. Analyzing navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London, the talk reflects on why tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving underwriting business. Bridging economic and environmental history, the talk documents how the very modalities and frameworks for assessing climate disturbance emanated out of these webs of insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period. Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the chair for the history of the Anthropocene at University of Zürich. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge, 2018). Currently she is working on the entanglement of climate and insurance from the latter half of the 19th century.