This article traces the history of Climate Pay – a payment system developed by the Royal Navy to compensate sailors, officers, and nurses for climatic hardship. From 1908 to the Second World War, the British Treasury approved expansions for Climate Pay on a piecemeal basis by relying on the expert testimonies of ship captains and surgeons linking tropical climates to discomfort, hardship, sickness, and reduced working capacity. Climate Pay was racialized and strictly hierarchical: white officers were compensated at the highest rates, while white non-commissioned sailors and naval nurses received lower rates. Non-white sailors were not compensated at all. During the Second World War, the Treasury curtailed Climate Pay by successfully challenging the prioritization given to climate-induced hardship over the general hardship of war suffered by British military personnel in even the most theoretically salubrious climates like that of the Mediterranean. In analyzing the history of Climate Pay, this article makes two interventions. The first expands how historians have understood the legacies of racialized tropical medicine beyond the nineteenth century and into the world of governmental finance by tracing how the Royal Navy systematized and recompensed theories of climatic hardship across oceans worldwide. The second analyzes the history of Climate Pay as an illuminating, historical point of reflection for reconsidering systems of reparation to global warming today.
This article traces the divergent careers of Alexander Laidlaw (d. 1836) and John McClelland (1805–83) in early East India Company surveys of the Kumaon Himalaya. Laidlaw, an Edinburgh-trained mineralogist who had petitioned the Court of Directors for a posting in India, arrived in 1817 as an ad hoc civilian specialist, only to find himself attached to an ongoing Himalayan survey whose terms allowed him little latitude for independent inquiry. McClelland entered the Bengal Medical Service in 1830 and belonged to a cohort of officers whose careers moved fluidly between military-administrative duty and scientific inquiry within an expanding Company state. That Laidlaw left almost no trace in the scientific record while McClelland converted prolific publication and institutional visibility into enduring scientific authority calls attention to a constellation of uneven local and institutional circumstances that shaped their respective careers. Deploying the concept of the “scientific persona,” this article argues that in frontier regions such as the Himalaya, effective participation in Company science depended upon forms of “hybrid expertise” that combined scientific acumen with bureaucratic competence. It demonstrates how the normative scientific persona that emerged in the Himalayan frontier during this period was defined not only by its ability to circulate findings in committee reports and learned society publications, but equally so by its bureaucratic literacy, that is, its capacity to manage paperwork and instruments as administrative objects, negotiate fiscal expectations, and navigate local social hierarchies through sensitive dealings with both its European counterparts and local intermediaries. The article emphasizes the methodological utility of this framework for reconstructing the wider configurations of labor through which frontier science was constituted, including the contributions of salaried European and Asian survey assistants, as well as the locally embedded forms of expertise through which diverse actors participated in the co-production of scientific knowledge in early Himalayan surveys.
An intense debate broke out between China and France over the sovereignty of the Xisha Islands in the early 1930s, in which meteorology played a key role. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the relationship between science and politics; this article demonstrates the multifaceted role of meteorology in asserting sovereignty in the context of East Asian international politics. The establishment of a meteorological observatory on the Xisha Islands was designed to demonstrate China’s administrative control over the territory, and to reinforce its sovereignty. In addition, international meteorological conferences also provided an arena through which Chinese diplomats could establish China’s position in this region. With rising nationalism, it is arguable that, because meteorological factors are strongly connected to transportation, the military, the economy, and technology, meteorology was highlighted in the Xisha Islands case and became the core issue in the diplomatic dispute between China and France. Drawing on official documents of the Chinese National Government, along with reports from the English and Chinese press, this article shows how China strategically employed meteorology as a tool for asserting territorial sovereignty over the Xisha Islands, arguing that science provided an effective means of solving its territorial disputes with foreign powers.
William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865) is best known for his invention of the strange and elaborate “quinarian” system of biological classification, which gained enormous popularity in Britain almost immediately after its initial explication in 1819. While the curious story of “quinarianism” is already a somewhat obscure episode in nineteenth-century natural history, even less is known about Macleay’s decade-long participation, beginning in 1825, in the de facto abolition of the Atlantic slave trade around Cuba. While an 1817 treaty had formally outlawed the purchase and sale of enslaved peoples in the region, the trade continued in practice well beyond that point. From his colonial post in Havana, Macleay occupied leading positions in the mixed admiralty court tasked with adjudicating the cases of ships captured on suspicion of engaging in it. This article first recovers Macleay’s views on human difference, what we might call a “quinarian anthropology.” It then details his work on the mixed commission at Havana between 1825 and 1836, where he continually struggled to stamp out the smuggling of enslaved peoples against a Spanish conspiracy to surreptitiously support it. Finally, it reads Macleay’s work in law and natural history collectively, lashed together by the unifying concept of redefinition. Macleay, it argues, pursued his efforts to reform the order of nature in tandem with his efforts to reform the language and interpretation of the laws that bound his rulings. In both cases, that work of reform relied on altering definitions, creating new terms, and recruiting allies to adopt and advance them.
This study aims to trace the methodological and epistemological shifts in the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, highlighting the transition from the archaeological excavation of discourse structures to the genealogical analysis derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s theses. The research seeks to deconstruct the mechanisms through which knowledge was transformed into an instrument of power to generate discourses of exclusion, confinement, and control within modern institutions (such as the asylum, the clinic, and the prison). Through this meta-critical lens, the paper examines how the categories of "reason" and "unreason" were constructed, and how the complicity between knowledge and power led to the marginalization and silencing of peripheral discourses (such as madness and sexuality). The study concludes by demonstrating how "the genealogy of knowledge" and "the archaeology of the margin" contributed to unmasking the authoritarian practices hidden behind the neutrality of the human and medical sciences, thereby reclaiming the forgotten and excluded history.
