Collaborative research on the meterological and botanical history of the Indian ocean, 1600-1900.

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The proposed network aims to address the sense of global concern associated with the threat of anthropogenic climate change by: (a) Attempting to plug the gaps in our knowledge of human induced climate change by uncovering historical records that help us understand climate and environmental change in the last 400 years. European intellectual engagement with the environments of empire over four centuries produced a corpus of documentary sources on the environment. The use of colonies for environmental experimentation resulted in locations in South Asia, Southern Africa, Australia and islands such as Mauritius becoming open-air laboratories for scientists attempting to understand, investigate, and manipulate a world of new peoples, species, environments and diseases. These sources have rarely been examined for the information they contain on environmental and climate change.(b) By redressing the information imbalance in the Global South by creating a group that would bring together data and approaches in the area of climate change and environmental history with groups and researchers concerned with understanding change in the environments on the peripheries of the Indian Ocean.The network will do this by: 1. Bringing together an interdisciplinary community of researchers from the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences to debate and conceptualise a database project on plant sciences and climate science of the IOW as documented in the records of the period. Sciences such as historical meteorology, phenology (a study of which species of plants and animals were living in which locations during which period) palynology (study of how much of the pollen of which flowering plants has been preserved in various places like lake sediments) depend on both historical documentary evidence and on physical evidence.2. Discussing how to combine physical evidence of environmental change, with historical documentary evidence such as colonial records, documentary evidence of indigenous knowledge systems, and practices of natural resource use. The locations for which we intend to gather and aggregate data are China, Mauritius, East Africa, the Cape, Sri Lanka, Western Australia, South East Asia and India. The region under study is the Indian Ocean World (IOW): an area of primary geo-political importance whose foundations are related to the monsoons, a system of winds and currents unique to the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and South and East China seas. The influence of the monsoon on the land and communities of the Indian Ocean and the inter-connected bodies of water helped to generate long distance trade and and led to an exchange of ideas, commodities and peoples. The intensive maritime voyaging of European mercantile empires after 1500 led to further interactions between indigenous knowledge systems and European ideas resulting in the distinctive environment, society, economy and culture of IOW of the modern period. CWEH is uniquely positioned to do this as a leading centre in the UK working on the environmental history of the tropics and as a result of its links with other networks such as ACRE and Historic Weather concerned with transcribing, digitising and publishing online various sorts of meteorological data for the period 1700-2000. Our expertise in the tropics has been further established as a result of our collaborative work with Kew and the Natural History Museum (NHM) on specific Indian records relating to natural history and our participation in an AHRC-sponsored meeting in Bangalore in March 2011 on South Asian historical records and climate change which led to another meeting on 'Botany Climate and Empire' in Sussex in May 2011 involving the MET office, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Natural History Museum.