Valuing Indian Ocean Monsoon Risk and the Making of Climate Science

Join us for a GHIL Lecture by Debjani Bhattacharyya (University of Zürich) as part of our summer series on environmental history.

Valuing Indian Ocean Monsoon Risk and the Making of Climate Science

This lecture brings together the intertwined histories of maritime insurance and of technical as well as vernacular representations of maritime storms in the late eighteenth century Indian Ocean. The technical representation of storms became an urgent issue of prediction, and was also important in arbitrating legal questions around liability for insurers, underwriters in Britain, and local courts in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. The question of commodification drove both these issues, as the lecture shows, as weather disturbance became the object of revenue generation; indeed, the uncertainty attached to it was precisely what drove its commodification. Focusing on this process of double commodification, the lecture reveals how the non-corporeal entity of the monsoon was enclosed as a commodity and its risk further priced and thus offloaded through the courts as well as other financial instruments. Ultimately, the lecture makes a case for historicizing what is too often seen as a contemporary phenomenon: the financialization of the climate crisis.

Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and leads the ERC project ‘Fair-Weather Finance: Historical Antecedents to Climate Risk Management’.

About the series

Environments of Knowledge: Climate, Risk, and Governance from the Middle Ages to the Anthropocene

This year’s summer lecture series examines how societies have understood, managed, and monetized environmental change. Drawing on approaches from environmental history, historical climatology, and science and technology studies, the series spans a wide chronological range, from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. Fourteenth-century English weather records feature alongside early modern flood politics, Cold War hydrology, and the valuation of monsoon risk. Taken together, these perspectives highlight the diverse ways in which environmental knowledge has shaped—and been shaped by—political, economic, and scientific practices.