Connection and Disconnection in the Global Scientific Imagining of the Himalaya

It was for both science and empire that East India Company employees lugged (or rather, employed Asian porters to lug) a panoply of fragile instruments into, and specimens out of, the Himalaya in order to account for what were only just coming to be acknowledged were by far the highest mountains on the globe. Measuring altitude accurately had never really been necessary before, but elevation was becoming a critical variable in many sciences, especially biogeography, altitude physiology, and geology. This scientific engagement with three dimensions was nevertheless complicated by surveyors’ dependence on their guides and the limits of imperial mastery along nascent high mountain frontiers. By focusing on the first half of the nineteenth century, often overlooked for the later period, I show that the gradual accumulation of scientific, political and imaginative coherence in the Himalaya occurred simultaneously with a recognition of the commensurability of mountain environments. Mountain science was thus, I argue, always global science. This had both a material dimension in the movement of things – specimens, scientific instruments, inscriptions and drawings – and an imaginative dimension in the way that plants, fossils and bodies increasingly had to be located on globe that was vertical as well as round. Practising science was thus an inherently comparative process, and even while physically ascending into the Himalaya, surveyors had to engage with a vertical globe that already prominently featured the Alps and Andes, even if tracing these equivalencies sometimes caused more confusion rather than coherence.