Assembling Cyclones: The Matter of the Weather in Colonial Mauritius

Positioned on key maritime trading routes, ravaged frequently by cyclones, and visited periodically by devastating droughts, weather and climate were key concerns of colonial Mauritius. Focusing on the period 1850 to 1920, this paper examines how tropical cyclones were reckoned with by colonial administrators and scientists. It contends that making sense of and predicting the behaviour of such storms was always more than an epistemic problem. It was also a challenge of piecing together a socio-material assemblage of observation, constituted by passing ships, with their log books and weather-watchers, by reliable instruments and trustworthy, healthy and static observers onshore, and by means of circulating the assembled knowledge such that its lesson could be absorbed by both local mariners and distant savants. Drawing on recent work revisiting the place of materiality in histories of scientific knowledge-making, this paper foregrounds the material politics of meteorology in what might otherwise be a rather triumphalist narrative of scientific progress. It examines first the role of data visualisation and printing practices in both aiding and retarding the development of cyclonic theory. Secondly, the paper shows how, as new theories of cyclone behaviour offered the possibility of anticipation, the tropical climate itself began to intervene in the apparatus of prediction, felling and jamming telegraph lines, and rendering sites of weather observation uninhabitable. The paper argues for the inseparability of the material and the epistemic in Mauritian meteorology, and questions what that means for our handling of the ‘local’ in history of science.