A new special issue of the History of Meteorology
By Xiao Liu and Xiaoping Xue (Tsinghua University)
When reflecting on Asia’s past, our attention often turns to land-based empires, national boundaries, or dynastic politics. Yet the oceans that surround and connect the region—the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Western Pacific—have long been crucial spaces of exchange, mobility, and contestation. These maritime worlds were also environments of uncertainty, shaped by storms, shifting monsoons, and changing seasonal cycles. To navigate, exploit, and govern these waters, states, empires, and local communities alike relied on meteorological knowledge.
This is the starting point of our special issue, Connecting Oceanic Asia: Production and Application of Meteorological Knowledge, which invites us to reflect on how weather observation, forecasting, and scientific infrastructures were central to the making of modern Asia. Meteorological knowledge in Asia was rarely produced in isolation. It emerged through layered exchanges between indigenous traditions of weather lore, colonial and imperial science, and global networks of information sharing.