By Fiona Williamson, ICHM Co-President and Singapore Management University
Over the past few years, I have been deeply engaged in the project of understanding the relationship between colonialism and the weather in British Malaya. I began this project with an interest in the nascent meteorological services in the region, from uncovering an early observatory experiment in Singapore in 1841 which was a small part of a global investigation of magnetism, to the advent of a small, but dedicated meteorological service in 1929. Across this period, it was obvious that the British government were not keen to invest resources into meteorology, as they had in some of their other Asian colonies, including India and Hong Kong.
This begged the question: why and how did they investigate weather, if at all? From the earliest time of British investment in the region under the English East India Company (EEIC) in the 1780s, British military officers and later colonial officials had expressed an interest in the region’s climate. The tropics were an unknown, a gap of scientific interest to be filled. With the desire to convert the Malayan jungles to commercial plantation, a working understanding of the weather was also essential. It surprised me therefore that the British scientific societies of the nineteenth century only invested sporadically in understanding these ‘new’ environments and that the EEIC or, later, the British Colonial Office, were far behind other countries or colonies in finding out more. It was really only when aviation began to take off in the 1920s (pardon the pun) that the government began to take meteorology seriously and, even then, it was left to a few individuals to really champion meteorology’s cause. The answer to why this was the case can only be examined in relation to local specificities, which I attempt to explore across the first chapters of my new book.
My research has also uncovered a problematic relationship between colonial officials that settled in the new towns and plantations and the weather over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This touched on the ‘imperial anxieties’ written about by historians including Dane Kennedy, James Beattie, and others but more than this, there was a complex interplay of assumptions about the tropical weather that moved beyond fear about health and morality in tropical climes. The colonial government wanted to control the weather, just as they wanted to control the natural resources of the colony. But the challenges of creating a liveable environment in tropical conditions, frequently pushed the colonial government beyond its capacities, and solutions often came at the expense of nature which, ironically, often made managing the weather’s impacts more problematic. The government’s attempts to control the weather are examined across the latter part of the book, where I explore efforts to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather, whether precipitation, humidity, or heat. Here I stray across disaster history and the history of science more widely, thinking about the various engineered or technical solutions employed to manage tropical weather’s extremes.
With this book then, I revisit what seems to me a fraught relationship between climate, weather science and Empire. Imperial Weather thus offers a deep exploration of the various official attempts to understand and apply structure to the previously unknown or uncontrollable through knowledge gathering, institutionalisation, and technological and infrastructural change. Connecting the history of science—especially the history of meteorology—and environmental history, it explores the multiple interests, capacities, and capabilities at play, including the state of scientific knowledge and importantly, socioenvironmental needs and practicalities. Walking a path that it not strictly a history of science, environmental history or imperial history has been an exciting albeit not always straightforward journey. I have had to engage with multiple historiographies, not always within my direct comfort zone. The historiography of meteorology alone has not always taken me far enough, but I have tried to engage with this wherever possible, to avoid trying to overstep into areas where I feel less secure.
One area which has been incredibly rich is uncovering the primary sources, which piece of detective work has taken me all over the world. Countries that have colonial histories tend to have scattered archives. In this case, Singapore and parts of Malaysia were under British governance across the nineteenth century until 1957, with the port towns of Singapore and, to a lesser extent, George Town in Penang, forming the urban nuclei of British rule for most of the period. Thus, the records for British Malaya (a term that usually encompasses the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay states) are held in archives in Singapore, Malaysia and in multiple repositories in Britain. That said, some records have even ended up in archives and libraries in the United States, largely because of the movement of people and ownership of land by foreign companies and actors across this period of steep agricultural and industrial development.
The National Archives of Singapore hold materials gathered from across the libraries and archives of the world that relate to that nation, often official correspondence and government documentation from the East India Company through to the British government. They also host a remarkable oral history collection, which holds narratives that often pre-date the Second World War. The National Archives of Malaysia hold information at the District Office level, which records are often far more interesting than the official or annual reports available at the Colonial Office (CO) records in Kew, London. For example, rather than simply detailing that a flood occurred they contain eye-witness reports and opinions about that event and why it occurred.
Due to the region’s colonial history, many original records reside in the archives and libraries of the United Kingdom. Particularly rich sources of information can be found at The National Archives in Kew which holds in addition to the Colonial Office (CO) documentation; War Office (WO), Air Ministry (AIR) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) records. These departments all had a hand in the development of meteorological science and the various means to manage the weather in British Malaya. The Cambridge University Library is home to the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) and the British Association of Malaysia and Singapore (BAMS) archives contain a wealth of personal letters and narratives stemming from the experiences of British expatriates who lived in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Cambridge University Library also houses the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) archives, which correspondence details their dealings with colonial meteorological and astronomical observatories. The sources are biased towards the structures of state and bureaucracy and to European and British people living in colonial Malaya, however. Such records paint a lopsided view of life in the colony, but this book focuses on the official narrative, not because of the availability of sources, but because scientific history is the one side of the official narrative that has to date been largely forgotten.
The book, Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya will be available from Pittsburgh University Press from April 2025. Also available as an e-book from Amazon.