Editorial note: To see figure 2, please consult the print book.

In 1869, at the age of thirty, Julius Hann seemed poised for a brilliant academic career. Holding two degrees in physics from the University of Vienna, Hann had earned an international reputation three years earlier by explaining the cause of a mysterious wind. Foehn blows warm and dry on the northern side of the Alps, resembling what those living east of the Rockies call chinook. In the Alps it strikes most often in the cold months, producing incongruously warm temperatures and allegedly unleashing a variety of human woes, from heart conditions to epileptic seizures. In Hann's day, because of foehn's warmth and dryness, it was assumed to originate in the Sahara. Indeed, it was common at the time to ascribe the health effects of a local climate to the prevailing air current, which in turn was understood to be determined by its place of origin. By contrast, Hann's "On the Origin of Föhn" of 1866 zoomed in to explain foehn as a local effect. Through years of hiking in the Alps, notebook in hand, he had tracked the movements of clouds and deduced the patterns of wind. At university, he had learned the new science of thermodynamics, the physics of heat and motion. This gave him the tools he needed to interpret foehn in terms of the transformations undergone by a parcel of air as it crosses the mountains, losing moisture as it rises and warming as it descends the northern side. The resulting wind will feel hot and dry—not because it arrives from an African desert, but because of the physical properties of the atmosphere and the relationship between heat and motion.[1]

This was a foundational moment in the history of an international research program that I will refer to as dynamic climatology: the application of the physics of heat and fluid motion to explain climatic conditions in their past and present distribution across the surface of the earth. Dynamic climatology deserves a prominent place in the history of the Anthropocene, for it identified and began to address the problem of conceptualizing interactions across scales of space and time, from the human to the planetary.[2]

Dynamic climatology flourished in Austria for as long as the Habsburgs ruled in Vienna. It was, as we will see, a science geared to the needs of this multifarious empire, just then in the throes of modernization, and Hann stood to be rewarded handsomely for his service to the state. He was on his way to acquiring the authority of an imperial-royal (kaiserlich-koniglich, k.k.)[3] scientist, that is, an expert on the territory of the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole—which covered nearly seven hundred thousand square kilometers of central, eastern, and southern Europe in the nineteenth century, an area nearly twice as large as the state of Germany today. Already he had begun to synthesize data from across the imperial lands, forging a continental-scale window onto the workings of the atmosphere.

Why then was Hann plagued by self-doubts as he entered the summer of his thirty-first year? As his personal diary reveals, he felt his future in Vienna to be "uncertain." He was tormented by homesickness for the very mountains that had set him on his path to success, longing for the "peace" and "mercy" of their forests, "as in the days of youth."[4] He hovered on the verge of renouncing his scientific career and returning to the seclusion of the monastery where he had been educated.

To be modern, in the words of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, is to experience the conflicting pulls of "cosmos" and "hearth": the yearning to venture beyond known frontiers and the craving for the stability of the familiar.[5] Climate in Motion explores the consequences of this tension for the production of climatology as a global science in the nineteenth century. It argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales of space and time, in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a bricolage of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative.

Until the twentieth century, theories of the global circulation of the atmosphere ignored motions smaller and shorter-lived than a major tropical cyclone. The circle of scientists around Hann bridged that gap, developing a picture of the interaction of small scale and large that still underwrites the climate models of today. Arguably, what makes modern climate science modern is its integration of phenomena of radically different dimensions. This requires methods appropriate to each scale; satellites are ideal for tracking hurricanes, for instance, but of little use for following the minute fluctuations in temperature and humidity that matter to the growth of a seedling. What's more, atmospheric phenomena at different scales do not proceed independently of each other. The breeze that, out of nowhere, ruffles the pages of your book may be an indirect effect of a storm brewing off the coast. As the sun's energy warms air at the equator and causes it to rise, it drives a hemispheric churning motion, which in turn generates smaller eddies, from which even smaller whirls spin off. These cross-scale exchanges of energy and even matter are what make global warming so all-encompassing and so hard to predict. One of the greatest challenges scientists face today is to model the very small-scale process by which water condenses around an atmospheric particle and begins to form a cloud, in relation to the very large-scale effects that clouds have on the global radiative energy balance. In order to predict, say, the earth's average temperature a century from now, scientists cannot ignore processes that unfold far more quickly and on far smaller scales, such as cloud formation. They deal with this problem by means of what they call "scale analysis," meaning that they estimate which are the significant phenomena for the purposes at hand and work with those to produce a reasonable approximation. The history of dynamic climatology is the story of this multiscalar, multicausal way of engaging with the world.[6]

When I began the research for this book in 2001, the field of climate science looked rather different than it does today, in 2017. The questions being put to climate models were almost exclusively about the global impacts of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. The spatial and temporal resolution of most models was too low to generate predictions that could be of use to communities planning for the medium term; nor did most models factor in regional-scale forcing mechanisms. Only recently has the question of regional impacts gained the attention of a significant portion of the modeling community.[7] Meanwhile, stalemates over international agreements on climate change have confirmed the need for action at the local and regional levels—and thus for reliable predictions at these spatial scales. Back in the early 2000s, one of the few research groups modeling regional impacts was CLEAR, or Climate and Environment in the Alpine Region. This group emphasized the value of alternating between local and global perspectives, or downscaling.[8] Based in Switzerland, they pointed to the Alps as a region that exemplified the benefits of small-scale climate analysis alongside global modeling. Prescient as their program may have been for the twentieth century, it struck me as an echo of the lessons of Habsburg climatology.

Working without the aid of digital computers, Habsburg scientists invented creative ways to detect, model, and represent atmospheric motions. These included turning plants into measuring instruments, imagining riverbeds as models of atmospheric waves, and inventing new literary and cartographic genres. Although you may not have heard their names before, their ingenuity was widely celebrated in their own day. Hann was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1910, and his publications were said by an American colleague to tower "over other books as the pyramids of Gizeh tower over the valley of the Nile."[9] Others have observed that the research of Hann and his colleagues was "eclectic": whereas most climate scientists today specialize in research at a single scale, "the range of phenomena considered [by Austrian scientists] spanned the space-time scales from the global circulation to boundary layer turbulence,"[10] from the planetary scale to the dimensions of agriculture and human health. Indeed, these scientists produced a novel conceptual apparatus for tracking the transfer of energy from hemispheric flows down to molecular motions. What's more, they found creative ways to make their insights vivid to a nonscientific audience. This new way of thinking about local winds in relation to a hemispheric circulation in turn breathed life into the Habsburg idea of transnational interdependence.

ENVIRONMENT AND EMPIRE

A twenty-first-century reader might be surprised to open the first volume of the Journal for Austrian Ethnography (1895) and find an article titled "The Importance of Collecting Popular Names for Plants."[11] What did the study of human cultures have to do with botany? How was the emergence of human science in this multiethnic state tied to the study of the nonhuman environment?

Over the past two decades, historians have demonstrated the many ways in which the making of environmental knowledge in the long nineteenth century was inextricably bound to European empire-building. This is true, first, in the sense that imperial expansion transformed colonial environments in far-reaching and irreversible ways. Environmental historians have shown how empires depleted natural resources, disrupted ecosystems, and introduced invasive species, often leading to the extinction of native ones. Europeans justified their empires by pointing to their superiority as "masters of nature." But such mastery counted both humans and nonhumans among their victims. In some cases, the nonhuman environment has avenged itself against the imposition of control by means of epidemics, floods, earthquakes, and other catastrophes.[12] In other cases, empires eventually instituted policies of conservation, and yet these have often come at the expense of indigenous rights. This is the tragic side of the relationship between environment and empire.[13]

At the same time, the environmental history of modern empires is also a history of learning. This is not to argue, as George Basalla did in the 1960s, that the explosion of natural historical knowledge that began in the sixteenth century was the achievement of intrepid European naturalists penetrating the wilds of other continents.[14] Nor is it to forget that some intellectual traditions were unlearned, even forcibly suppressed, as a result of colonization. Rather, over the past two decades, historians have shown precisely how the celebrated discoveries of metropolitan elites rested on knowledge appropriated from colonial naturalists and native informers.[15] The knowledge produced in this way included strains that we would now call ecological: in particular, knowledge of the distribution of plants and animals in relation to conditions of climate and soil. Indeed, the classification of new species has surged along the edges of expanding empires, even if closely followed by the disappearance of those newly cataloged species.[16] In other words, there is an uncomfortably intimate relationship between the growth of environmental knowledge and the environmental destruction wrought by imperialism.

What's more, some of the modern era's most damning critiques of imperialism and its ecological costs have come from scientists in the service of empires, from Johann Forster in the eighteenth century to Arthur Tansley in the twentieth. Twenty years ago, Richard Grove argued that the origins of modern environmentalism lie in the responses of colonial naturalists to the environmental degradation they witnessed on Pacific islands and for which they knew Europeans to be responsible. More recently, Helen Tilley has shown how twentieth-century scientists working for the British Empire in Africa developed their own environmentalist ideas by contrasting European land-use practices with the sustainable methods of local agriculture.[17] In some cases, imperial science proved sufficiently independent of imperial ideology to generate genuinely new knowledge. No less significant for the history of environmental science and politics was the scale of empire in the nineteenth century. Its networks of information exchange laid the basis for the global science of the late twentieth century and have been linked suggestively to the emergence of a "planetary consciousness."[18] From this angle, empires have been experimental sites for exploring ties of interdependence among far-flung humans, nonhumans, and the inorganic world.[19]

DEFINING CLIMATE

This book inquires into the role of nineteenth-century empires in producing knowledge specifically about climate. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the meaning of climate in European languages was in flux. Since ancient times, climate had signified the latitude-dependent effect of solar radiation, klima being the Greek word for inclination or the angle of incidence of sunlight. Three climate zones neatly banded each hemisphere: frigid at the poles, temperate at midlatitudes, and torrid at the equator. By the nineteenth century, however, geographic explorers and medical and agricultural researchers were drawing attention to the complex spatial variability of atmospheric conditions. Thus late nineteenth-century scientists contrasted the "solar climate," meaning the distribution of heat to be expected on the basis of solar radiation and the known composition of the earth's atmosphere, with the "physical" or "terrestrial climate," meaning climate as modified by any number of factors, such as the shape of the earth's surface and the distribution of land, water, and vegetation. This terminological confusion reflected a methodological problem of scale. Scientists of the nineteenth century possessed rudimentary physical models of the planetary circulation of the atmosphere, but they had no way to integrate these models with accumulating evidence of the fine-grained variability of climate across the surface of the earth. As one medical writer in the Silesian spa town of Kudowa expressed the difficulty in 1908, "Even if this locally restricted meaning of climate is not common usage, the phrase 'weather or atmospheric conditions' [Wetter oder Witterung] wouldn't always be accurate in what follows, and I must apologize in advance for the lack of an appropriate expression."[20] Thus climate was a fundamentally ambiguous concept in the nineteenth century, in ways that have escaped the attention of historians.

The temporal dimensions of climate were just as ambiguous as its spatial extent. The relevant time scales ranged from the seasonal, in the case of medical and agricultural climatology, to the geological, in the case of theories of the Ice Ages. Indeed, these temporal perspectives were proving impossible to reconcile. How could the evidence unearthed in the 1830s and 1840s of an ancient Ice Age be squared with the apparent stability of the earth's climate since the start of human records?[21] If climate implies a time-averaged state, it was not clear how long an interval was appropriate to its definition.

Finally, the meanings of climate also varied in their proximity to human interests. Alexander von Humboldt had famously defined climate as all the changes in the atmosphere that perceptibly affect our sense organs.[22] This anthropocentric definition reflected the fact that climate was recognized as an influence on almost every aspect of human life: health, agriculture, labor, trade, even the psyche. Indeed, the historical roots of climate science lie largely in practical efforts to improve everyday life. Much of our knowledge of climate has come from everyday experience with the many aspects of nature that stand in mutual dependence with the atmosphere, such as vegetation, water supply, and soil conditions. As historians have noted, professional scientists often built on the traditional knowledge of those whose livelihoods depended on climatic knowledge, such as farmers, sailors, and fishermen.[23] At the same time, climatological knowledge was being produced by new kinds of experts of many stripes, including botanists, foresters, agricultural scientists, geologists, paleontologists, mining officials, medical geographers, pharmacists, and balneologists. Nineteenth-century botanists, for instance, referred to vegetation as an ideal climatic record, "everywhere a reflection of the local climate," while geologists recognized glaciers as the best possible "climatic measuring instruments" (Klimam esser).[24] Just as numerous were the institutions that produced knowledge relevant to climatology. At European universities, climatology might be studied and taught in any or all of three different faculties: geography, physics, and medicine. Climate knowledge was also produced far beyond the walls of universities: at public observatories, by academies of forestry or agriculture, by voluntary associations like Austria's popular Meteorological Society, and by European explorers and travelers the world over.[25] Thus the study of climate mattered in practical ways to people of all kinds. At the same time, scientists were increasingly interested in atmospheric phenomena unfolding in the upper layers of the atmosphere. These were accessible only to intrepid mountaineers and balloonists—and they bore no obvious relation to human life.[26]

When did people begin to speak of "climate" in the singular, in the sense of a property of the earth as a whole? As we will see in chapters 7 and 9, the concept of the global climate entered popular discourse in central Europe in the 1870s, in the midst of a heated debate over anthropogenic climate change. But that is only half the story. Just as important was the rigorous definition of a "local climate" that entered with it. A modern, multiscalar concept of climate was born from encounters between scientists and others with wide-ranging claims to climate expertise.

VARIETIES OF EMPIRE

European empires of the nineteenth century seized on climatology as a tool for adapting newly acquired colonial environments to imperial ends. Climate was studied in relation to a swiftly changing global distribution of production and trade, as well as shifting theaters of military conflict. It was with the aid of such research that the global spread of capitalism was understood at the time to "make the best of the diverse endowments of the world by encouraging the most efficient use of each country's particular resources."[27] Eighteenth-century savants had typically regarded the fit between a society and its natural environment as the result of a divine plan.[28] Nineteenth-century geographers saw it instead as the result of a process of biological and cultural adaptation, one in which imperialists intended to intervene. Theories of acclimatization supported imperial plans to settle Europeans permanently in the "torrid zone."[29] In principle, if not always in practice, climatology could inform decisions about where to locate agricultural settlements and colonial towns. It also inspired the construction of high-altitude medical rehabilitation centers for sick and weary colonists in the tropics, taking advantage of cooler, drier mountain air.[30]

One historian has characterized nineteenth-century climatology as a "sleepy backwater,"[31] a charge that held true in certain parts of the world. In many parts of Europe's overseas empires, climatology developed as a scattershot study of local climates, paired with the self-serving theory that "the tropics," whatever they were, were unsuitable for European labor.[32] Across Europe and North America in the mid-nineteenth century, governments and private societies organized networks of meteorological observers. But this data was mined primarily for the purposes of storm forecasting. As the Habsburg climatologist Alexander Supan explained in 1881, "Climate has retreated with the advance of weather."[33] In 1908 Napier Shaw complained of the "waste" of the British Meteorological Office, from which he had recently retired as director. Data was streaming in, but to what end? Shaw lamented as well the discontinuities of the imperial network—"four observatories and over four hundred stations of one sort or another in the British Isles; an elaborate installation of wind-measuring apparatus at Holy head; besides other ventures squandered abroad; an anemometer at Gibraltar, another at Saint Helena; a sunshine recorder at the Falkland Isles, half a dozen sets of instruments in British New Guinea, and a couple of hundred on the wide sea."[34] "Waste" in this sense was a function of the inability or unwillingness of scientists of overseas empires to mediate between local observations and global models.[35]

Indeed, histories of science and empire tend to assume a divergence of interests and epistemic commitments between imperial scientists and local collectors. Imperial scientists figure in this scholarship as intellectual "lumpers," proponents of generalization, against the "splitters" who would insist on nature's local variability. Imperial science in this sense was embodied by the London botanist Joseph Hooker, the director of the imperial botanical garden at Kew, who claimed that his colonial correspondents paid too much attention "to minute differences that when long dwelt upon ... assume minute value."[36] According to this account, the global perspective of modern science emerged at the expense of the local.

However, historians have paid far less attention to the geography of knowledge production in the continental empires of nineteenth-century Eurasia: Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman, and Qing. In these cases the dividing line between metropolitan and provincial knowledge was far less clear. These states had in common the capacity to govern multiple cultures and to wield power from multiple centers. They took up the tools of modern science in part in the interest of developing new imperial "languages of self-description" that could serve as alternatives to the simplifications of nationalism. Undermining reified categories of nation and race, these sciences traced histories of migration, mixing, and cultural transfer. In other words, these late imperial sciences established the hybridity of their populations and territories as empirical facts.[37]

As this suggests, modern states do not all render society "legible" in the same way.[38] Making a territory and its population legible need not mean abstracting away local particularities. "Seeing like a state" might instead mean bringing imperial diversity into sharper focus. Historians of cartography recognize that maps do not simply reflect the world; they actively contribute to the creation of a territory by visualizing its features selectively, thereby encouraging some modes of interaction with the environment and discouraging others. In this way, maps that accentuate heterogeneity may help to preserve local differences of environment and culture.[39]

In the Habsburg Monarchy, in particular, "local knowledge" in fields like ethnography, medicine, and physical geography was often produced as "imperial science" and funded by the imperial state. Recent research by Pieter Judson and others has shown how the nineteenth-century Habsburg state created a legal space in which even former serfs could assert their rights as citizens and pursue economic development. Far from inhibiting modernization, the state's decentralized structure allowed grassroots politics and cultural pluralism to flourish.[40] Already in 1817, the Habsburg archduke Johann, a great patron of natural history, articulated the principle that provincial patriotism could go hand in hand with loyalty to the dynasty: "Austria's strength rests on the diversity of its provinces...which one should carefully preserve. ... Austria has recovered her strength after every misfortune, because each province stood on its own and considered its survival independently of the others, and yet contributed loyally to the common goal."[41] Previous research hints at the implications of this ideology in fields like ethnography, medicine, and physical geography. In these cases, research conducted in the service of nationalism—perhaps even the "national schools of thought" celebrated by post-Habsburg historians—was sponsored by the ministry of education and articulated, often in German, by Habsburg-loyal scholars as contributions to the ideology of "unity in diversity."[42]

So it was that the Austrian Society for Ethnography instructed its members in the collection of botanical knowledge from peasants, women in particular.[43] Knowing the popular names for plants in multiple dialects enabled the botanist and the ethnographer jointly to track the spatial distribution of a given species and the diffusion of a given dialect. Research in this vein was of particular significance "in our multilingual Austria . . . since the popular names are not only linguistic but also cultural-historical records." As we will see in chapter 10, the discovery that in some cases the same name was being used for different plants would have profound repercussions for interpretations of the relationship between climate and living things. By the same token, ethnographers took it upon themselves to record names for characteristic local winds and the rituals associated with them. Thus Hann was familiar with the adage of Alpine peasants: Steigt man im Winter um einen Stock, so wird es warm er um einen Rock ("If you climb in winter up a stair, one less coat you will need to wear").[44] To Hann, this meant that inversions of the usual decrease of temperature with height must be a common phenomenon, which provided a clue to atmospheric conditions of thermal equilibrium. In short, the fine-grained ethnic geography patronized by the Habsburg state often involved tracking a given natural kind across the Monarchy, in order to extract differences of language and culture. By attaching value to natural diversity, such research promoted the integration of "indigenous places" into "imperial space."[45]

SEEING VARIABILITY IN NATURE

Climatology in imperial Austria merits comparison to related enterprises in other nineteenth-century imperial states. The royal-imperial Central Institute for Meteorology and Geomagnetism (Zentralanstalt for Meteorologie und Geomagnetismus, later Geodynamik; ZAMG) was founded in Vienna in 1851, four years after the opening of the Royal Prussian Meteorological Institute. The British Meteorological Office evolved out of a committee established in 1854, while the French meteorological service was founded in 1855 and the US Weather Service in 1870. Like these other meteorological offices, the ZAMG was charged with taking advantage of the new technology of telegraphy in order to issue advance warnings of approaching storms. Indeed, Austrian scientists played an active role in the development of an international storm-warning system in the 1860s, including hosting the first-ever International Meteorological Congress in 1873, where the conventions of meteorological telegraphy were negotiated. And yet issuing forecasts was work that most ZAMG scientists disdained. Kreil, its first director, was distressed to find that not only was he expected to predict the weather, he was even held responsible for it—in certain circles he became known as the "weather maker." Given the state of meteorological knowledge at the time, Kreil believed that reliable weather forecasting was a long way off. For now, as he tried to convince the public in his popular writings, the most useful knowledge would not seek to "organize agriculture according to the daily fluctuations of the atmospheric conditions, but once and for all according to the average climatic character of specific places and regions."[46] Kreil and his associates genuinely believed that their research would benefit the state. But those benefits would come from knowledge of long-term regularities, not short-term predictions. They would come, in other words, from climatology, with its practical value for agriculture, medicine, tourism, trade, and military operations.

Austria seems to have been unusual in this respect, as far as one can tell from the sparse historical literature on nineteenth-century atmospheric science. At the state-sponsored observatories of Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington, DC, it seems that climatological research tended to be viewed as little more than a quaint relic of the eighteenth century, a worthy pastime for provincial amateurs or peasant farmers but of little relevance to modern science. Only in rare cases did meteorological officers in North America and western Europe choose to invest in the study of climate—that is, to shift their priority from short-term forecasts to long-term planning.[47]

Climatology thrived in particular in the great land empires of Eurasia: Russia, India, and Austria. Presented with an expansive and continuous field for geoscientific research, scientists in these states began to think in new ways. Tasked with the goal of stably and efficiently exploiting the territory's resources, they set out to map its "natural regions" and "transition zones." One historian of imperial Russia has aptly described this enterprise as a scientific project of "regionalization." The regionalizing sciences of the nineteenth century were holistic enterprises intent on analyzing local differences within a larger, integrated context.[48] The baseline definition of these regions was climatic: average temperatures and rainfall were the fundamental data on which a mental map of imperial difference was being constructed. Scientists thus came to appreciate the heterogeneity of climates and to seek the causes of their differentiation.

The choice to emphasize or de-emphasize the diversity of an empire's human and nonhuman subjects—the choice between pursuing imperial climatology as a coherent overview or as a patchwork of local details—was always a strategic political decision. From the perspective of Henry Francis Blanford, chief of the Indian Meteorology Department (founded 1875), the subcontinent furnished an ideal site for climatological research: a single, contained landmass displaying in miniature nearly all the variations in climate to be found on the earth's surface, with an unobstructed view of the formation of tropical storms. To speak of "the climate of India" in the singular, he argued, "would be as misleading as if we were to speak of its inhabitants in terms implying that they are a homogeneous race, alike in ethnic and social characters, culture and belief."[49] Yet others expressed India's suitability for climatological study in language with quite a different political valence. They emphasized the order and regularity of the Indian climate (now in the singular) and the ease with which British science could master it.[50]

In Russia, as Wladimir Köppen pointed out in 1895, climatology followed the tsar's troops, as the Russians pushed into the Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and beyond. "Russia's conquests to its west have quickly expanded our knowledge. For the Russian soldier is followed with remarkable speed by the Russian [scientific] observer, and out of the impenetrable dens of thieves ... have for a long time now been appearing practicable, uninterrupted meteorological data series."[51] The work of Russia's foremost climatologist, Alexander Voeikov (1842-1916) reflected the ambitions of a modernizing and expanding empire. He produced theories of the global climate system and of the influence of climate on social life, and he argued that unfavorable environments could be improved through rational water use.[52] Meanwhile, a more cautious research program in soil science under Vasilii Dokuchaev was investigating charges of human-induced climate change in the "black earth" region of the Russian steppe.[53] As Catherine Evtuhov shows, the "sheer bulk and diversity of information" gathered by Dokuchaev "rendered it virtually unusable by the central authorities."[54] Thus enterprising Russian scientists and citizens were hard at work developing scientific methods of agricultural assessment and improvement—methods in which the imperial government took little if any interest at all.

The situation was different still in the United States. Lorin Blodget's Climatology of the United States (1857) explicitly set out to counter the claim that the nation's climate was especially "variable or extreme."[55] East of the one hundredth meridian, Blodget insisted that the climate was "uniform"; and where mountains intruded, they "do not shelter or expose either side, nor cause any contrasts in the character of productions respecting them." Significantly for the present study, Blodget favorably compared his nation's climatic uniformity with "the abrupt transitions, and the predominance of local changes in southern and central Europe."[56] He concluded that whatever local variability the climate might display was not worth scientific attention. Climatic uniformity, not diversity, was his ideal. It is therefore unsurprising to learn that the federal government dedicated few resources to the investigation of local climates.[57]

"K. UND K." CLIMATOLOGY

In Austria, too, climatology was closely tied to empire-building. From the perspective of the Habsburg state, climatology was not about exploring a dark continent but about reimagining a familiar one in the throes of change. Over the course of seven centuries, through strategic marriages and battles, the Habsburg dynasty had acquired a motley yet contiguous set of kingdoms, duchies, and principalities. Extending through nine degrees of longitude, the dynasty's lands were crisscrossed by mountains: one chain running east from the tall peaks of the Alps in the westernmost province of Vorarlberg, then turning south along the Adriatic into the craggy towers of the Dinaric Alps; another rising to the east from the Bohemian massif up into the Carpathians, a largely unmapped range that isolated Galicia, the Habsburgs' newest acquisition. Before the coming of the railways, the Monarchy was largely dependent on its main river way, the Danube, for transport. Its waters originated in melting glaciers in the Alps, flowed east through Vienna, Bratislava (German: Pressburg; Hungarian: Poszony), and Budapest (German: Ofen-Pest), into lands still controlled by the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, and emptied into the Black Sea. Across much of the Habsburg world—the grassy plains of the Hungarian steppe; the rocky, porous ground along the Adriatic; and the high-altitude pastures of the Alps and Carpathians—agriculture was possible only during a brief season when adequate rainfall and mild temperatures prevailed. A swing of the climate could easily spell hunger. On the other hand, excess rainfall could trigger devastating floods along the Danube and its tributaries, especially in deforested areas, as well as rockslides in the mountains. In the marshy lands of the Carpathian basin, eighteenth-century attempts at water regulation had wreaked havoc with the ecosystem and threatened flood-plain agriculture. Transport and communication across the Habsburgs' lands was also highly dependent on climate. During Europe's Little Ice Age, from roughly the thirteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, portions of the Danube often froze, and snow blocked certain mountain passes year round. With the period of warming that set in circa 1860, baseline expectations from the past were not necessarily useful guides to the future.[58]

Image

The changes afoot in central Europe in the nineteenth century were socioeconomic as well as climatic. "For now a little rural village and its surroundings can shut itself in with all that it has, all that it is, and all that it knows," wrote the novelist and naturalist Adalhert Stifter at midcentury. "Soon, however, this will no longer be so, and [the village] will be caught up in the dealings of the world beyond it."[59] The nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire was a geographically extensive but semiclosed economic system, having been excluded from the German Zollverein in the 1830s. It was out of the race for overseas colonies and had minimal prospects for expansion in southeastern Europe. Within its borders, capitalism was already beginning to produce its signature geography of unevenness. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the stock market crash of 1873, industrialization transformed the geography of production in the Habsburg lands. Regions of the Monarchy that had once been economically self-sufficient were thrust into the role of imperial "periphery," generating a flood of migrants to the Monarchy's new industrial centers. After the crash, capital investment shifted to the periphery in order to take advantage of cheaper land, raw materials, and labor.[60]

In this context, the new genre of climatography (chapter 6) played in part the role of advice manual for repurposing natural environments to fit the new economy.

Possibilities included introducing new crops (beets for sugar, potatoes for spirits), launching a tourist industry, or building spas or sanatoriums to provide "climatotherapy." At the same time, imperial climatologists were called on to adjudicate between proponents of development and those of conservation. Deforestation or swamp drainage was blamed for a deterioration of the climate within the span of historical memory in several areas, above all Bohemia, the Hungarian plains, and the karst regions of Carniola, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia.[61] Everywhere it was argued that restoring forests would create a moister, more fertile climate. Inquiries into suspected climatic shifts in the course of human history were thus highly public and politically fraught.

In all these ways, climatology's history in Austria sheds light on this science's close ties to nineteenth-century imperialism more generally. At the same time, the scientific institutions of the supranational state formed a unique lens onto the natural world. Unlike administrators in Washington or Saint Petersburg, the emperor's ministers in Vienna saw good reasons, both practical and ideological, to support the study of climate down to the details of the smallest scales. And unlike British scientists, with their insistence on the fundamentally orderly atmosphere of India, Habsburg climatologists were far more ready to grapple with the true complexity of their data. As we will see, their day-to-day focus on minute fluctuations and statistical subtleties was the flip side of their quest for an all-encompassing overview.

Julius Hann made this point most effectively. After admitting that he had spent an entire week determining how best to standardize measurements of the distribution of air pressure in central and southern Europe, he cited Francis Bacon in his defense. Bacon had once remarked that the natural philosopher who neglects details is like a haughty prince who ignores the petition of a poor woman: "He who will not attend to things like these as being too paltry and minute, can neither win the kingdom of heaven nor govern it."[62] The Baconian metaphor of the "empire of nature" underscored the affinity of this scientific precept with the logic of the multinational state. In fact, Francis I (1804-35) had been praised in nearly identical language for his comprehensive knowledge of the Habsburg realm. The first ruler to call himself "Emperor of Austria" and to envision the dynastic lands as a unified state, Francis was known to occupy himself with what might seem to be insignificant local matters. Particularly on his frequent tours of the provinces, he was said to display "his extensive, one could even say all-encompassing knowledge of the laws, customs, and morals of all parts of his great kingdom. ... A phrase that was often on his lips was this: 'There is no affair that a priori and according to general principles could be called large or small; matters are only large or small in comparison to and in relation to other things."'[63]

TOWARD A HISTORY OF SCALING

The history of climate science needs to be seen, then, as part of a history of scaling: the process of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal and informal, designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world, in order to arrive at a common standard of proportionality. In the natural and social sciences, scaling (upscaling, downscaling) refers to the process of adapting models to apply at larger or smaller dimensions of space and time. But scaling is also something we all do every day. It is how we think, for instance, about how one individual's vote might influence a national election, or whether buying a hybrid car might slow global warming. It can also be a way of situating the known world in relation to times or places that are distant or otherwise inaccessible to direct experience. Scaling makes it possible to weigh the consequences of human actions at multiple removes and to coordinate action at multiple levels of governance. It depends on causal factors that are likewise of varying dimensions, from an individual's imagination to translocal infrastructures, institutions, and ideologies. A focus on scaling is timely for the field of history today, at odds as it is over "going big." Rather than framing this as an either/or choice, we might think historically about what is involved in working between and across different scales of observation, analysis, and action.[64]

Scaling is a necessary step in the production of what John Tresch calls "cosmograms": the representations we use to situate ourselves in relation to the rest of the universe, to map our interconnections and mutual influences. The history of scaling thus calls for a "materialized" intellectual history on Tresch's model. As he writes, "Cosmological ideas take on realist force when they are anchored, housed, and transmitted in objects, technical networks, routine practices, and social organizations."[65] Histories of scaling must therefore attend to the tools and practices of commensuration, which are not limited to measuring instruments in the traditional sense. For instance, Benedict Anderson pointed out decades ago that the novel and the newspaper were key early tools for creating a new scale of thought in the nineteenth century: the nation.[66] More recently, Richard White has traced the role of the railroads in creating a new, politicized space in nineteenth-century North America, for which transport rates provided the new metric of proximity and distance.[67] When it comes to climate change, some of the most important tools of scaling—for understanding the weather of the here and now in relation to large-scale, long-term processes—have been found, not made. These include migratory animals, tree rings, ice cores, fossils, rocks, and living plants.

In the nineteenth century, the scalar imagination was restless. A host of technical developments—including the improvement of microscopes, telescopes, photography, telegraphy, and electrical clocks—allowed human observation to push down into the smallest dimensions of space and time, as well as outward, across the earth, to the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond. Some in the nineteenth century spoke of the annihilation of time and space. In fact, time and space were measured more carefully than ever before. New intervals of space and time were introduced: a tenth of a second, an electron-width, a light-second, the height of the stratosphere, the depth of the earth's crust. Meanwhile, new political entities were emerging in an unprecedented variety of sizes and forms. Circa 1850 may well have been a high point for the diversity of state forms, after the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and before nation-states became ubiquitous.[68] Thus the political imagination was not confined to the spatial scale of nation-states and the temporal scale of their historical memory. In all, there was a wide variety of ways to envision relations between the individual and the state, between nation and empire, between the small scale and the large. Today, we have been so conditioned by statistical reasoning that we tend to view the micro solely as an instantiation of, or an exception to, the macro. Alternatives proliferated in the nineteenth century, proposing relations between micro and macro that were, for instance, emblematic, metonymic, or ecological. In the Habsburg lands, as we will see in chapter 1, dynastic iconography maintained the vitality of Renaissance cosmologies.

Meanwhile, new modes of representation juxtaposed these radically disparate dimensions to dramatic effect. Part 2 of this book traces the emergence in the nineteenth-century Habsburg lands of new techniques in a range of media and disciplines—from landscape painting to geography, fiction, and atmospheric physics—all dedicated to representing precise local detail within a large-scale overview. Elsewhere at the time, writers and artists were developing related techniques. In the United States, for instance, the landscape paintings of Frederic Church shifted away from Romanticism and toward what Jennifer Raab calls an "aesthetic of information," in which a proliferation of natural details vies with and ultimately triumphs over any overall impression of unity. This new orientation grew out of Church's sense of the interdependence of living things and culminated in his reinvention of himself as a landscape architect intent on revealing nature as a "living system."[69] Likewise, literary scholars have shown how certain Victorian novels integrated their human stories into grand visions of earth history. As Anna Henchman has recently put it, "Victorian writers move restlessly back and forth between self and universe, part and whole."[70] These literary exercises in scaling were often responding directly to developments in the sciences. "The novel," writes Jesse Oak Taylor, "helps reconcile the expansive timescales of evolution, climate, and geological change with those of human history and everyday life."[71] Thus the multiscalar vision of nineteenth-century climatology arose interdependently with a host of new ways of seeing and representing the human and natural world.

To be sure, some of these aesthetic trends proved more mystifying than illuminating. Turning attention from human events to cosmic ones could be a strategy for obfuscating the relationship between humans and nature back on earth. In this vein, Victorian scientists liked to compare British industry's consumption of energy with the thermodynamic "dissipation" of energy on a cosmic scale. In doing so, they made an unsustainable system of production appear natural and inevitable.[72] Hence the nineteenth century saw a growing need for representational approaches that might discipline a scalar imagination run wild.

It was in this spirit that many in the Habsburg world undertook the work of scaling. They insisted that nature could not be measured solely according to a scale derived from human concerns; other measures of significance were needed when studying nature on the very small scale or the very large. As the physiologist and leader of the Czech national awakening J. E. Purkyně wrote in the preface to the first issue of his scientific journal Živa: "We do not suppose that anyone will take exception to our discussing this or that seemingly insignificant matter in greater detail and more meticulously; in infinite nature nothing is insignificant, nor are the needs of man its only measure."[73] Likewise, the geologist and liberal statesman Eduard Suess insisted that "the planet may well be measured by man, but not according to man." As he explained,

The standard for small and big as well as for the duration and the intensity of a natural phenomenon is in many cases based on the physical organization of man. ... When we speak of a thousand years, we introduce the decimal system and, with it, the structure of our extremities. We often measure mountains in feet and we distinguish long and short periods of time according to the average length of human life and therefore based on the frailty of our bodies; and we unconsciously borrow the standard for the expressions "intense" or "less intense" from our personal experience.[74]

This theme was echoed by the pioneers of climatology in the Habsburg lands. Karl Kreil, the founding director of the ZAMG in Vienna, insisted that "everywhere there is a macrocosm and a microcosm, a world on the large scale and on the small—the latter just as important, often more important than the former." He urged his colleagues to pursue the "interaction," die Wecheslwirkung, between large-scale atmospheric phenomena and the "organic and inorganic shell of the earth."[75] We might think of such comments as the self-defense of Habsburg scientists against the accusation of drudgery that would haunt them into our own day.

By distinguishing the multiple scales of climatic processes, and by devising methods of observation and analysis appropriate to each, dynamic climatology operationalized Suess's principle that nature must be measured "by man but not according to man." His injunction to think across dimensions of space and time rested on an implicit distinction between "lived" and "absolute" scales of measurement. In this respect, dynamic climatology's ambition of studying the small scale in relation to the large resonates with quite a different tradition of central European thought: the philosophy of phenomenology, as it was developed in the early twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, Jan Patočka , and Ludwig Landgrebe, all born into the Habsburg Monarchy. These philosophers contrasted the experience of the realm of "self-extension," of human "work," with the experience of the "absolute" sphere of the earth, "the global context on which we depend."[76] It seems fitting, therefore, to describe the history of Habsburg climatology as what Landgrebe called "a history of the transformation of the horizons of the world."[77] From Husserl this book also adopts the goal of restoring "the link between our knowledge in physics and our intuitive experience of things in our 'surrounding world of life."'[78] It accepts phenomenology's challenge to the historian of science to re-embed inherited scientific knowledge in the existential context in which it originated.

Yet scaling is a more uncertain and imperfect process than the phenomenologists supposed. Not even the natural sciences have access, in practice, to an "absolute" measurement scale. Every measurement depends on an agreed- upon definition of a standard unit and its instantiation in an exemplary object. These standards are social conventions and recent research has shown that behind many such conventions lurk hidden histories of contention.[79] It is interesting to note that contemporary English offers no verb to denote the process of negotiation that produces a measurement standard. The use of "commensurate" as a verb seems to have fallen by the wayside in the nineteenth century, when the work of commensuration had apparently been completed once and for all by boards of experts. The term "scaling" fills this linguistic gap and so reminds us of the work that goes into mediating between different ways of measuring the world. As we will see, such work is not only cognitive; it may challenge the body, put social relationships to the test, and expose a mediator to the pull of conflicting desires.

AN OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

Part 1, "Unity in Diversity," analyzes the mutual development of imperial ideology and empire-wide institutions of environmental science. Its sources include state-institutional archives and distinctive compilations of knowledge such as the encyclopedic Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image, also known as the Kronprinzenwerk. Chapter 1, "The Habsburgs and the Collection of Nature," takes a broad and deep view of the production of climatic knowledge in the dynasty's lands. It reveals the motivations behind the long-term collection and preservation of information about the physical and biological diversity of this territory. Chapter 2, "The Austrian Idea," recasts the long debate over the late Habsburg Monarchy's ideological underpinnings or lack thereof. It calls attention to the spatial character of emerging justifications for the empire and to the empirical research programs they rested on, which shaped the human and natural sciences alike. Chapter 3, "The Imperial-Royal Scientist," introduces the figure of the kaiserlich und koniglich scientist—like Hann, an expert on the territory of the Monarchy as a whole. Chapter 4, "The Dual Task," charts the construction in the 1840s and 1850s of an empire-spanning geophysical observing network and a central observatory in Vienna—an institution whose responsibilities were described as "dual," serving both knowledge of particular places and of universal processes.

Part 2, "The Scales of Empire," focuses on the problems of scale facing the scientific servants of the Habsburg Monarchy and the representational techniques they developed in response. Chapter 5, "The Face of the Empire," traces the rise of cartographic and painterly efforts to achieve a synthetic overview of the Monarchy. Chapter 6, "The Invention of Climatography," introduces a nineteenth-century genre that aimed to make atmospheric data meaningful to readers of many backgrounds. Chapter 7, "The Power of Local Differences," tracks the spread of the metaphor that linked Habsburg ideology to the physics of the atmosphere. Chapter 8, "Planetary Disturbances," analyzes the physical-mathematical description of climate produced by Hann and his colleagues as the fruit of their practices of scaling.

Part 3, "The Work of Scaling," relies on scientists' unpublished letters and diaries to reconstruct the social and personal dimensions of the process of scaling. In the Austrian press and parliament in the 1870s and 1880s, arguments raged over the climatic consequences of deforestation and swamp drainage. Chapter 9, "The Forest-Climate Question," illustrates scaling as a social process by showing how imperial-royal scientists intervened to rescale this debate. Chapter 10, "The Floral Archive," considers plants as tools of temporal scaling, showing how botany became a crucial source of knowledge of climatic history. Finally, chapter 11, "Landscapes of Desire," turns to the private side of scaling. Comparing scientists' intimate accounts with published sources, this chapter explores the emotional experience of the imperial-royal scientist as he reoriented his sense of near and far. The conclusion considers the legacies of Habsburg climatology for twentieth-century central Europe and the present climate crisis.

Footnotes

[1] Germany's most famous scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz, ventured the same explanation in a popular lecture that year, but it was Hann's account, published in the new journal of the Austrian Society for Meteorology, that carried the day. Wilhelm von Bezold, "Noch ein Wort zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Ansichten über den Ursprung des Föhn," Meteorologische Zeitschrift 3 (1886): 85-87, on 86.

[2] The conclusion to chapter 8 addresses disputes over the definition and genealogy of dynamic climatology.

[3] After 1867, the legally correct term for joint Austro-Hungarian institutions was "k. und k.," emphasizing Franz Josef's identity as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary; "k.k." referred to institutions restricted to Cisleithania. I use the English translation "imperial-royal" without distinguishing between these meanings for the sake of simplicity and ease of pronunciation.

[4] Hann , Diary C, 85, JH.

[5] Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos & Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Compare the nineteenth-century geographer Carl Ritter's interpretation of homesickness (Heimweh), discussed in chapter 11.

[6] For an introduction to scale interactions, see Günter Blöschl, Hans Thybo, and Hubert Savenije, A Voyage through Scales: The Earth System in Space and Time (Baden bei Wien: Lammerhuber, 2015).

[7] Pitman et al., "Regionalizing Global Climate Models," International Journal of Climatology 32 (2012): 321-37, showed that many of the factors that determine the impact of climate change "at spatial scales relevant to policy makers, to impacts and adaptation" were excluded from global climate models.

[8] Peter Cebon et al., eds., Views from the Alps: Regional Perspectives on Climate Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

[9] Cleveland Abbe, review of Hann's Handbuch der Klimatologie, 3rd ed., Science 34 (1911): 155-56, on 155.

[10] Hew C. Davies, "Vienna and the Founding of Dynamical Meteorology," in Die Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik, 1851-2001, ed. Christa Hammerl et al., 301-12 (Graz: Leykam, 2001), 310.

[11] Hans Schreiber, "Die Wichtigkeit des Sammelns volksthümlicher Pflanzennamen," Zeitschrift für österreichische Volkskunde 1 (1895): 36-43, on 43. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

[12] Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2007); Charles Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

[13] Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Osborne, "Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science," Osiris 15 (2000): 135-51.

[14] Basalla, "The Spread of Western Science," Science 156 (1967): 611-22.

[15] Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), chapters 5-9.

[16] Robert E. Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 1. On climate science and settler colonialism in Oceania, see James Beattie et al., eds., Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

[17] Grove, Green Imperialism; Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See too Libby Robin, "Ecology, a Science of Empire," in Griffiths and Robin, Ecology and Empire, 63-75; Paul S. Sutter, "Nature's Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal," Isis 98 (2007): 724-54.

[18] Griffiths and Robin, Ecology and Empire; Anker, Imperial Ecology; Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). "Planetary consciousness" had a different meaning in Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

[19] Cf. Rohan Deb Roy, ed., "Nonhuman Empires," special section of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (2015): 66-172.

[20] Dr. Witte, "Über die Möglichkeit, das Klima zu beeinflussen," Medicinische Blätter, Wochenschrift für die gesamte Heilkunde 31 (1908): 1-2, on 1.

[21] On the development of paleoclimatology, see John lmbrie and Katherine Palmer lmbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

[22] Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, trans. E. C. Otte (New York, 1858), 1: 317.

[23] Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lorraine Daston, "The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800," in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Michael Reidy, Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Climate was conceived in still other ways beyond Europe and North America, where anthropologists have documented ideas of climate that draw "no sharp distinction" between "biophysical" and "social worlds." Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 258.

[24] Anton Kerner, Das Pflanzenleben der Donauländer (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1863), 3; Albrecht Penck, "Das Klima Europas während der Eiszeit," Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift 20 (1905): 593-97, on 594.

[25] On climatological knowledge for agriculture, see Benjamin Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2009); Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland, eds., New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (New York: Springer, 2015); Fredrik Jonsson, Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); David Moon, The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia's Grasslands, 1700-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[26] This is what Gisela Kutzbach refers to as the discovery of meteorology's third dimension in The Thermal Theory of Cyclones: A History of Meteorological Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1979). On climatology's status between the natural and human sciences, see Deborah Coen, Climate Change and the Quest for Understanding (New York: Social Science Research Council, January 2018).

[27] Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 ), 155.

[28] James R. Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 1. However, eighteenth-century settler colonialists believed in their capacity to "improve" climate; see Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[29] Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Locality, and Race in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

[30] Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

[31] Spencer Weart, Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 ), 10.

[32] Mark Carey, "Inventing Caribbean Climates: How Science, Medicine, and Tourism Changed Tropical Weather from Deadly to Healthy," Osiris 26, no. 1, Klima (2011): 129-41.

[33] Alexander Supan, Statistik der unteren Luftströmungen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1881), 1.

[34] Napier Shaw, "Address of the President to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the BAAS," Science 28 (1908): 457-71, on 463, 464. For John Herschel's earlier critique of blind empiricism in British meteorology, see Vladimir Janković, "Ideological Crests versus Empirical Troughs: John Herschel's and William Radcliffe Birt's Research on Atmospheric Waves, 1843-50," BJHS 31, no. 1 (March 1998): 21-40.

[35] On the failures of meteorological standardization in the British Empire before 1914, see Martin Mahony, "For an Empire of 'All Types of Climate': Meteorology as an Imperial Science," Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016): 29-39. On the problem of centralizing British meteorology, see Simon Naylor, "Nationalizing Provincial Weather: Meteorology in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall," BJHS 39 (2006): 407-33.

[36] Cited by Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 155. See too Christophe Bonneuil, "The Manufacture of Species: Kew Gardens, the Empire and the Standardisation of Taxonomic Practices in Late 19th century Botany," in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the 17th to the 20th Century, ed. M.-N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe, and O. Sibum, 189-215 (London: Routledge, 2002); Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), chapter 6.

[37] This was the topic of a conference I organized at Columbia in 2013, and I am grateful to the participants for sharing their research and insights; the phrase in quotation marks is from Marina Mogilner's presentation.

[38] James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory, 21, 130.

[39] J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); David Harmon, In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes Us Human (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2002).

[40] Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

[41] Quoted in Werner Telesko, Kulturraum Österreich: Die ldentität der Regionen in der bildenden Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 15.

[42] On Habsburg science and nationalism: Tatjana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, introduction to the special section on "Science, Medicine and Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918," SHPBBS 38 (2007): 679-86; Mitchell Ash and Jan Surman, eds., The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848-1918 (New York: Palgrave, 2012), Jan Surman, Biography of Habsburg Universities, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, forthcoming).

[43] Schreiber, "Wichtigkeit des Sammelns," 41.

[44] Julius Hann, "Die Temperatur-Abnahme mit der Höhe als eine Function der Windesrichtung," Wiener Berichte II 57 (1868) 740-65, on 749.

[45] Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 50.

[46] Friedrich Kenner, "Karl Kreil, eine biographische Skizze," Österreichische Wochenschrift 1 (1863): 289-366, on 360-61.

[47] Illuminating counterexamples are provided by James Bergman, "Climates on the Move: Climatology and the Problem of Economic and Environmental Stability in the Career of C. W. Thornthwaite, 1933-1963" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014); Jamie Pietruska, "US Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting," Environment and History 17 (2011): 79-105.

[48] Nailya Tagirova, "Mapping the Empire's Economic Regions from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century," in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank et al., 125-38 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). See too Marina Loskutova, "Mapping Regions, Understanding Diversity: Russian Economists Confront Natural Scientists, ca. 1880s-1910s," Encounters of Sea and Land (6th ESEH conference), Turku, 1 June 2011.

[49] Henry Francis Blanford, A Practical Guide to the Climates and Weather of India, Ceylon and Burmah (London: Macmillan, 1889), 95.

[50] Anderson, Predicting the Weather, chapter 6. Mahony, "Empire of All Types of Climate," suggests that the British did not support the regionalization of climatology until the peak of colonial nationalism after World War One.

[51] Wladimir Köppen, "Die gegenwärtige Lage und die neueren Fortschritte der Klimatologie," Geographische Zeitschrift I (1895): 613-28. Cf. A. Kh. Khrgian, Meteorology: A Historical Survey, ed. Kh. P. Pogosyan (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1970), vol. 1. On the imperial logic of Russian science, see Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic, 2004).

[52] Quoted in Ellsworth Huntington, review of Voeikov's Le Turkestan Russe, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 47 (1915): 708. Cf. Voeikov, "De L'influence de l'homme sur la terre,"pt. 2, Annales de Géographie 10 (1901): 193-215, esp. 193-95.

[53] Moon, The Plough That Broke the Steppes.

[54] Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 160; Khrgian, Meteorology, chapter 16; Olga Elina, "Between Local Practices and Global Knowledge: Public Initiatives in the Development of Agricultural Science in Russia in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century," Centaurus 56 (2014): 305-29.

[55] Lorin Blodget, Climatology of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1857), 25.

[56] Ibid., 208-9.

[57] On the neglect of climatology and seismology at the federal level, see Deborah R. Coen, The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chapter 9.

[58] Rajmund Przybylak et al., eds., The Polish Climate in the European Context: An Historical Overview (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010); Simron Jit Singh et al., eds., Long Term Socio-Ecological Research: Studies in Society-Nature Interactions across Spatial and Temporal Scales (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013); Lajos Rácz, The Steppe to Europe: An Environmental History of Hungary in the Traditional Age (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013).

[59] Quoted in Eva Wiedemann, Adalbert Stifters Kosmos: Physische und experimentelle Weltbeschreibung in Adalbert Stifters Roman Der Nachsommer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2009), 685.

[60] Komlosy, Grenze und ungleiche regionale Entwicklung: Binnenmarkt und Migration in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Promedia, 2003); David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[61] E.g., on Bosnia, Voeikov, "De l'influence de l'homme," 202.

[62] Julius Hann, Die Vertheilung des Luftdruckes über Mittel- und Süd-Europa (Vienna: Hölzel, 1887), 5.

[63] Der Kaiserstaat Oesterreich unter der Regierung Kaiser Franz I, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1841), 263.

[64] I gratefully acknowledge the help of Andrea Westermann and Nils Güttier in composing this definition. The following discussions of scale have been particularly helpful: Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d'échelles: La micro-analyse à l'expérience (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Francesca Trivellato, "Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?," California Italian Studies 2 (2011): 1-26; Wendy Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, "Commensuration as a Social Process," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 313-43; Nicholas B. King, "Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases," Osiris, 2nd ser., 19 (2004): 62-76; Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197-222; Julia Adeney Thomas, "History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value," AHR 119 (December 2014): 1587-607.

[65] John Tresch, "Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas," in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, 153-72 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 162.

[66] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), chapter 2.

[67] Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: London, 2011), chapter 4.

[68] Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 573.

[69] Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

[70] Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. See too Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

[71] Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 11.

[72] Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 79-80.

[73] Preface to Živa 1 (1853), iv.

[74] Eduard Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde, vol.1, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Tempsky, 1892), 25. Quoted and translated in A. M. Celâl Şengör, "Eduard Suess and Global Tectonics: An Illustrated 'Short Guide,'" Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences 107 (2014): 6-82, on 30.

[75] Karl Kreil, Die Klimatologie von Böhmen (Vienna: Gerald's Sohn, 1865), 2-3.

[76] E.g., Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), 54-56. Michael Gubser emphasizes such metaphors of distance and proximity in his analysis of the political legacy of central European phenomenology in The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

[77] Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, ed. Donn Welton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 191.

[78] David Woodruff Smith, Husserl, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 329.

[79] Simon Schaffer, "Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms," in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science, ed. R. Bud and S. E. Cozzans, 23-56 (Bellingham: SPIE Press, 1991); Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2002).