Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World

Part of the Social Life of Climate Change Seminar Series. 

Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya, Department of History, Drexel University

What are the historical antecedents to the contemporary financialization of climate threats through carbon markets or greening of asset portfolios? This talk argues for a longer colonial genealogy to the contemporary climate futures market, to show how British imperial expansion in the Indian ocean and the coterminous expansion of premium-based marine insurance shapes how we define weather disturbance and climate threats. Paleo-climatologists documented a spike in severe weather and tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal from the mid 1700s, a period when British Empire vastly expanded in the Indian ocean. Analyzing 18th-century merchants’ papers, Lloyd’s records, navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London shows that tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome simply through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving trade in speculative underwriting. These records reveal that actuarial experiments were not only central for garnering profit from the turbulence of the cyclonic Bay of Bengal but also created a colonial version of a derivatives market in climate futures. Such financialization of “natural limits” simultaneously laid the groundwork for nineteenth century theories of climate disturbance. Bridging histories of finance and Anthropocene scholarship the paper documents how the modalities, concepts and frameworks for producing knowledge about climate emanated out of the very webs of speculative finance, insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period. I conclude by arguing that turning to the Indian Ocean helps us understand how this space faced with the exigencies of global trade became a laboratory of actuarial experiments and weather knowledge production. It also allows us to identify a longer genealogy that shows that the very structures of climate knowledge-making based on ideas of profitability and the overcoming of ecological (and currently biospheric) limits is not simply a neoliberal story but were being scripted in the colonies from the latter half of the eighteenth-century.

Please note the Zoom link required to join this seminar is passcode-protected. If you would like access to the seminar please email sociology.media@lse.ac.uk.

This seminar series is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Sociology and the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.