Book Talk Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (Pittsburgh University Press, 2025).

Imperial Weather is an attempt to understand the relationship of the colonial British government with the weather of the tropics. Focussing on the 1870s to the 1950s, it looks at how weather knowledge and the practitioners of weather knowledge changed and, how the tropical environment went from being feared to being managed. It looks first at how colonial officers conceptualised the weather and the environment using experiential learning in combination with developing climate knowledge coming from Europe, eventually establishing a dedicated meteorological service in 1929. It argues that this shift came late and blames both the environment and the government for a lack of investment in weather research. It also looks at how the government increasingly tried to control the weather as it became recognised that droughts would affect economic productivity and towns needed to be supported by better water resources. Working across history of science and environmental history, the book also takes a turn toward more modern concepts of atmospheric control: the introduction of air conditioning in the twentieth century and the quest for pure air.

The talk will discuss some of the overarching themes of the book before taking a deeper dive into the subject of air conditioning, a subject that has much relevance today in an era of urban heat and Anthropogenic climate change.

Fiona Williamson is Professor of Environmental History at Singapore Management University. She works on colonial Malaya and Hong Kong and is especially interested in weather science and thinking, extreme weather and its impacts, and the intersection of environment and politics. Her latest project is on the rubber industry of colonial Malaya during World War Two and the Malayan Emergency.