Collaborative research on the meterological and botanical history of the Indian ocean, 1600-1900.

The proposed network aims to address the sense of global concern associated with the threat of anthropogenic climate change by:
(a) Attempting to plug the gaps in our knowledge of human induced climate change by uncovering historical records that help us understand climate and environmental change in the last 400 years. European intellectual engagement with the environments of empire over four centuries produced a corpus of documentary sources on the environment. The use of colonies for environmental experimentation resulted in locations in South Asia, Southern Africa, Australia and islands such as Mauritius becoming open-air laboratories for scientists attempting to understand, investigate, and manipulate a world of new peoples, species, environments and diseases. These sources have rarely been examined for the information they contain on environmental and climate change.
(b) By redressing the information imbalance in the Global South by creating a group that would bring together data and approaches in the area of climate change and environmental history with groups and researchers concerned with understanding change in the environments on the peripheries of the Indian Ocean.
The network will do this by:
1. Bringing together an interdisciplinary community of researchers from the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences to debate and conceptualise a database project on plant sciences and climate science of the IOW as documented in the records of the period. Sciences such as historical meteorology, phenology (a study of which species of plants and animals were living in which locations during which period) palynology (study of how much of the pollen of which flowering plants has been preserved in various places like lake sediments) depend on both historical documentary evidence and on physical evidence.
2. Discussing how to combine physical evidence of environmental change, with historical documentary evidence such as colonial records, documentary evidence of indigenous knowledge systems, and practices of natural resource use.

The locations for which we intend to gather and aggregate data are China, Mauritius, East Africa, the Cape, Sri Lanka, Western Australia, South East Asia and India. The region under study is the Indian Ocean World (IOW): an area of primary geo-political importance whose foundations are related to the monsoons, a system of winds and currents unique to the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and South and East China seas. The influence of the monsoon on the land and communities of the Indian Ocean and the inter-connected bodies of water helped to generate long distance trade and and led to an exchange of ideas, commodities and peoples. The intensive maritime voyaging of European mercantile empires after 1500 led to further interactions between indigenous knowledge systems and European ideas resulting in the distinctive environment, society, economy and culture of IOW of the modern period.

CWEH is uniquely positioned to do this as a leading centre in the UK working on the environmental history of the tropics and as a result of its links with other networks such as ACRE and Historic Weather concerned with transcribing, digitising and publishing online various sorts of meteorological data for the period 1700-2000. Our expertise in the tropics has been further established as a result of our collaborative work with Kew and the Natural History Museum (NHM) on specific Indian records relating to natural history and our participation in an AHRC-sponsored meeting in Bangalore in March 2011 on South Asian historical records and climate change which led to another meeting on 'Botany Climate and Empire' in Sussex in May 2011 involving the MET office, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

The key beneficiaries of the research outside the research community include: librarian and archivists, museum specialists, policy makers in government institutions in the Indian Ocean World and the UK government.

Several librarians and archivists will be involved in the network, including the head of the National Archives of India, the archivists responsible for the India Office collections at the British Library and the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi, the collections at Kew, the Natural History Museum, at the heads of institutions, such as, the Kolkata Botanic Garden, and the National Museum of Natural History, Delhi. These holding institutions will benefit from the interaction with scholars that this network will provide, firstly in terms of understanding which of their own collections are of interest to scholars of meteorological and botanical history and secondly in becoming aware of one another's holdings and how they might complement one another.

Given the importance of the issue of climatic and environmental change, the data that is generated in the network project will also be important for policy makers, who will benefit from a long-term perspective on climate change and the responses to it from the colonial period onwards.Through the involvement of the MET office in the UK and its counterpart in Pune, we will ensure that the findings of the network reach government institutions in the UK and India, and influence policy concerning climate change research and policy. Both the National Archives of India, and the British Library have strong links with the Indian Ministry of Culture while the National Museum of Natural History comes under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, and thus the findings of the network will also be fed into Indian government policy. The UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills will benefit from the promotion of UK expertise in how to use historical records to understand climate change as part of its endeavour to promote research partnerships between centres of excellence and towards developing professional and technical skills in education and training which meets the needs on an environmental scholarship for the 21st century.

The discussions during the networking project will include how to involve the wider public in research on an issue that affects every member of global civil society. Through the involvement of museums and libraries, the findings of the network will be transmitted to researchers outside the network and to the general public. It is envisaged that at a future date, academic members of the network will assist with displays and events to make the research visible to these audiences. Members of the Centre for World Environmental History are currently involved in existing projects to digitise and make use of the botanical records of Nathaniel Wallich and Joseph Dalton Hooker. As part of these projects we have taken part in public conferences and meetings and aided with the design of displays. These include helping to organise a public meeting on Nathanial Wallich and Indian natural history 6th and 7th December and a major public conference and museum display on Joseph Hooker at Kew Garden on the 9 December.

The overall impact of the network will be an increase both academic and non-academic collaboration around a critical issue, between the UK, Commonwealth partners in the Indian Ocean, and China. The potential impacts are environmental - in terms of the potential benefits for our understanding of human interaction with nature over the longue durée; cultural - in terms of the potential for exchange and personnel between countries; technological - in terms of the planned road map for large-scale digitisation; and have the potential to influence public policy, particularly in the UK and India.