UC Berkeley

Syncing time and clime endure as pursuits of empire. In Time and Clime, I offer one of the first critical and capacious histories of science, technology, and environment for early modern India by incisively examining the philosophies and practices of temporality and climatology in the Mughal and early British empires. Critically, early modern India boasted a population of 150 million, a complex bureaucracy and economic prosperity. Yet the history of science, technology and the environment is occluded from view. I contend that as the magnitudinal military science, astronomy was the bedrock of early modern empire controlling multiple temporalities, crafting narratives of cosmic truth, and configuring conceptions of the environment. I reveal that the utility of the exact sciences and their impact on environment and empire transformed from time-telling and astrology to meteorology and navigation in the transition from the Mughal to British empire.