Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire. Making Climate Change in Early America. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2016

Meteorological Frontiers: Climate Knowledge, the West, and US Statecraft, 1800–50

“…Developments in technologies of surveillance, human sciences, and disciplinary institutions, Foucault explains, gave way to a biopolitical apparatus that aimed to order the dynamics of human life, chiefly through aggregation, categorization, and minute concern with the environs that control health, productivity, and normalized behavior. Although Foucault paid scant attention to climate (see Foucault 1991: 93–95; 2004: 21–22), others (Golinski 2008; Jankovic 2000; Zilberstein 2016) have shown how achieving a productive and healthy population; “improving” climates to become more temperate and healthy; and advancing civilization as a climate-dependent process emerged as intertwined problems of government within eighteenth-century European and colonial contexts.…”

“…A second relevant theme developed by cultural geographers and environmental historians (Golinski 2008; Grove 1995; Livingstone 1991, 2002; Mahony and Hulme 2016; Zilberstein 2016) addresses how geographically expansive and socially stratifying forms of rule, especially colonialism, related to theories of climate. Such issues have been especially important to scholars of modern environmental thought and its articulation with British and French colonization in what many called the “torrid zone” of equatorial, tropical, and arid climates (Arnold 1996; Beattie et al 2014; Davis 2016; Duncan 2007; Harrison 1999).…”

“…Apprehending or seeking to institute social and climatic order, what we are here labeling practices of meteorological government, is hardly reducible to colonial projects in specifically “torrid” or “tropical” spaces. Analysis of nineteenth-century US statecraft, not a focus among studies of colonialism and climate discourse in North America (Golinski 2008; Kupperman 1984; Zilberstein 2016), can contribute to the broader historical genealogy of meteorological government in two ways. The first is to show how meteorological government in the United States reflected practices developed in European and colonial contexts.…”