Anduaga Egaña, Aitor (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 113
Issue: 3
Pages: 513-536
Jesuit scientists played a key role in the establishment of the earliest warning systems for tropical cyclones in the 1870s and 1880s. Jesuit observatories and their cyclone prediction methods were unrivaled in the geopolitically and commercially competitive landscape in the Antilles and the Far East. Even Western governments and local mercantile communities in Cuba, China, and the Philippines entrusted the Jesuits with the direction of national and regional weather services in the 1880s and 1890s, while state observatories and imperial navies often surreptitiously drew on the Jesuits’ forecasts for their own storm warnings. The ability of the Society of Jesus to produce, codify, and disseminate scientific knowledge is here addressed in terms of the formation of an “epistemic network” of actors sharing certain beliefs as well as a common scientific enterprise. This actor-centered network did not mean, however, that there was some center of calculation or production through which Western domination of knowledge over the periphery would take place. Quite the contrary, the case of Jesuit cyclone prediction details a specific networked activity that deepens our understanding of how specific epistemic networks can be actively engaged in the processes of circulation and globalization while also adapting, modifying, and producing prediction methods in local contexts.
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