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Article ID: CBB782813382

Cyclonic Ecology: Sugar, Cyclone Science, and the Limits of Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean World, 1870s–1930s (2019)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 110
Issue: 1
Pages: 48-67
Publication date: 2019
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1086/702729

DOI: 10.1086/702729

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Agrometerology Agriculture Sugar and sugar industry Meteorology 20th century 19th century Mauritius Indian Ocean

Tropical cyclones posed unique challenges to the mobility and durability of British colonial capital in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. Although a veritable community of scientists studying these storms in the Bay of Bengal and the Mascarene Islands developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, knowledge about cyclone generation, movement, and internal makeup remained opaque. This article analyzes one response to these limitations: the growth of agrometeorology on the African island of Mauritius. Agrometeorology, a field of study that integrated knowledge produced on cyclones with that in sugar cultivation, the industry at the heart of the island’s economy, studied how cyclonic winds and rains constituted part of a broader ecology of sugar cultivation, rather than focusing exclusively on developing models of prediction.

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