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HEIndividual fellowship2022–2024

HABITABILITY · Imperial Science and the Habitability of Central Asia and Mesopotamia, 1815-1914: A History of the Societal Consequences of Changing Environmental Limits

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2022-11-01 → 2024-10-31
EU contribution
€173,847
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Imperial Science and the Habitability of Central Asia and Mesopotamia, 1815-1914: A History of the Societal Consequences of Changing Environmental Limits

The MSCA project HABITABILITY has addressed a question of fundamental relevance today: what happens to societies when long habitable places become uninhabitable? It has done so by examining how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperial scientists and geographers tried to measure the limits of life on earth in new ways. The focus has been on Central Asia and Mesopotamia, which became key to imperial investigations into environmental stability and change, especially via the disciplines of geography and climatology. Bringing an innovative combination of environmental history, global history and history of science methods to archival sources, this research has aimed to place scientific and cultural ideas of ‘habitability and ‘uninhabitability’ into their historical contexts and pioneer ‘habitability studies’ as an essential interdisciplinary methodology for an age of climate crisis. The research has focused especially on attempts to trace changing ‘arid lines’ and ‘snow lines’ over a range of timescales. Here the discovery of lost cities in places that could not possibly support similar demographics under the environmental conditions of the present shaped imperial debates about climate change within recent human history. At the same time, in the case of Central Asia this was complicated by the growing imperial imaginary that these vast deserts had once supported allegedly one of the greatest trade routes in history: that is, the so-called ‘Silk Roads.’ This research has thus aimed to trace the development of these imaginaries, and the many ways these imperial categories continue to impact the region today.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Following a summer where parts of Europe flooded while others burned, this research addresses a fundamentally relevant question: what happens to societies when habitable places become uninhabitable? The large scale effects of anthropogenic climate change are new, but divisions of the world into 'habitable' and 'uninhabitable' regions are not, and have long shaped humanity. My project examines a pivotal part of this longer history by showing how between 1815 and 1914, British and French imperial scientists tried to measure the limits of life on earth in new ways (especially via the new sciences of geology, geography and ecology). There is nevertheless a significant research gap in that previous scholars have generally used intellectual history methods to examine theories of environmental change proposed by elite philosophers based in Europe, rather than addressing the imperial contexts in which this knowledge was made. Bringing an innovative combination of global history and history of science methods to archival sources, my project will close this gap by focusing on Central Asia and Mesopotamia, which became key to investigations into the societal consequences of environmental change (e.g. the movement of the Euphrates river causing cities to be abandoned). Examining the origins of these environmentally determinist imperial categories will simultaneously reveal their problematic legacies today (e.g. the idea of Afghanistan having an inherently 'violent geography'). This research thus aims to place scientific and cultural ideas of 'uninhabitability' into their historical contexts and pioneer 'habitability studies' as an essential interdisciplinary methodology for an age of climate crisis. This will also allow me to enhance my research skills (learning cutting-edge material culture and colonial archive methods) and expand my impact and international profile under the expert mentorship of Prof. Roland Wenzlhuemer to secure an academic position at a European university.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN · PlaneggCoordinatorGermany

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union