British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment: Between the Scientific and Traditional with Historian Jan Golinski

Part 1 | Part 2
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The World's Fair is proud to discuss British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007) with its author, Jan Golinski of the University of New Hampshire. Golinski is a Professor of History and Humanities, the Chair of the Department of History at UNH, and a leader in the field of the history of science.

Golinski's work has become influential and well-respected in the history of science and science studies in the past decade-and-a-half, likely because of a rare match between graceful writing style and rigorous theoretical grounding. His first book, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, (1992) was published by Cambridge University Press. His second book has probably brought him the most renown: Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago) was first published in 1998 and then in a new edition in 2005. Since it's first edition it has become a standard-bearer for clearly presenting constructivist historiography. I'll just borrow this blurb: "Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, [the book] reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to prominence, and traces its most important tensions." He then co-edited The Sciences in Enlightened Europe with William Clark and Simon Schaffer (Chicago, 1999) before finishing research for British Weather, the book under discussion below.

This is the ninth in our series of "Author Meets Bloggers" posts, where we talk to authors about their new work. (See them all here.) Instead of going on and on in an intro about the strength and clarity of Golinski's research and scholarship, let's just get to it. What follows is part one of a two-part conversation about British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment.

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WORLD'S FAIR: What do we have here? When you sent in the prospectus to Chicago, what did you tell them this would be about?

JAN GOLINSKI: The book explores beliefs about weather and climate in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies. I argue that these beliefs reflect some of the important social and cultural changes of the period. People began to study the weather in a way that we recognize as more "scientific," but traditional attitudes also survived, even what we might call "superstitions." The tensions between scientific and traditional approaches seemed to me symptomatic of the age, and to some extent of modern attitudes to the natural environment in general.

WF: You're a premier historian of science, respected, influential, articulate, good-humored, don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this...namely, what does a book about the weather contribute to our understanding of the history of science?

JG: I think of it as a combination of history of science with cultural history. I didn't set out to trace the origins and growth of a science of weather, but to place scientific practices like record-keeping and the use of instruments in their cultural context. So, I suppose it contributes to the way we can understand science as a set of practices and beliefs that has developed in specific historical settings.

WF: Alternatively, what has the study of the history of science in recent years offered you so you could write this book?

JG: Recent history of science has tended to focus a lot on the practices of science and tried to place them in their historical contexts, whereas an older approach emphasized ideas largely in isolation from context. I have certainly learned from the new approaches. On the other hand, as I say, I wasn't studying just the science of weather, but a whole range of attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs about it.

WF: Beyond the easy answer of "I'm a British historian," why British weather? Not Dutch or Spanish or Leichtensteinian? Is the story there more rich or meaningful?

JG: I think the British do have a special relationship with their weather. They inhabit an island in the North Atlantic that gets most of its weather from the ocean, which makes it rainy and changeable. The weather features a lot in British conversation and proverbs; and I think they feel it has shaped their character as a nation. I argue that in a sense it has, at least insofar as prevailing notions about the British weather took root in the culture at the same time as the sense of national identity was forged. Eighteenth-century British people thought their weather was an asset to their agricultural productivity, their commerce, their emotional equanimity, and their health. They thought it made them civilized, no less.

WF: The notion of "climate" of course has cultural and meteorological meaning (or, as you note, is it both cultural and natural). What was it about the British cultural climate that lent itself to talking and studying the weather?

JG: Obviously, my title puns on the ambiguity of the word "climate." I try to show how the eighteenth-century Enlightenment explored the physical climate and its influence on human life. Thinkers of the time investigated how the weather affected people's mood and health, and how it shaped the prospects for the historical development of civilization in particular places. At the same time, the cultural "climate" of the Enlightenment inclined people to regard the weather in new ways: as ultimately regular and perhaps even predictable.

WF: I've learned a great deal about the Enlightenment and science from your prior work. How does this draw from and then add to recent studies in that area?

JG: I tried to show how a focus on weather and climate could present a face of the Enlightenment that historians have not always recognized. When unusual weather events occurred, it was hard for eighteenth-century intellectuals to sustain their optimism about the progress of science and reason. And many of them understood that human lives were intimately shaped by the natural forces of climate. When it came to the weather, enlightened thinkers confronted the limits of what human rationality could accomplish.

WF: What role instruments? There's a technological dimension to your story, where advocates for studying the weather begin to produce and make available instruments for recording weather information.

JG: Weather instruments, especially thermometers and barometers, were a novelty in the eighteenth century, but they caught on astonishingly quickly with middle-class consumers. I tried to work out how they were used and interpreted by the people who bought them and set them up in their homes. The barometer, especially, turns out to be a rather equivocal index of enlightenment. It was generally interpreted as a sign of the weather to come and compared with other signs drawn from nature (the appearance of the sky, the behavior of animals and birds, etc.). So, this supposedly "scientific" instrument was actually being used in the traditional practice of "weather-wising," using natural signs to predict what the weather was going to do. Some people thought it was being treated as a kind of oracle, encouraging superstition.

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Part 1 | Part 2
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