Thomas Simpson | University of Warwick (original) (raw)

Books by Thomas Simpson

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and know... more Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysis of frontiers in northwest and northeast India and draws on visual and written materials from an array of archives across the subcontinent and the UK. Colonial interventions in frontier spaces and populations were, it shows, enormously destructive but also prone to confusion and failure on their own terms. British frontier administrators did not merely suffer ‘turbulent’ frontiers, but actively worked to generate and uphold these regions as space of governmental and scientific exception. Accordingly, India’s frontiers became crucial spaces of imperial practice and imagination throughout the nineteenth century.

Papers by Thomas Simpson

BJHS Themes, 2024

How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the ... more How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of 'big-picture' scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowledge. Critically engaging a wide range of recent literature across history of science, environmental history, and environmental humanities, alongside an array of case studies, the article puts forward an agenda for 'planetary pictures'. These are analyses that actively contribute to the vital political and ethical task to make visible, and force a reckoning with, the perpetrators and victims of Anthropocene violence.

Modern Asian Studies, 2024

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Riv... more Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region's rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Territory, Politics, Governance, 2024

George Curzon's 1907 Romanes lecture, delivered soon after his tenure as Viceroy of India, articu... more George Curzon's 1907 Romanes lecture, delivered soon after his tenure as Viceroy of India, articulated a vision of geopolitical order at a moment of British imperial decline. Curzon, however, argued that he lived at a historical zenith of frontier competition characterised by British India's land power and complex frontiers. He invoked ancient precedents to assert the inevitability of modern imperial expansion, obscuring the specific geopolitical and historical material conditions of India's colonialised frontier spaces. Nonetheless, the lecture illustrates how India's 'walling' proceeded through the projection of the Government of India's border power and through imperialist 'protection', client rule and commerce.

WIREs Climate Change, 2023

Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to... more Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to be brought together into a critical synthesis. This advanced review offers a critical overview of the key themes of this literature with the primary intention of enabling historians and other scholars to recognize, specify, and acknowledge the roles of imperial and colonial processes in shaping scientific framings of climate. Following a brief overview of debates in older literature over the significance of imperialism and colonialism in climate sciences, the article investigates the wealth of recent scholarship that demonstrates specific and diverse connections between empires and climate science. Major features of this scholarship include: the role and the erasure of Indigenous and local knowledge; imperial climate infrastructures and visions; and climate data and theories in land empires as well as in informal empires and neocolonial settings. Through critically engaging these themes, the article seeks to help historians identify avenues for future research.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew ... more During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an object that was differently defined in different academic disciplines. Geography's climate, according to Herbertson and his supporters, was defined by its relations with other spatially distributed phenomena rather than being the quantifiable and isolable entity of modern climatology. Building on recent work in the history of cartography foregrounding map use and reception, the article also argues that natural regions were products of particular modes of map reading, comparison, and synthesis. Although maps were arguably the most influential medium for communicating natural regions, they also proved limited as bearers of the multiscalar version of climate that Herbertson and his successors sought to convey. Finally, the article explains how natural regions and associated conceptions of climate came to be sidelined in the mid-twentieth century as geographers foregrounded human agency in region formation and adopted climatology's definitions and analytical tools. Revisiting the life and death of theories of natural regions illuminates the contested significance of climate in the discipline of geography, and contributes to ongoing efforts to pluralise the history of climate sciences.

Ice humanities: Living, working, and thinking in a melting world, ed. Sverker Sörlin and Klaus Dodds, 2022

From the consumable slush of the plains to the glaciers of the high Himalaya, Europeans struggled... more From the consumable slush of the plains to the glaciers of the high Himalaya, Europeans struggled to obtain purchase on Indian ice epistemologically as well as physically. Even as their encounters with ice relied upon Asian people and infrastructures, however, imperial personnel came to configure consuming, climbing, and categorising ice as markers of racial and gendered distinction. Multiple temporalities and types of motion coalesced and clashed on the ice, ranging from humans moving in different spaces and different rhythms, to the assumed actions of powerful and mysterious glaciers and gods, to instruments and texts precariously generating and bearing information. In this flux, knowledge and practices of power might congeal for a time; but only on rare occasions, and with difficulty, could they be made to stick durably. In addition, Asian ice appeared sufficiently distinctive to many Europeans to prompt or substantiate a wide range of scientific investigations and theories across natural and physical sciences. This chapter shows how ice in colonial India was ‘vital matter’, in terms of being both important stuff to various agents of empire and a lively substance that persistently slipped their grasp.

The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire, ed. Andrew Goss, 2021

Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. ... more Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. Imperial formations developed in conjunction with particular mapping projects, which acted as instruments of violence, extraction, and dispossession, facilitating vast inequalities and iniquities. But maps have never been under the exclusive control of narrowly defined imperial elites; instead they have drawn on the knowledge and labour of subject peoples and remained open to unexpected and resistant repurposing. Scholarship of recent decades has investigated spatial representations’ power as a variable and relative quality rather than one to be taken for granted. This chapter presents a global and broadly chronological overview of imperial cartographies from the fifteenth century to the present, from early-modern globes and world maps, through increasingly expansive imperial surveys and cartographic bureaucracies, on to the malleable spatial technologies of the contemporary world. Maps shaped how empires governed, grew, and declined; empires shaped what maps displayed, their material forms, and who used them. The chapter casts light on how these processes took diverse forms not only between but also within empires, often exceeding and reframing the expectations of the many people—colonisers and colonised, producers and viewers—who had a stake in maps.

The Historical Journal, 2019

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many... more Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance , and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.

History of Science, 2017

During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significa... more During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged.

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, 2019

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (London: Hurst; New York: Oxford U... more Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (London: Hurst; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 223-47

What if governing and ‘seeing’ like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the ten years that followed its invasion of Assam in 1824, the British East India Company-State had failed to recollect the public statement issued in its name to ‘reestablish in that Country a Government … calculated to promote the happiness of the people of all Classes’. The Court of Directors in London admonished the Government of India for its performance over the preceding decade, opining bluntly that ‘we have hitherto governed Assam extremely ill’. At the centre of these failings, the Court said, was the ‘unlimited confidence’ Calcutta had placed in the late Agent to the North-East Frontier, David Scott, ‘allow[ing] him to govern the country in his own way’. The early years of British penetration into Assam and the hill regions beyond north-eastern Bengal were indeed dominated by Scott and a very few underlings, who administered and gathered information with significant autonomy from Calcutta and still more from London. This paper investigates how this small cabal went about making knowledge and setting the terms for governmental expansion in the Company-State’s newly acquired north-east, and the longer-term impact of these endeavours.

The Historical Journal, 2015

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansio... more From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state’s power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

in Efram Sera-Shriar (ed.), Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 2018

In Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Marcus Banks (eds.), Visual Histories of South Asia (New Delhi: P... more In Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Marcus Banks (eds.), Visual Histories of South Asia (New Delhi: Primus, 2018), pp.73-92

Book Reviews by Thomas Simpson

Times Literary Supplement, 2024

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining ... more In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have been living in the Anthropocene – an epoch “in which many conditions and processes on Earth are profoundly altered by human impact”. For more than a decade, however, arts and humanities scholars have insisted that defining the Anthropocene is too important to be left to the scientists. Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth is a bravura synthesis of historians’ recent moves beyond “global” interconnections and dynamics, and on to “planetary” processes in which humans alter – and are altered by – the matter of the Earth.

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023

A commentary on Lachlan Fleetwood's 'Science on the roof of the world', including an application ... more A commentary on Lachlan Fleetwood's 'Science on the roof of the world', including an application of some of Fleetwood's thinking to the eastern Himalaya.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

Journal of Historical Geography, 2021

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2020

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and know... more Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysis of frontiers in northwest and northeast India and draws on visual and written materials from an array of archives across the subcontinent and the UK. Colonial interventions in frontier spaces and populations were, it shows, enormously destructive but also prone to confusion and failure on their own terms. British frontier administrators did not merely suffer ‘turbulent’ frontiers, but actively worked to generate and uphold these regions as space of governmental and scientific exception. Accordingly, India’s frontiers became crucial spaces of imperial practice and imagination throughout the nineteenth century.

BJHS Themes, 2024

How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the ... more How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of 'big-picture' scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowledge. Critically engaging a wide range of recent literature across history of science, environmental history, and environmental humanities, alongside an array of case studies, the article puts forward an agenda for 'planetary pictures'. These are analyses that actively contribute to the vital political and ethical task to make visible, and force a reckoning with, the perpetrators and victims of Anthropocene violence.

Modern Asian Studies, 2024

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Riv... more Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region's rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Territory, Politics, Governance, 2024

George Curzon's 1907 Romanes lecture, delivered soon after his tenure as Viceroy of India, articu... more George Curzon's 1907 Romanes lecture, delivered soon after his tenure as Viceroy of India, articulated a vision of geopolitical order at a moment of British imperial decline. Curzon, however, argued that he lived at a historical zenith of frontier competition characterised by British India's land power and complex frontiers. He invoked ancient precedents to assert the inevitability of modern imperial expansion, obscuring the specific geopolitical and historical material conditions of India's colonialised frontier spaces. Nonetheless, the lecture illustrates how India's 'walling' proceeded through the projection of the Government of India's border power and through imperialist 'protection', client rule and commerce.

WIREs Climate Change, 2023

Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to... more Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to be brought together into a critical synthesis. This advanced review offers a critical overview of the key themes of this literature with the primary intention of enabling historians and other scholars to recognize, specify, and acknowledge the roles of imperial and colonial processes in shaping scientific framings of climate. Following a brief overview of debates in older literature over the significance of imperialism and colonialism in climate sciences, the article investigates the wealth of recent scholarship that demonstrates specific and diverse connections between empires and climate science. Major features of this scholarship include: the role and the erasure of Indigenous and local knowledge; imperial climate infrastructures and visions; and climate data and theories in land empires as well as in informal empires and neocolonial settings. Through critically engaging these themes, the article seeks to help historians identify avenues for future research.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew ... more During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an object that was differently defined in different academic disciplines. Geography's climate, according to Herbertson and his supporters, was defined by its relations with other spatially distributed phenomena rather than being the quantifiable and isolable entity of modern climatology. Building on recent work in the history of cartography foregrounding map use and reception, the article also argues that natural regions were products of particular modes of map reading, comparison, and synthesis. Although maps were arguably the most influential medium for communicating natural regions, they also proved limited as bearers of the multiscalar version of climate that Herbertson and his successors sought to convey. Finally, the article explains how natural regions and associated conceptions of climate came to be sidelined in the mid-twentieth century as geographers foregrounded human agency in region formation and adopted climatology's definitions and analytical tools. Revisiting the life and death of theories of natural regions illuminates the contested significance of climate in the discipline of geography, and contributes to ongoing efforts to pluralise the history of climate sciences.

Ice humanities: Living, working, and thinking in a melting world, ed. Sverker Sörlin and Klaus Dodds, 2022

From the consumable slush of the plains to the glaciers of the high Himalaya, Europeans struggled... more From the consumable slush of the plains to the glaciers of the high Himalaya, Europeans struggled to obtain purchase on Indian ice epistemologically as well as physically. Even as their encounters with ice relied upon Asian people and infrastructures, however, imperial personnel came to configure consuming, climbing, and categorising ice as markers of racial and gendered distinction. Multiple temporalities and types of motion coalesced and clashed on the ice, ranging from humans moving in different spaces and different rhythms, to the assumed actions of powerful and mysterious glaciers and gods, to instruments and texts precariously generating and bearing information. In this flux, knowledge and practices of power might congeal for a time; but only on rare occasions, and with difficulty, could they be made to stick durably. In addition, Asian ice appeared sufficiently distinctive to many Europeans to prompt or substantiate a wide range of scientific investigations and theories across natural and physical sciences. This chapter shows how ice in colonial India was ‘vital matter’, in terms of being both important stuff to various agents of empire and a lively substance that persistently slipped their grasp.

The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire, ed. Andrew Goss, 2021

Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. ... more Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. Imperial formations developed in conjunction with particular mapping projects, which acted as instruments of violence, extraction, and dispossession, facilitating vast inequalities and iniquities. But maps have never been under the exclusive control of narrowly defined imperial elites; instead they have drawn on the knowledge and labour of subject peoples and remained open to unexpected and resistant repurposing. Scholarship of recent decades has investigated spatial representations’ power as a variable and relative quality rather than one to be taken for granted. This chapter presents a global and broadly chronological overview of imperial cartographies from the fifteenth century to the present, from early-modern globes and world maps, through increasingly expansive imperial surveys and cartographic bureaucracies, on to the malleable spatial technologies of the contemporary world. Maps shaped how empires governed, grew, and declined; empires shaped what maps displayed, their material forms, and who used them. The chapter casts light on how these processes took diverse forms not only between but also within empires, often exceeding and reframing the expectations of the many people—colonisers and colonised, producers and viewers—who had a stake in maps.

The Historical Journal, 2019

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many... more Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance , and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.

History of Science, 2017

During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significa... more During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged.

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, 2019

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (London: Hurst; New York: Oxford U... more Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (London: Hurst; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 223-47

What if governing and ‘seeing’ like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the ten years that followed its invasion of Assam in 1824, the British East India Company-State had failed to recollect the public statement issued in its name to ‘reestablish in that Country a Government … calculated to promote the happiness of the people of all Classes’. The Court of Directors in London admonished the Government of India for its performance over the preceding decade, opining bluntly that ‘we have hitherto governed Assam extremely ill’. At the centre of these failings, the Court said, was the ‘unlimited confidence’ Calcutta had placed in the late Agent to the North-East Frontier, David Scott, ‘allow[ing] him to govern the country in his own way’. The early years of British penetration into Assam and the hill regions beyond north-eastern Bengal were indeed dominated by Scott and a very few underlings, who administered and gathered information with significant autonomy from Calcutta and still more from London. This paper investigates how this small cabal went about making knowledge and setting the terms for governmental expansion in the Company-State’s newly acquired north-east, and the longer-term impact of these endeavours.

The Historical Journal, 2015

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansio... more From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state’s power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

in Efram Sera-Shriar (ed.), Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 2018

In Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Marcus Banks (eds.), Visual Histories of South Asia (New Delhi: P... more In Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Marcus Banks (eds.), Visual Histories of South Asia (New Delhi: Primus, 2018), pp.73-92

Times Literary Supplement, 2024

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining ... more In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have been living in the Anthropocene – an epoch “in which many conditions and processes on Earth are profoundly altered by human impact”. For more than a decade, however, arts and humanities scholars have insisted that defining the Anthropocene is too important to be left to the scientists. Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth is a bravura synthesis of historians’ recent moves beyond “global” interconnections and dynamics, and on to “planetary” processes in which humans alter – and are altered by – the matter of the Earth.

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023

A commentary on Lachlan Fleetwood's 'Science on the roof of the world', including an application ... more A commentary on Lachlan Fleetwood's 'Science on the roof of the world', including an application of some of Fleetwood's thinking to the eastern Himalaya.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

Journal of Historical Geography, 2021

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2020

The English Historical Review, 2018

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2018

Reviews in History, 2017

Traversing varied material, institutional, and conceptual terrains, plotting shifts in how space ... more Traversing varied material, institutional, and conceptual terrains, plotting shifts in how space has been represented and enacted throughout the 20th century, and rendering connections between spatial technologies and politics, After The Map ventures far beyond conventional boundaries of the history of cartography. It is a beautiful book, not only in its dazzling array of illustrations (available in high-resolution colour form on the accompanying website, www.afterthemap.info [2]), but also in the elegance of its writing and the deftness of its arguments. Case studies of rich technological and ideational complexity -compelling enough in isolation -serve as foundations for stories on a far grander scale, exploring the changing forms of globalism and functioning of state power during the 20th century. On this basis alone, William Rankin's work deserves a wide readership. The analytical nuance and spirit of humility that runs throughout the book means that it goes further still. Among the most significant developments in spatial representations and practices during the 20th century, Rankin suggests, was a shift away from timeless, singular truth to active use and engagement. It seems to me that After The Map partakes in a similar logic. Rather than just being told a particular tale, readers are encouraged to think more deeply and clearly about issues such as the stakes of knowing and of not knowing about space, and the ways in which all humans shape, and are in turn shaped by, spatial representations and technologies. It is above all else this intellectual generosity, summed up by the conclusion taking the form not of prescriptive statements but of four open-ended questions (pp. 297-8), that makes reading the book such an engaging and edifying experience.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2017

British Journal of the History of Science, 2016

Viewpoint: Magazine of the British Society of the History of Science, 2018

Global Mountains, conference held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Univers... more Global Mountains, conference held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, July 2017

https://www.rgs.org/naturalhazardsandempire, 2023

In this exhibition, we explore how natural hazards were studied and experienced under the conditi... more In this exhibition, we explore how natural hazards were studied and experienced under the conditions of empire, drawing on examples from the Royal Geographical Society's Collections. For many people, colonialism itself was a disaster. When combined with the shock of an earthquake, an avalanche, or volcanic eruption, the effects could be especially damaging and long-lasting.

The exhibition was put together following an undergraduate workshop held at the Society in collaboration with the University of Leeds and the University of Warwick. This was an exercise in participatory research.