Cherry Briggs (Independent Researcher), The Multiple Geographies of Sri Lanka’s Climate, 1805-1953

Since the early twentieth century, the division of Sri Lanka into two distinct ecological and climatological regions – the Wet Zone and the Dry Zone – has become firmly entrenched in the way Sri Lanka’s geography has come to be imagined, both on the island and by those looking in from outside. This geographical imaginary has become so thoroughly naturalised that it has yet to be critically examined by historians of empire or historical geographers. This paper will trace the knowledge making practices that produced Sri Lanka’s climate in the context of empire, with a focus on the multiple geographical networks and imaginaries that brought it into being. Using climate as a lens, it will answer the call of historians of Sri Lanka to think through Sri Lanka’s past both beyond the shores of the island and the analytical frameworks of the colony and the nation state. It will show how Sri Lanka’s climate was produced by the collaboration of early nineteenth century meteorologists and climatologists, who imagined Sri Lanka variously as an isolated island, an extension of the Indian mainland, as a node in the Indian Ocean, as an ‘equatorial’ landmass and as part of a global network of data gatherers. It will show how the collection of the longitudinal rainfall data sets that were used to measure these climatic zones was initiated by individuals who traversed and transcended imperial space and how these zones were mapped in line with practices formulated beyond the British Empire in continental Europe. Finally, it will show how early twentieth century demographers’ insertion of the island into a global climatic schema ultimately aided the politicisation of the Wet and the Dry Zones after Independence.

Alison Bennett (University of Oxford), Port labour, global commodities, and material skill development: A study of the ivory warehouse in the Port of London and its representation c. 1860–1968

This paper explores how global commodity trade fostered localised skills among Britain’s labouring classes, namely through the creation of new material, geographical, and commercial knowledge. Its lens is the Port of London’s Ivory Floor at St. Katherine’s Dock (built 1860, closed 1968), and its chief focus the warehouse workers and commercial agents who prepared ivory for market, as well as the Port’s publicity department who marketed their work through commissioned photographs and newspaper accounts. As the first substantive examination of ivory warehouses (in London or elsewhere), this case study sheds light on an overlooked part of the global commodification process of ivory while also unravelling the impact of global trade on a local workforce through their development of a specialised epistemological and material skillset. It demonstrates that through their prolonged material and sensory engagement, this group of port labourers became knowledgeable in assessing ivory and its origins without ever seeing an elephant or leaving the British Isles. Scholarship tends to approach the relationship between global commodity trade and local skill development at the level of artisanal and industrial manufacture, yet as this paper shows, material skills, knowledge, and visual marketing were also instrumental to port warehouse storage and trade, adding value to one of the most coveted raw materials of the nineteenth century. The paper develops our understanding of the material and visual cultures behind global trade, port labour history, and ivory commodity chains In turn, it opens space for understanding how other global commodities were mobilised for, and marketed to, manufacturers and consumers around the world via port warehouses.