Environmental Exchanges Seminar - Philip Gooding

This semester, the Centre for Environmental History's Environmental Exchanges seminar series will include four fantastic papers from a diverse group of historians on the theme 'climate'.
The third Environmental Exchanges seminar of 2023 was the following paper by Philip Gooding, held on the 29 March 2023:
Rainfall variability and its effects on 18th-19th-century East African history
In the last two decades, climatologists have used interpretations of natural proxy records and climate forcings to reconstruct global climatic conditions to as far back as the beginning of the common era. For the period since the mid-nineteenth century, they have indicated rainfall variability at monthly and seasonal scales. However, none of these reconstructions have incorporated data from the African continent. This reflects both the difficulty of acquiring high-resolution natural climate proxies in tropical climates, as well as Africa’s marginalisation from the global scientific community during and after colonialism. Thus, to improve current reconstructions and challenge such institutional inequalities, this paper integrates qualitative descriptions from documentary sources (published and archival) that refer directly to the African continent in the nineteenth century into understandings of past climatic conditions. Focusing on parts of present-day inland Tanzania, it explains the methods and challenges of creating interdisciplinary time-series of rainfall variability as well as the utility of such time-series in history and climatology.
Philip Gooding is a postdoctoral researcher at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University. He is author of On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and editor of Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022). He is also the Associate Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, a platinum open-access, peer-reviewed journal focusing on social science and humanities research on the Indian Ocean World and its constituent parts, from eastern Africa to eastern and southeastern Asia and Australasia.
To find out more about the Centre for Environmental History, or to sign up for our newsletter in order to hear about more exciting events and opportunities, follow this link: history.cass.a....