The crucible of altitude: Situated knowledges,Himalayan sciences,and imperial geopolitics

Historical records of science and exploration in the Himalayan region have long privileged, and perpetuated, a distinct colonial gaze. More recently, critical decolonial interventions from both the humanities and social sciences have done essential work to disrupt and challenge legacies of knowledge production formulated by and established in predominantly Western European imperialist contexts. While this long-overdue corrective has reoriented attention to and from subaltern, Indigenous, and historically marginalized perspectives, and generated a prodigious amount of excellent scholarship in turn, there remains much work to be done. This is especially true in terms of alternative histories to the geopolitical intersections of scientific knowledge production and the technology of empire.

Lachlan Fleetwood makes it abundantly clear in his excellent new book, Science on the Roof of the World, that these blanks can and must be filled in. Situating his study at the geographical crossroads of high mountain Asia, where episodes of nineteenth-century global imperial rivalry were played out in the local terrains of Himalayan peaks and valleys, Fleetwood tells an important story about the place of science in the making of historical – and in turn also contemporary and postcolonial – geopolitics. And yet, the book also goes well beyond the temporal scope of Himalayan colonial intrigue. That is, through a rich and evocative account of the study of altitude across the highest landscapes on earth, Fleetwood demonstrates that a closer and more critical reading of archival records tells a different story than that which has been told so many times over for hundreds of years until now.

Showing how science has served as both an instrument and crucible of geopolitics, Fleetwood reads ‘against the grain’ of colonial archives to illuminate and amplify more nuanced histories and situated knowledge. In so doing, the book makes several key contributions to and interventions in historical geography. This includes, but is not limited, to the following points: demonstrating how a multitude of characters and local Himalayan actors played critical roles in contributing to the development of a wider global science; challenging the popular (if erroneous) ‘great men’ storyline in Euro-Western accounts for the history of science; and historicizing the greater limits of science and knowledge in contemporary contexts, including in the present age of a rapidly changing climate as well as how new forms of ‘Great Power’ geopolitics play out in the Himalaya region today.

In reading through Science on the Rood of the World, it becomes abundantly clear that knowledge is made – and done – differently in the mountains. And over the course of the text, Fleetwood makes this point evident across three critical registers. First, that modern science came into being according to a three-dimensional sense of the world; this is what is called ‘the vertical globe’. Second, that in the long run of nineteenth-century coloniality, establishing the ‘global’ as the scale for science in turn helped to accomplish important and deliberate imperial work. And third, that dominant narratives which have long purported to tell the history of science in fact framed, and exploited, geographical imaginations by appropriating (and often then erasing) situated knowledges. In the writing of this book, Fleetwood identifies and reverses many historical fallacies related to the critical role of local Himalayan actors in the production of modern science and in so doing brings to light and voice the long-silenced histories and stories of these Himalayan peoples. In turn, the book fills in many blanks of the historical record and demonstrates that it was local Himalayan, rather than imperial British, expertise that in fact allowed science to be made, even if it is the latter who often captured and long maintained the credit for such discoveries, methods, and theories.

From ‘Measuring Mountains’ to testing their ‘Vertical Limits’, over the course of six chapters, Fleetwood takes the reader on a Himalayan sojourn through the high-altitude landscapes of India, Nepal, and Tibet as well as proximate mountain reaches in Bhutan and Pakistan. In the case of this review commentary, I want to engage the book through three historical contexts and incidents. This includes altitude and ‘Humboldt's chagrin’, filling in some ‘blanks on the map’, and an enduring ‘politics of scale’. Together, these considerations help to tell a bigger story that not only provides new understandings for the history of science but that more importantly (and especially for readers of this journal) demonstrates how the value of geographical scale works to disrupt dominant histories and epistemologies of other sciences too.

The advent of altitude; or Humboldt's chagrin

Why does altitude matter? This is not merely a rhetorical question but a historical point of inflection. For Humboldt, the belief – or at the time, scientific truth – that the summit of Chimborazo was the highest point on earth was predicated on his high-altitude measurement on the Ecuadorian volcano in 1802. But this Andean record was not long to last. Demonstrating ‘how global comparisons were wrapped up in imperial efforts to measure the Himalayas and map their natural history from the outset’ (33), imperial competition to generate and claim science motivated the subsequent reckoning of Dhaulagiri in central Nepal as the highest mountain on earth, which itself was of course eclipsed by Everest in 1856. Adding insult to injury, Fleetwood further explains that not only was Humboldt's record shattered by measurements made by agents of the East India Company in the Himalayas, but that Humboldt himself was not invited along for the expeditions.

But why was height so important in the first place? And what did it have to do with empire? While finding, and lifting, the line of perpetual snow was at the forefront of geopolitical scientific competition, Fleetwood explains, ‘it is that height – and more specifically, height above sea level – only became an essential characteristic of mountains in both European science and imaginative geographies relatively recently’ (40). In light of this historical revelation, cannot help but wonder if George Mallory's immortal words voiced to justify the ill-fated (and also fatal) 1924 British expedition to be the climb Everest – ‘because it is there’ – do not in fact also belie a much wider high-imperial internalization of the magnanimity of elevation. Or, in other words, it was not just that Everest was simply there but rather that it was most importantly taller than anything else, and that factor of altitude played a powerfully motivating but historically unprecedented new role in periods of high empire.

That is, the advent of altitude as the foremost measurement of imperial science – or height above all – in fact brought into being a new form of international scientific relations itself known as the ‘vertical globe’. Moreover, and in my own reading, the centrality of that scientific measurement is one of the most valuable overall contributions of Fleetwood's study, that ‘in tracing the origins of the vertical globe through its inherently comparative dimensions, the book thus seeks to reconstruct and historicize the formation of what were both sciences of the globe and global sciences in practice’ (15).

Filling in some blanks on the map and the importance of routes and roots

In collecting specimens, measuring heights, and documenting records, imperial geographers cataloged a great number of things. But at the same time, cartographers working alongside botanists, zoologists, and geologists rendered countless places, things, and even the people that were there as altogether missing. This was part of the terrible colonial making of many ‘blanks on the map’. ‘Much as inscribing “blank spaces” onto maps erased indigenous presences, so too did dividing up the mountains according to European norms derived from the horizontal’ (208). Across several chapters of the book, Fleetwood addresses this historical erasure and uses the situated knowledge and biographical stories of local guides and informants to do the critical work of filling in such blanks.

Fleetwood tells and illuminates essential narratives that have long been left out of the so-called historical (but in fact truly just partial and largely colonial) record. Most of all, this includes attention to the critical importance of local knowledge in the expedition and exploration processes. From Indigenous expertise and local labor to British reliance on different Himalayan peoples – particularly Bhotiya, Wakhi, Lepcha, and Tatar, at least in Fleetwood's telling – the agency of porters and pandits, sirdars and traders, guides and spies is brought to the fore. In telling some of their profound and peculiar stories, Fleetwood demonstrates that imperial science could never have been done without these essential characters. In other words, only they knew the routes because they were the only ones with roots in given places. And by that, British imperial science profited immeasurably.

In the contemporary moment, this tension between local routes and roots on the one hand, and Western desires to extract Himalayan resources for something perceived as a greater global good on the other, continue to resonate. In my view, countless analogs to imperial economies of extraction persist in the colonial present through industries of ‘green’ development and foreign ‘expertise’ that dominant sectors of international development. Take, for example, the identification of seismically active and geologically precarious zones as sites for hydropower or transportation infrastructure; time and again, Himalayan peoples with deep local roots and possessing generational knowledge of key routes are all but left out of conversations, negotiations, and decisions as to where the next hydroelectric dam or international roadway is constructed (or more importantly, where it should not be built). With respect to a discipline like geography so deeply entangled with legacies of empire, colonialism, and extraction, Fleetwood's review of archival records does critical work for advancing broader projects of decolonizing and disrupting normative framings of the geographical sciences. And through such close historical readings, the book also helps to advance critiques of twenty-first-century development practices and enduring global legacies of Western science as expertise.

A politics of scale across time

Another central paradox of nineteenth-century scientific expeditions in the Himalayas was that access to such a vast mountain landscape was severely limited. But at the same time, that itself is what shaped and motivated the production of much European science at the time. Pointing to this contradiction and the European logics to elide such limits, in Chapter 6, Fleetwood writes that ‘imagining the vertical globe through the language of latitude was implicitly a form of imperialism, and allowed for the subsuming and appropriation of the Himalayan landscape, flora, fauna, and peoples into a framework that was explicable and therefore exploitable by European science and empire’ (208).

These limits and frameworks were posed and shaped not just by geographical or climatic constraints – as severe as the objective challenges of elevation and temperature surely are – but also by political complications. To agents of the East India Company, Tibet was off limits, Kashmir was complicated, Nepal was all but closed by a xenophobic king, and therefore the high reaches of India's western and eastern Himal became where the science was mostly made and done. As Fleetwood tells in the latter chapters of the book, historical contexts of the Anglo-Gurkha Was as well as the opening of Garhwal and policies of the Qing Empire in China contributed to complex geopolitical conditions that indeed resonate even today.

Nearly two hundred years later, many of the same places where Fleetwood's characters sought their specimens remain all but off-limits to outsiders. From the valleys of Kashmir to the lakes of Tibet to the forests of Assam and Bhutan, disputed borders and restricted territories remain in some cases a legacy of colonial intervention and in others a contemporary logic of state sovereignty. And therefore, in addition to being a richly historical record of science, Fleetwood's text is timely and highly relevant in twenty-first-century contexts as well. In my own understanding, it provides both a corrective and precursor to contemporary Eurasian geopolitics, especially as Himalayan landscapes and the ‘Roof of the World’ relates to territorial disputes and conflict between China, India, and Pakistan as well as the agency of smaller states like Nepal and Bhutan situated in between.

The term ‘Roof of the World’, and its place in the title of the book and geographical contexts alike, is one of my remaining questions. While ‘Roof of the World’ is colloquially, if problematically, often applied to the Tibetan Plateau in some cases and to the wider Himalaya region on others, Fleetwood points to its linguistic and etymological roots in the Tajik Pamirs. Given that in the Introduction itself, he acknowledges Bam-i-Dúniah as the Persian namesake for ‘Roof of the World’ (21), and goes on to explain how and why many of the contiguous great Asian mountain ranges are included in wider framings of the Trans-Himalaya, I nevertheless remain curious why the author did not choose the translation of a Sanskrit or Tibetan term for the great mountain landscape at the center of this story – be it himā-laya or otherwise.

With this consideration out of the way, I want to close by returning to the important contributions that Fleetwood makes with the book. Through rich historical telling, Science on the Roof of the World inverts imperial hierarchies, deflates colonial masculinities, grounds scientific theory, and relocates geopolitical legacies. Just as the vertical globe served to reorganize space in three dimensions, so too did altitude and scale become the metrics and registers by which the knowledge production of global science began to be done. While some might then say – ‘and the rest is history’ – the book compelling shows that it is anything but so simple. Instead, Fleetwood makes the indubitable and geographical point that all this could only have been done in one place – the diverse and complex landscapes of the Himalayas.