The survey sciences in thin air

This is not primarily a book of historical geography, at least in the sense of the literatures the author, Lachlan Fleetwood, positions it within. Rather, the book sits in Cambridge University Press's Science in History series and the majority of its principal secondary source materials are pulled from the broad field of the history of science. That said, this is a book with questions of geography at its heart, not just in terms of its focus on a particular region and environment but in terms of the arguments the book pursues. In this commentary I want to draw out the two main contributions Fleetwood's book makes to debates about the historical geographies of science, that is (1) the significance of mountain environments for the development and conduct of scientific inquiry in the 19th century, and (2) the place of mountain science in the establishment of conceptualisations of global environments.

In Science on the Roof of the World, Fleetwood traces the development of various scientific disciplines in the early 19th century – physical geography, geology, botany and biogeography, medical topography – and considers their prosecution in the context of the Himalayan mountain range. This was new territory for European natural historians. Work had been conducted in the Alps and in the Andes mountains of South America, most famously by the scientific polymath, Alexander von Humboldt. Despite the attention Humboldt brought to the Andes, mountains occupied a marginal position in western science, politically, culturally, and environmentally. European science was forged in the lowlands, Fleetwood argues, while the highlands languished. When it came to addressing this lacunae, ‘European travellers in the Himalaya took existing horizontal divisions – tropical, temperate and arctic (or polar, Alpine) – and, as had been done for the Andes, mapped them onto the vertical’ (207). Why tropical, temperate, or arctic environments could be classified as primarily horizontal is not dwelled upon or really teased out, although it was certainly the case that the Himalaya's elevation presented a set of challenges previously not encountered before, even while some European travellers denied the full extent of its elevation. One of the principal means by which the heights of the Himalayas were reconciled and incorporated into European science was initially achieved by ‘borrowing from the language of latitude’ (208). Measuring altitude was difficult, unnecessary, and undesirable before the mid-18th century but by the early 19th century accurate measurements of altitude were becoming critical variables in many sciences, including plant geography, geology, and human physiology.

Verticality gradually emerged as a framework for organising scientific understandings of nature and was a crucial metric for European travellers charged with making sense of the high mountains. Fleetwood traces the crucial role of instruments in the establishment of accurate measures of altitude in the Himalaya and in helping to establish the very idea of a vertical globe. But the deployment of instruments developed in more temperate environments often meant their ability to function was compromised and their trustworthiness was brought into question. As Fleetwood notes, instrumental practice was made unstable in the high mountains, just at the moment when users hoped to impose meaning and certainty. Human bodies and plants also proved to be effective barometers and useful in estimating height. Although the experience of altitude sickness was contested and suppressed by some travellers, the phenomenon helped to constitute medical topographies of high mountains as aberrant environments. The challenge of incorporating the verticality of the Himalayas into European scientific consciousness was most obviously exposed when it came to representing their sheer scale in diagrams. Available techniques of drawing and visual representation were pushed to their limits.

Fleetwood expertly shows how the production of what he calls a ‘global consciousness of verticality’ (240) was tethered to imperial expansion in the region, both conceptually and materially. In line with other scholarship on the relationship between science and empire, Fleetwood demonstrates the imperial utility of representing the high mountains. Although the Himalayan foothills and the Indian hill stations were central to colonial governance in India, occupation of the high mountains was another matter entirely. How could the high mountains be colonised in any meaningful way? Fleetwood shows us that altitudinal thresholds and environmental limits posed questions not just of plant communities and European bodies but also of imperial desires and were a source of considerable imperial insecurity. The Himalayas acted as both a scientific and a geopolitical frontier, where travellers found themselves limited by both.

The challenges of accessing and working within the high mountains highlighted European limitations and forced travellers to rely on a medley of brokers, guides, porters, and translators. European scientists relied on local people to show them pre-existing routes; transport instruments and supplies; share the risks of mountain travel; and sometimes even conduct the expedition on Europeans’ behalf. Studying the Himalayas ‘involved locating, identifying and moving literally tons of material – dried and live plants, stuffed and pickled animals, rock and fossils, fieldbooks and journals – both into and out of the mountains’ (251). Finding interesting sites where objects like plants and fossils could be collected depended upon local knowledge. Survival demanded knowledge of more mundane but equally important materials, notably fire wood for fuel. Studies of changing environmental conditions, such as long-term shifts in the snow line over generations also required information from people with long histories in the region, although many brokers and intermediaries working with European travellers in the Himalaya were often recruited from the lowlands. Fleetwood's study provides an exemplary interrogation of relations between European traveller-scientists and South Asians, where his emphasis is on the decentring of scientific practice and on the everyday relations between different members of expeditions.

While Fleetwood spends a lot of time attending to the conduct of the survey sciences in the Himalayas, he also considers the connections that were constantly made to other mountain ranges. In fact, one of the main aims of the book is to show us exactly how scientific travellers drew the Himalayas into a global framework of mountain environments in the first half of the 19th century. The study of the region was, Fleetwood argues, a critical component in the making of the vertical globe. The incorporation of scientific surveys of the Himalaya into existing studies of other mountain ranges facilitated the creation of a ‘global consciousness of verticality’ (209). Fleetwood traces the history of the idea that mountain environments were commensurable and comparable and that they needed to be understood and mapped in three dimensions. Verticality became an important framework for the organisation and understanding of nature on a global scale. Comparisons to the Alps and the Andes were most common. Mont Blanc and Mount Chimborazo in particular functioned as comparative units of measurement and helped to translate the Himalayas to audiences in Europe. Gradually the Himalayas were incorporated into visual tableaus of the world's most notable mountains (to Europeans at least): the Alps, the Andes, and the mountains of Lapland and Tenerife. Everest was finally established as the definitive roof of the world in 1856 but that outcome was only possible after decades of surveying work, concerted acts of imperial projection and the associative promotion of a vertical consciousness that promoted height above sea level as the most significant attribute of mountain spaces. Despite alternative South-Asian mountain cosmologies that emphasised the sacred centrality of mythical sites like Mount Meru and the religious significance of mountains in the Kailash Range as pilgrimage sites, European survey sciences emphasised physical height as the crucial characteristic of a mountain's regional and global identity. The comparative tableaus of mountains on the basis of height above sea level, which became popular in 19th-century European atlases, erased other meanings inscribed onto mountain slopes and ignored some mountains entirely, but similarly performed acts of imagination. The idea of a commensurable globe, so crucial for the justification of imperial governance, was one such act. One of the important contributions Fleetwood makes in his book is to show us how the globe was used not only as a method and means of understanding the universal but also as a powerful tool of empire.

It is perhaps inevitable that a book which examines the prosecution of the survey sciences in a mountain setting in the early 19th century spends a considerable amount of time considering the work and legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. Fleetwood deliberately and appropriately pays attention to Humboldt, given the significant role he played in the history of measurement of mountains, particularly his sea-to-summit profile of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes, and his promotion of data visualisations of mountain spaces. In doing do, Fleetwood follows other scholarship in the history of science to point out Humboldt's role in promoting a vertical consciousness in the early 19th century. In similar manner to the European surveyors working in the Himalayas, for Humboldt the mountains were comparable settings useful for building global knowledge. At the same time, however, Fleetwood resists the temptation to focus heavily or exclusively on Humboldt himself as a ‘great man’ of science. He also, rightly, resists the temptation to read the actions of European surveyors in the Himalayas as iterations of Susan Faye Canon's ‘Humboldtian science’. Rather, he traces the way travellers read and positioned themselves in relation to Humboldt (37). Humboldt's work was certainly an important orientation point and inspiration for many travellers and mattered if only because naturalists and surveyors agreed that it did (246). Equally, Fleetwood traces the challenges that Humboldt's own global status imposed on the development of Himalayan knowledge. He shows for instance that Humboldt's theories about elevation, latitude, and the line of perpetual snow, developed on Mount Chimborazo, failed to translate to the Himalayas and delayed recognition of problems with theories and scales when it came to explaining physical processes on Asia's high mountains.

This is an excellent history of the Himalayas and how European survey-scientists came to understand it as part of a global environment. By extension it makes a significant contribution to the production of the history of the globe as a concept in science. Along the way we learn a great deal about the trials and the laboriousness of operating in the high mountains and the essential roles of brokers and intermediaries in the production of science in these displaced, disconnected, and unevenly resourced locations. There remains more work to be done to understand and interrogate the survey sciences as they were advanced in the 19th century and to map common practices across environmental terrains. There are interesting similarities to be mapped between the challenges of operating in the high mountains and those confronting surveyors working at sea, in the Arctic or the tropics, especially with regard to the networked and co-produced nature of western science. Although by no means the first to do so, Fleetwood's focus on the science of physical geographies remains under-explored in the historiography. Developing transnational historical geographies of mountains, or river catchments, or mangroves, for instance, can if nothing else help us to avoid national political boundaries from skewing our analyses, or at least to see more clearly the effects of those boundaries on our scholarship. Finally, Science on the Roof of the World shows us that decentring western science in our histories of science is a challenging task but that one way of progressing that is to start our historical geographies away from imperial centres and indeed from centres in the periphery.