Climate, environment, and the colonial experience

British intellectual engagement with the environments of empire involved understanding the colonies as spaces of climatic concern, unfettered opportunity, moral danger, dangerous disease, natural plenitude, and environmental experimentation. South Asia, South Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand each became giant open-air colonial laboratories, natural archives even, for scientists attempting to understand, investigate, and govern a world of new peoples, species, environments and diseases. On the one hand, encountering and documenting the facts of environmental change, indigenous knowledge systems and practices of natural resource use laid the groundwork for much that is modern in environmental thinking, especially in the tropics.