Neighbors Lecture Series vol. 5: Debjani Bhattacharyya / TPOD, THEMA, HITAM

The paper brings together the intertwined histories of maritime insurance, and the technical as well as vernacular representations of maritime storms in the late eighteenth century Indian Ocean. The technical representation of storms became an urgent issue of prediction as well as arbitrating legal questions around liability for insurers, underwriters in Britain and local courts in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The question of commodification drove both these issues, as the paper shows, for climate and weather disturbance became the object of revenue generation even as the uncertainty attached to it was precisely what drove its commodification. Focusing on the process of double commodification, the paper reveals how the non-corporeal entity of the monsoon was enclosed as a commodity and its risk further priced and thus offloaded through the courts as well as other financial instruments. Ultimately the paper makes a case for historicizing what is too often seen as the more contemporary phenomenon of the financialization of the climate crisis.

Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersection of legal and environmental history. Her research is driven by the desire to understand how legal and economic structures order our conceptualization of environmental transformations and shape how we respond to climate crises. Her book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History.