Dr Thomas Simpson

I am a historian of environmental and climate sciences. My research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental history, history of science, and imperial and colonial history. My earlier research focused particularly on British India and its mountainous and desert-bound frontiers, and I continue to have an interest in the borderlands of South, Central, and Southeast Asia.

I am currently co-writing Making Global Temperature with seven colleagues on the 'Making Climate History' project based at the University of Cambridge. The book considers the long history of concepts and measures of global temperature from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. I contribute chapters focusing on c.1830 to c.1940, covering topics including the development of thermometry in colonial India, the extension of temperature records through imperial networks, theories of temperature change in deep time, and the use of glaciers as climatic instruments.

Alongside this work, I have established interests in histories of mountainous and riverine spaces, the history of cartography and anthropology, the interaction of European imperial and non-Western knowledge systems, and the question of how history should be written and taught in the Anthropocene. All of these areas feed into an ongoing book project entitled Maps that made climate change, which explores how climate has been depicted and conceptualised in various cartographic traditions across the world.

Publications

Book

The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth CenturyLink opens in a new window (Cambridge University Press, 2021; paperback 2023)

Articles

'Planetary pictures: historicising environmental and climate sciences in the Anthropocene'Link opens in a new window, British Journal for the History of Science Themes, 8 (2024)

'Beyond Frontiers: “Curzonic” order, frontier expansion, and the 1907 Romanes lecture'Link opens in a new window, with Matthew Tillotson, Hannah Fitzpatrick, and Richard Schofield), Territory, Politics, Governance (2024)

'Find the river: Discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire'Link opens in a new window, Modern Asian Studies, 58, 1 (2024), pp. 127–62

'Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science'Link opens in a new window, with Harriet Mercer, WIREs Climate Change, 14, 6 (2023), e851

'Climate, cartography, and the life and death of the "natural region" in British geography'Link opens in a new window, with Mike Hulme, Journal of Historical Geography, 80 (2023), pp. 44–57

'Modern mountains from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene'Link opens in a new window, The Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2019), pp. 553–81

'"Clean out of the map": Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers'Link opens in a new window, History of Science, 55, 1 (2017), pp. 3–36

'Bordering and frontier-making in nineteenth-century British India'Link opens in a new window, The Historical Journal, 58, 2 (2015), pp. 513–42

Chapters

'Imperial slippages: Encountering and understanding ice in colonial India', in Ice Humanities: Living, thinking, and working in a melting worldLink opens in a new window, ed. Klaus Dodds and Sverker Sörlin (Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 205-27

'Cartography and empire from early modernity to postmodernity', in The Routledge Handbook of Science and EmpireLink opens in a new window, ed. Andrew Goss (Routledge: 2021), pp. 21-34

'Forgetting like a state in colonial north-east India', in Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British colonial ruleLink opens in a new window, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 223-47

'Historicizing humans in colonial India', in Historicizing humans: Deep time, evolution, and race in nineteenth-century British sciencesLink opens in a new window, ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), pp. 113-37

'A fragmented gaze: Depictions of frontier tribes and the beginnings of colonial anthropology', in Visual Histories of South AsiaLink opens in a new window, ed. Marcus Banks and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (Primus, 2018), pp. 73-92

Book reviews

'The Burning Earth: A Material History of the Last 500 Years, by Sunil Amrith', Times Literary Supplement, no. 6345 (November 8, 2024)

'Making margins visible'Link opens in a new window, Dialogues in Human Geography, 14, 1 (2024), pp. 152–4

'Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya, by Lachlan Fleetwood'Link opens in a new window, Isis, 114, 1 (2023), pp. 206-7

'The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, by Kyle S. Gardner'Link opens in a new window, Journal of Historical Geography 80 (2023), pp. 106-7

'Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledges, edited by Martin Mahony and Samuel Randalls'Link opens in a new window, Journal of Historical Geography, 72 (2021), pp. 90-91

'Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India, by Tobias Wolffhardt'Link opens in a new window, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 21, 2 (2020)

'Science Without Frontiers: Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870-1940, by Robert Fox'Link opens in a new window, English Historical Review, 133 (2018), pp. 996-8

'After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, by William Rankin'Link opens in a new window, Reviews in History (6 July 2017)

'New Histories of the Andaman Islands: Landscape, Place, and Identity in the Bay of BengalLink opens in a new window, 1790-2012, by Clare Anderson, et al', Journal of Historical Geography, 57 (2017), pp. 116-17

'Geography, Technology, and Instruments of Exploration, edited by Fraser MacDonald and Charles W. J. Withers'Link opens in a new window, British Journal for the History of Science, 49, 3 (2016), pp. 494-6