Dr Tom Simpson from the Department of History kicks of the 2025 CEH seminars. Dr Simpson will present "Habitable histories: Theories of life, race, and climate in the age of high imperialism"

Abstract

Although for astronomers around the turn of the twentieth century, habitation was becoming a multi-planetary topic, a wider array of geographers, explorers, and bureaucrats at this juncture pondered the limits of life in relation to peripheral spaces on Earth. This paper focuses on a region of climatic and topographic 'extremes' and of increasing intense rivalries between empires: Central Asia. I discuss how speculations about the possibilities and limits of human and nonhuman life were deeply enmeshed in concepts of racial difference, alibis for imperial rule, and conjectures of glorious pasts, degraded presents, and uncertain futures. The paper considers which—and whose—knowledge counted in these debates, and points to how notions of habitability in the era high empire continue to haunt imaginaries of life in the Anthropocene.