5.30 pm (BST) / 6.30 pm (MECS)
Debjani Bhattacharyya (University of Zürich)
This lecture brings together the intertwined histories of maritime insurance and of 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, and was also important in 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 lecture shows, as weather disturbance became the object of revenue generation; indeed, the uncertainty attached to it was precisely what drove its commodification. Focusing on this process of double commodification, the lecture 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 lecture makes a case for historicizing what is too often seen as a contemporary phenomenon: the financialization of the climate crisis.
Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and leads the ERC project ‘Fair-Weather Finance: Historical Antecedents to Climate Risk Management’.
This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to attend this event, please register via Eventbrite to take part in person or online.