Contrary to current claims, it is not to be expected that a new form of historiography can be achieved solely through pure ‘scaling-up’ and longue-durée perspectives. Larger units and longer, even geological time periods can be easily integrated if the object of investigation ‘calls for it’, for example through the half-life of uranium, the formation periods of fossil resources or the reflection of the sixth mass extinction in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. However, contamination and relations cannot be discovered simply by enlarging the horizon of investigation. We are reminded of Bruno Latour's beautiful illustration of the problem: ‘Larger does not mean more comprehensive, but more connections. One is never more provincial than when one insists on one's ‘global view’ [...].’ The paper draws on anthropological and micro-historical approaches and proposes a historiography that uses relations and contaminations as modes of analyzing planetary history.

This paper uses the climate in Zimbabwe, particularly the erratic droughts, as a library whose information played an essential role in the colonial government’s formation and transformation of knowledge about the environment and efforts to alter it for the betterment of humanity. I trace the colonial government’s efforts from the 1890s to1930s to understand the climate as a result of the ecological realities on the ground that limited especially the farming enterprise. This resulted in the formation of meteorological and hydrographical knowledge and categorising the country into rainfall zones. Yet recurring droughts kept frustrating the colonial project. In the post-Second World War period, the worst drought ever experienced by the settlers occurred in 1947, and in the late 1950s scientists projected a looming desert in the lowveld areas of the country. The desert was thought to be caused by a combination of recurrent droughts and farming methods. This contributed to intensified research in climate modification as a solution to recurrent droughts. From the 1950s to the 1980s,the colonial government invested in the formation and transformation of climate knowledge and weather modification as a solution. The paper, therefore, examines the ways in which nature, especially through recurring droughts, contributed to the formation and transformation of climate knowledge and ideas and practices of weather modification from the 1950s. It further explores the various human perspectives of what it would look like to alter the climate and model it on human requirements, especially of rain.

This paper probes at the planet and the globe’s role in history. I begin by highlighting that it is essential to interrogate these categories along two registers: as historical objects and frames of analysis. The first mode is familiar to intellectual and cultural historians -we analyze how contextual factors produce certain philosophies and visions of the world. I model this approach by surveying how the globe and planet have broadly been conceived, and reviewing the early Soviet and American models that informed Paul Crutzen’s articulation of the Anthropocene. This analysis reveals that several central theories of global environmental change were produced within a context of colonial and extractive activity. This is where the second register of analysis comes into play –how do historical ideas of the planetary or global inform contemporary environmental politics and philosophies? The second half of my talk questions whether older theories of environmental change should be dismissed or if it is possible to repurpose features of such planetary theories and turn them back against the very extractive and colonial practices from which they were borne. This paper concludes with two key takeaways for historians in an age of planetary environmental change. Firstly, I propose that history is a discipline distinctively positioned since it can illuminate how material actions, philosophical systems, and different geopolitical networks have led to the environmental crisis. Secondly, I argue that historians need to review current categories of study and consider how new analytical frameworks can be developed that better address the Anthropocene.

Scaling out from human history to a planetary view inevitably raises the question of the entanglements of human life with the ecosphere, requiring us to widen our spatial and temporal boundaries of history and connect human history to other histories and presences that can no longer be conceived of independently, such as long-term Earth-system processes, microbes, wind currents, and other animals. Such recognition of nonhuman agencies raises the question, what kind of knowledge and data historians need to incorporate into their histories. The natural sciences, which predominantly have shaped our knowledge of the nonhuman in recent centuries, take also center stage for assessing planetary histories, as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s wrestling with the relation of history to the sciences in his 2021 book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and the responses to it highlight. On one hand, the question is how to work with nature-scientific knowledge in writing social and cultural history. On the other, the natural sciences and their knowledge regime remain hegemonic in shaping debates on responding to the new environmental situation, and not just public ones. Yet scholars and activists rightfully criticize these knowledge systems as narrow, technocratic, neocolonial, and exclusionary, and that planetary views need to recognize, for example, the impact of colonialism and capitalism on the Earth system or the continuing global inequities in access to resources and in climate vulnerability. Our presentation will explore these tensions and look for ways of renegotiating the relation between historical and natural scientific forms of writing history.