From 1440 to 1870, the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) produced the largest forced migration in history; more than 11 million enslaved Africans were transported from Africa to the Americas. Throughout its more than 400-year span, economic, political, agricultural, and natural forces modulated the TAST. Natural forces that affected the TAST included droughts, which affected agricultural productivity over Africa.

Historians have suggested that severe droughts increased the raiding of villages that led to the increase in the transport of enslaved Africans to the Americas. To date there has been no quantitatively based study that links El Niño and African droughts with increases in slave exports. With this in mind, the central hypothesis of this study is that El Niño, a phenomenon that affects global weather patterns, had a significant influence on the TAST. To test this hypothesis, a statistical analysis based on a historical El Niño dataset, which is used as a proxy for African droughts, is combined with the slave voyages data set. The analysis shows a statistically significant correlation at a four-year lag between El Niño and an increase in the number of enslaved Africans transported from West Africa to the Americas. A land-vegetation-atmosphere feedback mechanism is presented that provides a physically based linkage between El Niño, drought, and the TAST. The results are discussed in light of present day climate change and its effects on conflict and migrations in the Middle East.

By the 1970s, the world’s deepest mines were operating two miles below the surface. In South Africa, prospective miners were required to undergo an extensive acclimatization process in order to cope with the intense heat builds up in the ultra deep gold mines. To streamline and increase the efficiency of this process, companies developed a series of experimental chambers that could replicate extreme subterranean conditions above ground. Their design process addressed racial as well as material and physiological concerns, as industry scientists sought to establish a “standardized work rate” through the classification of Black miners’ bodies. In studies concerning the performance of “underweight” “heat adapted Bantu workers,” researchers revealed both distain for and intense interest in the exposed body, as well as the tribal and racial classification schemes deployed by mining companies.Moving between the human body, the climatic room, and larger centers of scientific research, this paper questions the way engineers reconfigured the mine as a laboratory. Examining building practices that seek to reproduce (rather than mitigate) extreme environments, I analyze the way the mine was both modeled as an object and extended as a vast technical apparatus. I argue that as engineers gave new form to the underground environment, they also facilitated a bizarre faith in the ability to manage the productivity of the mine through the conditioning of workers’ bodies rather than their training, tools, or knowledge of mineral deposits. 

In 1879, Samuel R. Elson, Marine Pilot on the Hooghly River, published a rhyming pamphlet entitled The Sailor’s East Indian Sky Interpreter and Weather Book. Contained in its clever couplets was the experienced navigator's expert advice for his "brother sailors" on how to detect and avoid the notorious seasonal cyclones that formed in the Bay of Bengal.In devising his rules, he drew not only from his own practical experience but also from scientific research by local meteorologists, with whom he personally interacted in the course of his duties at the port of Calcutta. Composed a few years after the India Meteorological Department's (IMD) establishment in 1875, Elson’s verses open a window into the collaborative exchange of expertise between professionalizing meteorologists and skillful seafarers. This paper examines their late 19th-century alliance based upon mutual interest in mitigating the devastation of cyclonic storms; and for meteorologists, in the potential of these influential partners to win them political support and funding. It then describes the gradual attenuation of that special relationship, as storm warnings and physical models improved enough to avert most catastrophes, and meteorologists' priorities shifted to other scientific problems. It finally links this process to broader transformations in common sense notions regarding weather risks and responsibility, using the case of the unlucky S. S. Okarna in 1923 to illustrate that the IMD had, willingly or not, assumed the burden of duty to prevent storm tragedies (involving European lives and property), thereby excluding sailors from authorship of official cyclone science.