The paper brings together the intertwined histories of maritime insurance, and the 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 as well as arbitrating legal questions around liability for Llyods of London and local courts in colonial Bengal. The question of commodification drove both these issues, as the paper shows, for climate and weather disturbance became the object of revenue generation even as the uncertainty attached to it was precisely what drove its commodification. Focusing on the process of double commodification, the paper reveals how the non-corporeal entity of the monsoon was enclosed as a commodity and its risk further priced and thus offloaded through other financial instruments. Ultimately the paper makes a case for historicizing what is too often seen as the more contemporary phenomenon of the financialization of the climate crisis.

Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zurich, where she directs the Digital History Lab. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is a non-resident fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania since 2019. Currently she is writing a long history of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge and a derivatives market in climate futures in the Indian Ocean Region.

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.