Empire of Ice: Science, Nature, and the Commerce of Cold

This project investigates imperial articulations of cold as a basic condition of the natural world. Taking the British Empire at its global maximum, “Empire of Ice” explores cold as a subject of scientific inquiry, a lived experience, and a non-human agent active in the shaping of human history. In it, Woods will focus on arctic exploration, artificial refrigeration, and the commoditization of ice and cold, asking how chemists’, merchants’, and entrepreneurs’ deep vein of interest in low temperatures and their effects in the nineteenth century transformed science and engineering projects, helped to drive Arctic exploration, and radically extended the limits of what was possible in terms of perishable food transportation and storage. To tell the story of cold’s transformation from natural fact to artificial technology, “Empire of Ice” begins with the emergence of a prehistoric mammoth from the Siberian permafrost at the close of the eighteenth century. The bones of this animal played a role in formulating theories of evolution at the turn of the nineteenth century, and later it came to serve a rhetorical purpose as novel articles of food, namely frozen meat, were introduced to British consumers in the nineteenth century. Wary of ingesting meat that had been dead for several months or more, boosters drew upon the Siberian mammoth, frozen for thousands of years before being safely ingested by Inuit dogs, to assuage the misgivings of skeptical diners. The mammoth thus serves to unify the guiding themes of “Empire of Ice:” It speaks to humankind’s quest for control over the natural world; to the importance of literal and figurative networks of imperial exchange; and to the technoscientific production of artificial cold in the mid to late nineteenth century; as well as to more general concerns of the project such as commerce, exploration, and the production of scientific knowledge.