Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan

This article argues for the importance of Europe's continental empires, Habsburg and Romanov, to the emergence of a physical-dynamical model of the global climate before World War I. It begins to identify a set of questions and methods that were distinctive of climatology as a continental-imperial science of "regionalization" with a global vision. The focus is on studies of mountain climatology by Heinrich von Ficker and A. I. Voeikov in the ecologically vulnerable regions of Tyrol and western Turkestan. This continental-imperial context deserves historians' attention because it suggests a new model for the globalization of knowledge: not simply a matter of scaling up, globalization must be understood as a process of seeing across scales, of recognizing causal connections between local, regional, and planetary phenomena. "For a change, the material for a dissertation was procured mostly with the feet." Heinz Ficker, of his research on the föhn wind in Tyrol, 1906 "Science is something beautiful, especially when you can do it on horseback." Ficker in his journal in 1913, in a mountain pass in central Asia.