Making climate pay: Calculating climatic hardship and reparations in the Royal Navy, 1900s–1940s

This article traces the history of Climate Pay – a payment system developed by the Royal Navy to compensate sailors, officers, and nurses for climatic hardship. From 1908 to the Second World War, the British Treasury approved expansions for Climate Pay on a piecemeal basis by relying on the expert testimonies of ship captains and surgeons linking tropical climates to discomfort, hardship, sickness, and reduced working capacity. Climate Pay was racialized and strictly hierarchical: white officers were compensated at the highest rates, while white non-commissioned sailors and naval nurses received lower rates. Non-white sailors were not compensated at all. During the Second World War, the Treasury curtailed Climate Pay by successfully challenging the prioritization given to climate-induced hardship over the general hardship of war suffered by British military personnel in even the most theoretically salubrious climates like that of the Mediterranean. In analyzing the history of Climate Pay, this article makes two interventions. The first expands how historians have understood the legacies of racialized tropical medicine beyond the nineteenth century and into the world of governmental finance by tracing how the Royal Navy systematized and recompensed theories of climatic hardship across oceans worldwide. The second analyzes the history of Climate Pay as an illuminating, historical point of reflection for reconsidering systems of reparation to global warming today.