Abstract

Tropical cyclones posed unique challenges to the mobility and durability of British colonial capital in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. Although a veritable community of scientists studying these storms in the Bay of Bengal and the Mascarene Islands developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, knowledge about cyclone generation, movement, and internal makeup remained opaque. This article analyzes one response to these limitations: the growth of “agrometeorology” on the African island of Mauritius. Agrometeorology, a field of study that integrated knowledge produced on cyclones with that in sugar cultivation, the industry at the heart of the island’s economy, studied how cyclonic winds and rains constituted part of a broader ecology of sugar cultivation, rather than focusing exclusively on developing models of prediction.