The Double Commodification of Monsoon: Risk and Cyclone Science (South Asian Studies Council)

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 insurers, underwriters in Britain and local courts in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. 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 the courts as well as 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.