Historical Geographies of the Future: Airships and the Making of Imperial Atmospheres

Abstract

This article explores the elemental encounters and imaginative geographies of empire to develop a new means of engaging with the historical geographies of the future. Futures have recently become an important topic of historical and cultural inquiry, and historical geographers have an important role to play in understanding the place of the future in the past and in interrogating the role of posited futures in shaping action in historical presents. Drawing on literature from science and technology studies, a framework is developed for engaging with the material and imaginative geographies that coalesce around practices of imagination, expectation, and prediction. This framework is then used to reconstruct efforts to develop airship travel in the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. At a moment of imperial anxiety, airships were hoped to tie the empire together by conveying bodies, capital, and military capacity between its furthest points. Confident projections of the colonization of global airspace were nonetheless undermined by material encounters with a vibrant, often unpredictable atmospheric environment. The article aims to spur renewed work on the historical geographies of the future, while also contributing to debates on the cultural and political geographies of the atmosphere and of atmospheric knowledge making. Key Words: atmosphere, empire, future, mobility, technology.

本文探讨帝国的原始境遇和想像地理，以发展涉入未来的历史地理学的崭新工具。未来在近日已成为历史和文化探问的重要议题，而历史地理学者在理解未来在过去中的位置，以及探问推断的未来在形塑历史上的当下的行动上，扮演重要角色。本文运用科学与技术研究的文献，建立涉入连结想像、期望与预测行为的物质与想像地理之架构。该架构随之用来重构1920至1930年代在大英帝国致力发展飞船的尝试。在帝国焦虑的时刻，飞船被寄望通过在帝国最远的端点之间运载身体、资本和军事能力来联系帝国。全球领空殖民的大胆预测，却仍因活跃且经常无法预测的大气环境之物质境遇而受阻。本文旨在刺激对未来的历史地理进行重新研究，同时对于大气与大气知识建构的文化与政治地理学之辩论做出贡献。关键词：大气，帝国，未来，移动，技术。

Este artículo explora los encuentros elementales y las geografías imaginativas del imperio para desarrollar un nuevo medio de involucrarse con las geografías históricas del futuro. Recientemente, los futuros se han convertido en tópico importante de la indagación histórica y cultural, y los geógrafos históricos tienen un papel importante que jugar para entender el lugar del futuro en el pasado, y para interrogar el papel de los futuros propuestos en configurar la acción en los presentes históricos. Con base en literatura de estudios de ciencia y tecnología, se desarrolla un marco para enfrentar las geografías materiales e imaginativas que coalescen alrededor de las prácticas de la imaginación, la expectativa y la predicción. Este marco se usa luego para reconstruir los esfuerzos por desarrollar el viaje en dirigibles en el Imperio Británico en los años 1920s y 1930s. En un momento de ansiedad imperial, se tuvo la esperanza de que los dirigibles pudieran mantener la unidad imperial transportando cuerpos, capital y capacidad militar entre sus puntos más apartados. No obstante, las proyecciones confiadas de la colonización del espacio aéreo global fueron afectadas por los encuentros materiales con un entorno atmosférico vibrante y a menudo impredecible. El artículo busca estimular el trabajo renovado sobre las geografías históricas del futuro, contribuyendo además a los debates sobre las geografías culturales y políticas de la atmósfera, y la construcción de conocimiento atmosférico.

Palabras clave:

• atmósfera
• futuro
• imperio
• movilidad
• tecnología.

Acknowledgments

The ideas in this article developed in dialogue with numerous people, particularly Stephen Legg, Helen Pallett, Georgina Endfield, Mike Heffernan and Jake Hodder. I’d also like to thank conference and seminar audiences for their feedback and suggestions at the RGS-IBG, the London Group of Historical Geographers, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Anticipation-2017, the University of Nottingham and the Science and Democracy Network. Finally, I thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions for improvement.

Notes

1 Flying Hotel, Daily Mail, 15 October 1929.

2 Samuel Hoare, Memorandum on meeting with Alan Anderson, AIR 5/996, National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA).

3 State Airship Policy—Particulars of the R101, The Times, 31 March 1928.

4 Anonymous memo to Secretary of State for Air, AIR 5/1059, NA.

5 Selection of airship bases: Preliminary report on Mauritius, p. 1. National Meteorological Library and Archive, Exeter.

6 See the discussion in in AIR 5/1060, NA.

7 The state airship, The Times, 27 July 1928.

8 State airship, The Times, 24 August 1928.

9 Great care with R-101, Daily Telegraph, 11 October 1929.

10 The State Airship, The Times, 27 July 1928.

11 Factors of safety for airships, AIR 5/1018, NA.

12 State airship, The Times, 24 August 1928.

13 Great liner of the air, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18 November 1926.

14 Report of the R-101 Inquiry, 95–96. HMSO, 1931.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Mahony

MARTIN MAHONY is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK, and a member of the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include climate change politics and the histories and geographies of atmospheric science and technology.