Reading the Skies, Writing Mobility: On the Road with a Colonial Meteorologist

Enthusiasm for the connective power of aeroplanes and airships between the two world wars saw aerial mobility rise to prominence as a British imperial project, yet little attention has been paid to the practices, technologies and ‘moorings’ by which the atmosphere was rendered a medium of imperial mobility. One of the most significant parts of this infrastructure was the knowledge and predictive potential provided by meteorology. In order to make sense of how emerging practices of colonial meteorology and imperial aviation were changing conceptions of colonial space, this chapter explores one meteorologist’s own forms of mobility as journeys by car and aeroplane were undertaken to develop and inspect the infrastructural moorings of emergent imperial mobilities. Making use of the memoirs of Albert Walter, government statistician and meteorologist in British East Africa, along with colonial and metropolitan government archives, the chapter examines how mobilities were recounted through narrative forms which called forth older modes of imperial travel writing which Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has analysed as a window onto the ‘anti-conquest’ of scientific knowledge-making and colonial administration.