Winds of Empire: Knowing Imperial Climates in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf South of the United States

Atmospheric knowledge, especially of winds, was central to nineteenth-century understandings of health and place. In the Gulf South of the United States, the drive to eradicate expressions of non-white autonomy in the region and repopulate it with white citizens framed the colonial impulse to make sense of these phenomena. This article seeks to recover the layers of embodied experience and medical knowledge of the winds that swept across the region. In doing so, it explores how theories of wind both underwrote and complicated visions of US sovereignty. Efforts to make sense of a climate that cultivated both health and disease was part of a larger project of establishing white hegemony on the southern frontier. Winds implicated residents in intensely local experiences of climate that were at the same time tethered to broader patterns of race and place, trade and nation-building, environment and empire.