Dr Thomas Simpson

I am a historian of environmental and climate sciences. My research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental history, history of science, and imperial and colonial history. My earlier research focused particularly on British India and its mountainous and desert-bound frontiers, and I continue to have an interest in the borderlands of South, Central, and Southeast Asia.

I am currently co-writing Making Global Temperature with seven colleagues on the 'Making Climate History' project based at the University of Cambridge. The book considers the long history of concepts and measures of global temperature from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. I contribute chapters focusing on c. 1830 to c. 1940, covering topics including the development of thermometry in colonial India, the extension of temperature records through imperial networks, theories of temperature change in deep time, and the use of glaciers as climatic instruments.

Alongside this work, I have established interests in histories of mountainous and riverine spaces, the history of cartography and anthropology, the interaction of European imperial and non-Western knowledge systems, and the question of how history should be written and taught in the Anthropocene. All of these areas feed into an ongoing book project entitled Maps that made climate change, which explores how climate has been depicted and conceptualised in various cartographic traditions across the world.

I co-convene the 91福利 Map History Research Group and the . I am also an Associate Editor of .

Publications

Book

(Cambridge University Press, 2021; paperback 2023)

Articles

, British Journal for the History of Science Themes 8 (2024)

, with Matthew Tillotson, Hannah Fitzpatrick, and Richard Schofield), Territory, Politics, Governance 14, 1 (2026), pp. 150鈥�68

, Modern Asian Studies 58, 1 (2024), pp. 127鈥�62

, with Harriet Mercer, WIREs Climate Change 14, 6 (2023), e851

, with Mike Hulme, Journal of Historical Geography 80 (2023), pp. 44鈥�57

, The Historical Journal 62, 2 (2019), pp. 553鈥�81

, History of Science 55, 1 (2017), pp. 3鈥�36

, The Historical Journal 58, 2 (2015), pp. 513鈥�42

Chapters

'Imperial slippages: Encountering and understanding ice in colonial India', in , ed. Klaus Dodds and Sverker S枚rlin (Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 205-27

'Cartography and empire from early modernity to postmodernity', in , ed. Andrew Goss (Routledge: 2021), pp. 21-34

'Forgetting like a state in colonial north-east India', in , ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 223-47

'Historicizing humans in colonial India', in , ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), pp. 113-37

'A fragmented gaze: Depictions of frontier tribes and the beginnings of colonial anthropology', in , ed. Marcus Banks and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (Primus, 2018), pp. 73-92

Book reviews

'Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, by Ramachandra Guha', American Historical Review 130, 4 (2025), pp. 1728鈥�9

, Journal of Social History (online 2025)

, Times Literary Supplement, no. 6361 (February 28, 2025)

, Pacific Affairs 98, 3 (2025)

, Times Literary Supplement, no. 6345 (November 8, 2024)

, Dialogues in Human Geography 14, 1 (2024), pp. 152鈥�4

, Isis 114, 1 (2023), pp. 206-7

, Journal of Historical Geography 80 (2023), pp. 106-7

, Journal of Historical Geography 72 (2021), pp. 90-91

'Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India, by Tobias Wolffhardt'Link opens in a new window, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 21, 2 (2020)

, English Historical Review 133 (2018), pp. 996-8

, Reviews in History (6 July 2017)

, Journal of Historical Geography 57 (2017), pp. 116-17

, British Journal for the History of Science 49, 3 (2016), pp. 494-6