WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

In 2000, Mike Davis published the now classic work, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. The book’s main argument, that colonial policies exacerbated the effects of global climate patterns and led to the excess death of millions of people in late nineteenth century famines, stirred debate and ultimately led to the reassessment of colonialism’s lasting impact on the Global South. Ruth Mostern, Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh ), Nadin Heé, Daniel Hedinger (Leipzig University), and Shellen Wu (Lehigh University) will conduct a roundtable panel on the use of AI to read nineteenth century large-scale weather data and archival materials at scale to reexamine the famines that arose from the 1877 El Niño. We would like to revisit Mike Davis’ arguments in Victorian Holocaust with empirical evidence that new technological developments now make possible. Focusing on a crucial period in the late nineteenth century - for the rise of meteorological sciences, instrumentation, and global networks for the collection of data, we will share strategies, methodologies, and tools for using AI and other digital tools for large scale historical research. This panel brings together a range of fields that are rarely articulated at once: world history and the history of empire, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and digital methods for history.

This panel uses a transimperial (Hedinger and Née) framework to analyze the relationship between the British and Qing empires across distinct frontiers over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bilateral framing of the topic may seem to obviate the analytical purchase of “transimperial,” which draws attention to networks of multiple imperial formations and actors who operated at the interstices of empire. In fact, the papers illustrate that this relationship was never purely bilateral. Rather, it was conditioned by a diverse range of Qing, British, and other subjects acting on a complex range of localized interests that never neatly aligned with metropolitan concerns. Moreover, interactions with other imperial rivals, like Japan and Germany, and local polities shaped the Anglo-Qing relationship in different ways across these various “contact zones” (Pratt). Exploring this relationship across trans-Himalayan, littoral, and inland Chinese frontiers using disparate, multilingual archives underscores the fragmentary nature of this bilateral relationship. However, it also provides opportunities to observe how the inter-regional circulation of personnel and information shaped imperial agents’ negotiation of challenges that were simultaneously local and embedded in broader dynamics. Our papers pay particular attention to the development of strategies to, in turns, limit, harness, and stimulate commercial activity and assert jurisdictional claims over subjects. Rather than abandoning the bilateral framing of Anglo-Qing relations, we use a transimperial and multi-frontier framework to develop an understanding of this relationship rooted in these localities as opposed to London, Beijing, or the better-studied treaty ports.