Climate, Environment, and Crisis in Eighteenth Century India

The Seven Years’ War was a global conflict fought on an enormous scale. In India, in the first half of the eighteenth century, British and French trading companies involved in intense competition and supported by national armed forces were in undeclared conflict for decades before hostilities became subsumed into the wider confrontation between British, French, and allied forces. Environmental factors influencing the course of the conflict have rarely been studied, and this chapter uses a selection of diaries and British and French East India Company records to address this. These records are analyzed to assess claims by scholars whose work seeks to integrate climate history and political history, pointing to climate anomalies in this period as a driver of conflict and disruption. This study finds that while such anomalies played an important role, human agency, through individual and institutional action, was key in transforming weather phenomena into a humanitarian disaster.