Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but also within the same societies according to social groups, ethnicity and gender. They also demonstrate how studying past disasters, including earthquakes, droughts, floods and epidemics, can provide a lens through which to understand the social, economic and political functioning of past societies and reveal features of a society which may otherwise remain hidden from view.
Author(s): Bas van Bavel, Daniel R. Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Matthew Hannaford, Maïka de Keyzer, Eline van Onacker, Tim Soens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF 6x9 Format
Pages: 244
City: Cambridge
Tags: Environmental History; History; Global History; Emergency Management: Research; Hazard Mitigation: Research; Natural Disasters: Research
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
1 Introduction: Disasters and History
1.1 The Key Themes of the Book
1.2 Disaster Studies and Disaster History: Connected Fields?
1.3 Interpretative Frameworks in Historical Research
2 Classifications and Concepts
2.1 A Taxonomy of Disasters
2.2 Scale and Scope of Disasters
2.3 Concepts
2.3.1 Disaster and Hazard
2.3.2 The Disaster Management Cycle
2.3.3 Vulnerability
2.3.4 Resilience
2.3.5 Adaptation, Transformation, and Transition
2.3.6 Risk
3 History as a Laboratory: Materials and Methods
3.1 Historical Sources
3.1.1 Types of Historical Sources
3.1.2 Combining Historical Data with Sources from the Natural Sciences
3.1.3 History and the Digital Age: Opportunities and Pitfalls for Historical Disaster Research
3.2 Methodologies
3.2.1 Hazard and Disaster Reconstruction from Historical Sources
3.2.2 Vulnerability Assessment
3.2.3 Comparative Methodologies
4 Disaster Preconditions and Pressures
4.1 Environmental and Climatic Pressures
4.2 Technological, Infrastructural, and Economic Preconditions
4.2.1 Technological and Infrastructural Preconditions and Pressures
4.2.2 Economic Pressures and Crises
4.3 Coordination Systems and Institutional Preconditions
4.3.1 Coordination Systems: The Family, the Market, and the State
4.3.2 Institutions for Collective Action and the Commons
4.4 Social Pressures: Poverty, Inequality, and Social Distress
4.5 Cultural Preconditions
5 Disaster Responses
5.1 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Responses
5.2 Experience, Memory, Knowledge, and Experts
5.2.1 Memory and Learning from Experience
5.2.2 The ‘Rule of Experts’
5.3 Constraints on Disaster Responses
5.3.1 Inequalities in Power and Property
5.3.2 Institutional Rigidity and Path Dependency
6 Effects of Disasters
6.1 Short-Term Effects
6.1.1 Victims, Selective Mortality, and Population Recovery
6.1.2 Land Loss and Capital Destruction
6.1.3 Economic Crisis
6.1.4 Scapegoating, Blame, and Social Unrest
6.2 Societal Collapse
6.3 Long-Term Effects
6.3.1 Disasters as a Force for Good? Economic Effects
6.3.2 Long-Term Demographic Changes
6.3.3 Reconstruction, Reform, and Societal Change
6.3.4 Economic Redistribution
7 Past and Present
7.1 Disaster History and/in the Anthropocene
7.1.1 Climate Change
7.1.2 Capitalism
7.1.3 The Risk Society
7.2 The Potential of History for Better Understanding Disasters
7.2.1 The Historical Roots of Present-Day Disasters
7.2.2 The Past as an Empirical Laboratory: Institutions and Social Context
7.2.3 The Great Escape: Can History Teach Us How to Escape from Disaster?
7.3 The Potential of Disasters for Historical Research
7.3.1 Disasters as Historical Protagonists
7.3.2 Disasters as Tests at the Extreme Margin
7.4 Future Pathways
7.5 A Final Word on Disaster Victims
References
Index
