Disasters and history : the vulnerability and resilience of past societies

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. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 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 "This monograph provides an overview of research into disasters from a historical perspective, making two new contributions. First, it introduces the field of 'disaster studies' to history, showing how we can use history to better understand how societies deal with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. Despite growing recognition of the importance of historical depth by scholars investigating disasters, the temporal dimensions of disasters have been underexploited up to now. Moreover, the historical record sometimes enables us to make a long-term reconstruction of the social, economic and cultural effects of hazards and shocks simply not possible in contemporary disaster studies material. We can therefore use 'the past' as a laboratory to test hypotheses of relevance to the present in a careful way. History lends itself towards this end because of the opportunity it offers to identify distinct and divergent social and environmental patterns and trajectories. We can compare the drivers and constraints of societal responses to shocks spatially and chronologically, and therefore enrich our understanding of responses to stress today"-- Provided by publisher Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive overview of research into hazards and disasters from a historical perspective. It uses history to understand the ways that societies deal with nature-induced hazards and their disastrous outcomes and will also be valuable to practitioners of contemporary disaster studies and related fields. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core