Historical Disasters in Context

Science, Religion, and Politics

Andrea JANKU, Gerrit Schenk, Franz Mauelshagen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415885096
• eBook ISBN: 9781136476259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Growing concerns about climate change and the increasing occurrence of ever more devastating natural disasters in some parts of the world and their consequences for human life, not only in the immediately affected regions, but for all of us, have increased our desire to learn more about disaster experiences in the past. How did disaster experiences impact on the development of modern sciences in the early modern era? Why did religion continue to play such an important role in the encounter with disasters, despite the strong trend towards secularization in the modern world? What was the political role of disasters?

Historical Disasters in Context illustrates how past societies coped with a threatening environment, how societies changed in response to disaster experiences, and how disaster experiences were processed and communicated, both locally and globally. Particular emphasis is put on the realms of science, religion, and politics. International case studies demonstrate that while there are huge differences across cultures in the way people and societies responded to disasters, there are also many commonalities and interactions between different cultures that have the potential to alter the ways people prepare for and react to disasters in future. To explain these relationships and highlight their significance is the purpose of this volume.

1 Introduction

Andrea Janku, Gerrit J. Schenk and Franz Mauelshagen

Four days after a deadly earthquake in Sichuan killed nearly 70,000 people, injured hundreds of thousands, and made millions homeless the English edition of the People’s Daily Online published an opinion piece entitled “Much distress regenerates a nation,” praising the spirit of the Chinese people who were united in their struggle against the hardship the nation had to suffer in that extraordinary year 2008.¹ This was not the first and was not to be the last disaster to hit China in the year of the Beijing Olympics. It had started with extreme cold and snowstorms that severely disrupted the traffic nationwide during the peak travel season around the Chinese New Year festival. More news of disasters—natural, and also political and technological—was to follow, and when the earthquake struck on May 12 people started to make prognostications based on the five Olympic mascots renamed ‘fuwas of doom’—a contradiction in terms. Based on their names and appearances, they were respectively associated with the protests that accompanied the journey of the Olympic torch, a disastrous train crash in Shandong, the violent clashes in Tibet, and the earthquake in Sichuan. The final one that came in the shape of a Yangzi sturgeon was then seen as predicting a flood and, unsurprisingly, heavy rainstorms lasting from late May through the month of June caused disastrous flooding in large parts of the country, particularly in the southern provinces. While it does not take much to predict a flood somewhere in China in any given year, what is interesting about this is the ease with which such events lend themselves to all kinds of interpretations, in particular political interpretations, and the unease they cause, visible in official attempts to censor this kind of popular doomsaying.² The significance of any such event for human societies is largely the result of its historical context, the kind of religious, scientific, and political interpretations it evokes, and the ways these are communicated both through time and space.

Historical disasters pale in comparison to more recent catastrophic events. Moreover, we will have to get used to seeing disastrous flooding not only in China and Bangladesh, but also in the US and Australia, devastating earthquakes not only in Haiti and Kashmir, but also in New Zealand, and truly catastrophic tsunamis not only in Southeast Asia but also in Japan. We are increasingly aware of our own responsibility for most of these ‘natural’ disasters, be it anthropogenic global warming, or the building of nuclear power stations in risky environments, such as the one that turned the Japanese tsunami into a major nuclear catastrophe, the outcome of which is still far from clear at the time of this writing. While these only too real events make it sound cynical to speak of disasters as purely ‘socially constructed,’ they have never been entirely ‘natural’ either.³ Moreover, in the decades to come the need to satisfy the material requirements of the earth’s still massively growing human population will enormously increase the number of serious clashes between human civilization and the physical environment it helped to create.

It is then no wonder that references to the increasing frequency of disasters have become common place in recent years,⁴ and there is indeed a constant flow of news about earthquakes, floods, landslides, droughts, and hurricanes, which are becoming ever more disastrous. Only three months into the year 2011, the Guardian reviewed the earthquake in Japan, the landslide in Brazil, the flood in Australia, the earthquake in New Zealand, the floods in Sri Lanka, the earthquake in Burma, more floods in the Philippines, and severe storms, lightning, and floods in South Africa. It asked: “Natural disasters? What we can learn from this year’s catastrophes.”⁵ This flow of news is accompanied not only by a flood of popular books capitalizing on the spectacular aspects of major catastrophes, but also by academic studies of disasters, mostly written by social scientists, geographers, and anthropologists who focus on recent and contemporary events and are mostly concerned with prevention and mitigation of future disasters.⁶ While these studies are very important and crucial for policy formulation, they do not necessarily help us to understand the role of disasters in the broader context of individual and collective life experiences and knowledge production. We believe that disasters have to be understood as major forces shaping historical processes and therefore need to be studied not as isolated events but in their historical context.

Despite the recent increase of relevant publications,⁷ historians have not given enough attention to the close and complex relationship between human civilization and the environment that supports it, and the subtle ways in which small and big ‘disasters’ have shaped human societies in the past. Unfortunately, the scenarios of growing social and political conflict reaching a global scale and threatening our future are rarely linked to the caprices of ‘nature’ or climatic fluctuations. The assumption that environmental and human history operate on incompatible timescales made it possible to some extent to ignore the complex ways in which the environment and human civilization interact, in particular on a global level. Generally speaking, only the most spectacular disasters have been deemed worthy of study so far—obvious examples are the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 or the eruption of Mount Tambora (Sumbawa, Indonesia) in 1815—or the nations or regions that are seen as most disaster-prone, such as the Philippines, Japan, or the US.⁸ The recent Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global Environmental History edited by Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister brought together a variety of studies looking at different cultural patterns of coping with disasters.⁹ The purpose of our project is to go a step further along these lines. It is a joint effort to gain deeper historical insight into the consequences of disaster experiences and their transformational powers. It will make an argument for their complexity, their multifaceted consequences, and, to some extent, even their inevitability. We have deliberately excluded technological disasters from the contents of this volume, although we appreciate that it is difficult to draw a clear line distinguishing ‘natural’ from ‘technological’ disasters. If we were to do so every major Yellow River flood, for example, would have to be excluded, as these involved the breaking of a dike; the same would be true for storm floods at the North-Sea coast since the thirteenth century. Boundaries between epistemological categories are becoming increasingly blurred. Natural hazards are being transformed into ever more disastrous events, not only because of the intensive use of hazardous environments by humans, but also because of the increasing technological risks that accompany the irrational belief in humankind’s command over the forces of nature. Both are of course closely related to each other, and the consequence of both is that we ourselves are increasingly becoming a “global meteorological force,”¹⁰ or, as Paul Crutzen and others have argued, we need to realize that we are living in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the dominating force of global environmental change.¹¹

Natural scientists have long recognized the importance of environmental disasters as catalysts of regenerative processes, as “normal events that can benefit ecosystems.”¹² In a comparable vein, geographer Kenneth Hewitt argued that “disasters are the products of historical as well as natural processes and that they are in fact a part of normal life in a culture.”¹³ Disasters as triggers of cultural change have been studied by archaeologists,¹⁴ and also increasingly by historians.¹⁵ All find that disasters are much more common than one would expect, but still, while the most spectacular ones are well remembered, our knowledge about most of them tends to be poor. On the surface disasters have a huge but short-lived impact, mostly on a minor—and from the point of view of the global media often a marginal—part of the human population, and are therefore quickly forgotten by the mainstream of memory producers. This does not only apply to the historical dimension of disasters, which has been compared to bees—“they sting, and then they die,”¹⁶ but also to the contemporary dimension, where a ‘window of opportunity’ is open only for a limited period immediately after a disaster happened.¹⁷ In the past, in view of the often observed quick recovery of economies and populations, disasters have even been considered economically irrelevant.¹⁸ While this is no longer the majority opinion, it is still true that the attention disasters attract while they happen stands in strange contrast to the lack of acknowledgement of their long-term significance. A—strongly contested—exception is perhaps Eric Lionel Jones who has argued that the ability of European societies to cope with disasters enabled the accumulation of capital, which again led to early forms of a capitalist economy—for him one of several factors in the explanation of the “European miracle.” ¹⁹ Elsewhere it has been argued that in the European Middle Ages protecting communities from natural hazards by investing in infrastructure for disaster prevention served as a strategy of political legitimation.²⁰ This kind of more subtle and often cumulative impact disasters can have on human societies and the ways they develop in the long-term is more often than not neglected in favor of what are considered to be more important events of a more clear-cut social, economic, or political character. But rarely are distinctions so clear, and it is precisely the interactions between the natural environment and human societies as highlighted in disaster situations that are the subject of this book.

As should be clear by now, this book is not about ‘the top ten most deadly historical disasters’ and despite a chapter on doomsday science, it is not about ‘our final day.’ Perhaps with the exception of the earthquakes of Lisbon (1755) and San Francisco (1906), most readers will not have heard of any of the disasters studied here. They range from relatively minor landslides in southern Germany (Dix) to minor and major earthquakes in ancient Rome (Meier), Aleppo (Knost), Switzerland (Fulton), France (Quenet), and California (Rohland and Winder), from river floods (Schenk and Fulton) to coastal storm tides (Allemeyer), and from wide-spread drought in North China (Janku) to catastrophic climate change (Mauelshagen) and doomsday scenarios (Rupke). We also did not try to cover every major world region, preferring to focus on particular themes that seemed to be relevant in one way or the other for all case studies. We ended up with a rather heavy focus on ‘Western’ civilization, though the point is really to see this as an integral part of global history. ‘Western’ experiences are not intrinsically different from others, rather they show the historical contingency of all human experience. Moreover, in a sense disasters are not only global but also trans-cultural phenomena. Disasters confront people in different civilizations with largely similar tasks, such as ensuring people’s safety or providing relief for victims; responses are often surprisingly similar, and from the nineteenth century on disaster relief became an increasingly transnational enterprise. Recurrent, presumably universal themes pop up again and again in the study of disasters and the ways societies have coped with them. Among these are science, religion, and politics. As most of the studies assembled here touch on more than one of these aspects, we have arranged them in roughly chronological order, starting with ancient Rome and ending with future expectations of climate change, though the early modern period is certainly most strongly represented. Interestingly, the early modern period does indeed seem to be a historical exception in so far as the relationship between man and nature is concerned. This was a time when, in Western Christian tradition at least (though similar trends may also be observed in other cultural formations), earth history finally became disentangled from human history (Rupke), a process that, as mentioned above, some see as having been reversed again. In a slightly different take on the same question Grégory Quenet sees the connection between geological and human time scales as a matter of political definition. Hopefully, some of the ideas explored here may serve as points of departure for future, more systematic, comparative study, thus leading to a truly global history of disasters.

One of the most intriguing aspects of disaster history is perhaps the manipulation of disaster experiences by those who were in a position to dominate the ways in which they were communicated, documented, and interpreted. These interpretive interventions could be crucial for the preservation of social stability and the maintenance of political order which otherwise might have faced a serious threat. Official proclamations and religious sermons were designed to give meaning to what happened and to channel people’s behavior into the desired direction. They were meant to provide orientation in a situation of utter disruption and to re-establish order. Further consequences of these disaster politics were the development of laws and regulations stipulating how to deal with this kind of experiences; they would become defining features of the modern state as would the construction of new bodies of knowledge to feed into the formation of the modern sciences. Both of these provided the means to make disasters more manageable, or so it seemed. They helped to mitigate the disruptive effects of disasters, making them actually less disastrous, or even turning them into a constructive force, in so far as they could be instrumentalized and used by those in positions of power.

In brief, the aim of this volume is to shed light on how past societies coped with a threatening environment, how societies changed in response to disaster experiences, and how disaster experiences were processed and communicated, both locally and globally. How did disaster experiences interact with the development of scientific thought in the early modern era? Why did religion play such an important role in disaster response, as it still does, despite the strong trend towards secularization in the modern world? What was and is the political role of disasters?

SCIENCE

In Europe, the collection of knowledge about disasters in the Renaissance was part of the project to gain control over nature. Already in the late Middle Ages astrometeorologists tried to discover connections between celestial phenomena (comets, constellations) and disasters (literally ‘bad stars’) and use this knowledge for their prognostications.²¹ Not later than in the fifteenth century can we find the systematic registration of historical earthquake events. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries weather diaries enjoyed increas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Roman Emperors and ‘Natural Disasters’ in the First Century A.D.
• 3 Managing Natural Hazards: Environment, Society, and Politics in Tuscany and the Upper Rhine Valley in the Renaissance (ca. 1270–1570)
• 4 Acts of God: The Confessionalization of Disaster in Reformation Europe
• 5 The Struggle Against the Sea: An Early Modern Coastal Society Between Metaphysical and Physical Attempts to Control Nature
• 6 Earthquakes in Early Modern France: From the Old Regime to the Birth of a New Risk
• 7 The Doomsday Discourse in the Earth and Planetary Sciences, 1700–Present
• 8 Forgotten Risks: Mass Movements in the Mountains
• 9 Shaping the City: Aleppo’s Foreigner Community and the Earthquake of 1822
• 10 Earthquake versus Fire: The Struggle over Insurance in the Aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Disaster
• 11 Mediating Foreign Disasters: The Los Angeles Times and International Relief, 1891–1914
• 12 From Natural to National Disaster: The Chinese Famine of 1928–1930
• 13 Climate Catastrophism: The History of the Future of Climate Change
• Contributors
• Index