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Historical Disaster Experiences: First Steps Toward a Comparative and Transcultural History of Disasters Across Asia and Europe in the Preindustrial Era

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Historical Disaster Experiences

Abstract

This introductory contribution presents the main topics of the volume. It positions research on historical natural disasters as a recent trend bridging environmental history, cultural studies, and global history. The appropriate terms, concepts, theories, methods, and problems associated with this topic are also discussed. Particular attention is payed to the translingual conceptual history of “disaster” and “catastrophe” and on the concept of “cultures of disaster,” as developed by Greg Bankoff, with their specific vulnerability or resilience in the context of “naturally” induced disasters. The questions that form the basis of the contributions to this volume are presented in detail and include (trans)cultural learning processes based on experiences of historical disasters, the hybrid character of natural disasters and their relationship to nature, society, and power, and finally concerning the role of governance and the consequences of glocalisation processes. To conclude, this contribution summarises initial results in the form of hypotheses while mainly concentrating on the transcultural experiences of historical disasters in the preindustrial era.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This phrase attempts to render adequately the traditional German concept of “gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse;” see footnotes 46–50 for further remarks on this concept.

  2. 2.

    See David Arnold, The Problem of Nature : Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56–73; a popular but academically problematic treatment by Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005); criticism from Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  3. 3.

    We cannot here go into this and the logical problems of differentiation in the systems “world,” “environment”/“nature ,” “society” (e.g. our bodies etc.). In this regard see Niklas Luhmann , Ökologische Kommunikation: Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf ökologische Gefährdungen einstellen? 4th ed. (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004),11f., 36–39, 71, 218–226, and passim.

  4. 4.

    For different angles on dealing academically with the construction and constructedness of nature vs. culture , see Melanie Reddig, “Die Konstruktion von Naturwelt und Sozialwelt: Latours und Luhmanns ökologische Krisendiagnosen im Vergleich,” in Verschwindet die Natur? Die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie in der umweltsoziologischen Diskussion, ed. Martin Voss and Birgit Peuker (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 129–147. On the historical development in Europe see e.g. Dieter Groh, Schöpfung im Widerspruch: Deutungen der Natur und des Menschen von der Genesis bis zur Reformation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003); Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh, Weltbild und Naturaneignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991); Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh, Die Außenwelt der Innenwelt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996).

  5. 5.

    Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2013), 141.

  6. 6.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29f., 43–45; Carola Dietze, “Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of ‘Provincializing Europe,’” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 69–84, in particular 78–83.

  7. 7.

    Gregor Schiemann, “Natur—Kultur und ihr Anderes,” in Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften: Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jaeger and Burkhard Liebsch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), 1:60–75. Neither Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, 4th ed. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2010), nor Sasha Roseneil and Stephen Frosh, eds., Social Research after the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) talk about the environment as an autonomous topic of cultural studies.

  8. 8.

    See e.g. Jürgen Mittelstraß, “The Concept of Nature : Historical and Epistomological Aspects,” in Environment across Cultures, ed. Eckart Ehlers and Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Wissenschaftsethik und Technikfolgenbeurteilung 19 (Berlin: Springer, 2003), 29–35; Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978); Friedrich A. Kittler, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Munich: Fink, 2001), with positions by Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg W. F. Hegel , James George Frazer and Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

  9. 9.

    See e.g. Armin Hajman Koller, The Theory of Environment: An Outline of the History of the Idea of Milieu and Its Present Status (Menasha: Banta, 1918); Donald Worster, Nature 's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2002), 12; Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Der Mensch zwischen Natur und Kultur: Auf der Suche nach einer Umweltgeschichtsschreibung in der deutschsprachigen Mediävistik—Eine Skizze (avec résumé français),” in Umwelt und Herrschaft in der Geschichte / Environnement et pouvoir: Une approche historique, ed. François Duceppe-Lamarre and Jens Ivo Engels, Ateliers des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Paris 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 27–51; Ulf Dirlmeier, “Historische Umweltforschung aus der Sicht der mittelalterlichen Geschichte,” Siedlungsforschung: Archäologie—Geschichte—Geographie 6 (1988): 97–111, particularly 97.

  10. 10.

    See e.g. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat (Paris: Fayard, 2004–2009); Hubert Horace Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (London : Routledge, 1995); Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2007); Franz Mauelshagen, Klimageschichte der Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010), in particular 28f.; Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse oft the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950–1072 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  11. 11.

    See e.g. Berbeli Wanning, Die Fiktionalität der Natur: Studien zum Naturbegriff in Erzähltexten der Romantik und des Realismus, Natur—Literatur—Ökologie 2 (Berlin: Weidler, 2005); Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: Le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

  12. 12.

    See e.g. Karl-Werner Brand, ed., Soziologie und Natur: Theoretische Perspektiven (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1998); Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson, eds., Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London : Routlege, 1996); Paul E. Little, “Environments and Environmentalism in Anthropological Research,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 253–284.

  13. 13.

    See e.g. Winfried Schenk, “Historische Geographie: Umwelthistorisches Brückenfach zwischen Geschichte und Geographie,” in Umweltgeschichte: Themen und Perspektiven, ed. Wolfram Siemann and Nils Freytag (Munich: Beck, 2003), 129–146; Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger, eds., Natur-Bilder: Wahrnehmungen von Natur und Umwelt in der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999); Horst Bredekamp, “Kulturtechnik zwischen Mutter und Stiefmutter Natur,” in Bild—Schrift—Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Fink, 2003), 117–141.

  14. 14.

    See e.g. Robert Delort and François Walter, Histoire de l’environnement Européen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France , 2001); Carole L. Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994); Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz, ed., The Environment and World History, The California World History Library 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); John R. McNeill and Alan Roe, eds., Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (London : Routledge, 2013); Shepard Krech III, Carolyn Merchant, and John R. McNeill, eds., Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  15. 15.

    Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); see also Arnold, The Problem of Nature , 1–38; Stephen J. Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

  16. 16.

    Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London , New York: Verso, 2001).

  17. 17.

    See e.g. Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, and Joan Martínez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, Globalization and the Environment 1 (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007); with a traditional division into epochs John McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, eds., A Companion to Global Environmental History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Erika Maria Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  18. 18.

    See Bernd Herrmann, Umweltgeschichte: Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 36–38 on the “wrong categories” of “human, nature and environment.”

  19. 19.

    Bruno Latour , Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Latour, Politics of Nature : How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Latour , We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Latour, “Über technische Vermittlung: Philosophie, Soziologie, Genealogie,” in Technik und Sozialtheorie, ed. Werner Rammert, Theorie und Gesellschaft 42 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998), 29–81.

  20. 20.

    This is the much-discussed theory of Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London : Sage, 1992). It would be worth reviewing whether the thesis of a “crisis of societal relationships with nature ” in present-day cultures is really true or only the postmodern version of a myth of progress read backwards; on the crisis, cf. Michael Weingarten , “Die Krise der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse: Annäherung an die kulturell konstituierende Differenzierung von Natur und Kultur,” in Die Kulturhistorische Wende: Zur Orientierung des philosophischen Selbstverständnisses, ed. Dirk Hartmann and Peter Janich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 371–414; Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, “Die Regulation der ökologischen Krise: Theorie und Empirie der Transformation gesellschaftlicher Naturverhältnisse,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 36, no. 2 (2011): 12–34, in particular 15.

  21. 21.

    See Reinhart Koselleck, “Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels,” in Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswisenschaft 14 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 29–47; Jörn Leonhard, “Grundbegriffe und Sattelzeiten—Languages and Discourses: Europäische und anglo-amerikanische Deutungen des Verhältnisses von Sprache und Geschichte,” in Interkultureller Transfer und nationaler Eigensinn: Europäische und anglo-amerikanische Positionen der Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Rebekka Habermas and Rebekka von Mallinckrodt (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 71–86.

  22. 22.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty, “In Defense of ‘Provincializing Europe:’ A Response to Carola Dietze,” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 85–96, in particular: 94–96.

  23. 23.

    See Adi Ophir, “Concept,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 (2011), accessed August 20, 2013, http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/concept/, translated as “Begriff,” Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–24.

  24. 24.

    On the formation of different linguistic systems and the categorisation into standard and popular language, see the global historical study by Benoît Grévin, “La lente révolution des cultures linguistiques,” in Histoire du monde au XVe siècle, ed. Patrick Boucheron (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 651–667.

  25. 25.

    On the analytical view of the “oneness of the difference” between the societal system and its environment (“Einheit der Differenz des Gesellschaftssystems und seiner Umwelt”) as a fundamental operation of an environmental sociology that makes it possible for a system to reflect on itself—without necessarily wanting to agree here totally with this system-theoretical tradition—see Luhmann , Ökologische Kommunikation, 23f., 33, 47, 63, and passim.

  26. 26.

    See this introduction and the contributions of Greg Bankoff on “(sub)cultures of disaster ” and of Sarah Büssow-Schmitz on Fanāʾ and fasād .

  27. 27.

    “Culture” can be understood system-theoretically, even if this goes against Luhmann ’s intentions, see Dirk Baecker, Beobachter unter sich: Eine Kulturtheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013). In this chapter we understand by “sociocultural system” the section of society that observes and reflects on “society”—and is thereby part of society.

  28. 28.

    On the concept of culture , see the debate between Chris Hann, Rolf Lindner, Doris Bachmann-Medick, Aleida Assmann, and Albrecht Koschorke in “Fremde Dinge,“ ed. Michael C. Frank et al., special issue, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2007): 125–146; also Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, eds., Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen—Ansätze—Perspektiven (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008); Max Fuchs, Kultur Macht Sinn: Einführung in die Kulturtheorie (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), particularly 53–92; and Stefan Lüddemann, Kultur: Eine Einführung (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010), particularly 11–20.

  29. 29.

    According to Wolfgang Welsch, “Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalität?” in Hochschule als transkultureller Raum? Kultur, Bildung und Differenz in der Universität, ed. Lucyna Darowska and Claudia Machold (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 39–66, particularly 45–47, “internal transculturality” can also be studied at the personal, micro-level. It has been shown empirically that individuals who have a generally western, scientific worldview can still use traditional religious explanatory patterns for the reasons for disaster; see the contribution of Eleonor Marcussen in this volume. For an approach to explaining such phenomena based on the sociology of knowledge , see Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “‘...prima ci fu la cagione de la mala provedenza de’ Fiorentini...’ Disaster and ‘Life World’—Reactions in the Commune of Florence to the Flood of November 1333,” The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 1–2 (2007): 355–386, particularly 376.

  30. 30.

    That is why, in Europe, the medieval rhetoric of a (uniform) “christianitas” was more than just rhetoric, and had a constitutive effect, cf. Nora Berend, “The Concept of Christendom: A Rhetoric of Integration or Disintegration?’” in Hybride Kulturen im mittelalterlichen Europa: Vorträge und Workshops einer Frühlingsschule, ed. Michael Borgolte and Bernd Schneidmüller, Europa im Mittelalter 16 (Berlin: Akademie, 2010), 51–61.

  31. 31.

    See e.g. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, “Historischer Vergleich: Methoden, Aufgaben, Probleme: Eine Einleitung,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Haupt and Kocka (Frankfurt: Campus, 1996), 9–45, particularly 12–15. They discern the following functions of a historical comparison: it can generate new questions (heuristic function) and highlight single cases (descriptive function) which can be explained in their peculiarity or similarity with other cases (analytic function). For more on this method see Thomas Welskopp, “Stolpersteine auf dem Königsweg: Methodenkritische Anmerkungen zum internationalen Vergleich in der Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 339–367; Werner Daum, Günter Riederer, and Harm von Seggern, “Fallobst und Steinschlag: Einleitende Überlegungen zum historischen Vergleich,” in Vergleichende Perspektiven—Perspektiven des Vergleichs: Studien zur europäischen Geschichte von der Spätantike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Helga Schnabel-Schüle (Mainz: von Zabern, 1998), 1–21.

  32. 32.

    On environmental history as an issue for global history , see Conrad, Globalgeschichte, 232–240.

  33. 33.

    The concept of transculturation was first introduced by Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 4th ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); the notion has been developed in the German context by Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture—City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London : Sage Publications, 1999), 194–213, accessed August 26, 2013, http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Wlelsch_Transculturality.html/, and note 29 in this contribution.

  34. 34.

    Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London : Routledge, 1992), 6.

  35. 35.

    See Stuart Jenks, “Astrometereology in the Middle Ages ,” Isis 74, no. 2 (1983): 185–210.

  36. 36.

    For bibliographical information about the term see notes 57–86.

  37. 37.

    It is noteworthy that reciprocal influences are shown specifically, as there can naturally also be independent, parallel developments. See note 129.

  38. 38.

    In the premodern context, the concept of “histoire croisée” does not prove fruitful, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Penser l'histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité,” in De la comparaison à l'histoire croisée, ed. Werner and Zimmermann, Le genre humain—Editions du Seuil 42 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 15–49; for exemplary approaches see Wolfram Drews and Jenny Rahel Oesterle, eds., “Transkulturelle Komparatistik: Beiträge zu einer Globalgeschichte der Vormoderne,” special issue, Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 18, nos. 3–4 (2008).

  39. 39.

    Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter, “Ordnungskonfigurationen: Die Erprobung eines Forschungsdesigns,” in Ordnungskonfigurationen im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Schneidmüller and Weinfurter, Vorträge und Forschungen 64 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2006), 7–18, particularly 7f.

  40. 40.

    For the classical (and problematic) position see Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, New Series 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–1207; Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 29–57; Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Lektüren im ‘Buch der Natur:’ Wahrnehmung, Beschreibung und Deutung von Naturkatastrophen,” in Geschichte schreiben: Ein Quellen- und Studienhandbuch zur Historiographie (ca. 1350–1750), ed. Susanne Rau and Birgit Studt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 507–521.

  41. 41.

    See e.g. Albrecht Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag 2007); Mischa Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians: Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jahrhundert n. Chr., Hypomnemata: Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben 147 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 64–72, 84–86.

  42. 42.

    Johannes Fried , Aufstieg aus dem Untergang: Apokalyptisches Denken und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaft im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).

  43. 43.

    On the phenomenological and knowledge -sociological concept of “life world” see Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Konstanz: UTB, 2003), 327–347; Ilja Srubar, Kosmion: Die Genese der pragmatischen Lebenswelttheorie von Alfred Schütz und ihr anthropologischer Hintergrund (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).

  44. 44.

    See Schenk, “...prima ci fu la cagione,” 359, 375–377.

  45. 45.

    See e.g. Anu Kapur, Vulnerable India : A Geographical Study of Disasters (New Delhi : Sage, 2010), 91–119; Christopher Z. Minkowski, “Competing Cosmologies in Early Modern Indian Astronomy,” in Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingreem, ed. Charles Burnett et al., Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Sciences: Text and Studies 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 349–385; S. M. Razaullah Ansari, “Sanskrit Scientific Texts in Indo-Persia n Sources, with special Emphasis on siddhāntas and karaṇas,” in Burnett et al., Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences, 587–605; Charles Burnett, “Arabic and Latin Astrolog y Compared in the Twelfth Century: Firmicus, Adelard of Bath, and ‘Doctor Elmirethi’ (‘Aristoteles Milesius’),” in Burnett et al., Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences, 247–263; Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit: Al-Birjandī on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and Its Sanskrit Translation, ed., comm., and trans. Takanori Kusuba and David Edward Pingree , Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science: Texts and Studies 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); David Pingree , “Mesopotamia n and Greek Astronomy in India,” in Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, ed. Karin Preisendanz, Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens 53 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007), 41–50; Pingree , From Astral Omens to Astrolog y: From Babylon to Bīkāner, Serie Orientale Roma 78 (Rome : Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1997).

  46. 46.

    Selected sources on this section: Thomas Jahn and Peter Wehling, “Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse—Konturen eines theoretischen Konzepts,” in Soziologie und Natur: Theoretische Perspektiven, ed. Karl-Werner Brand, Soziologie und Ökologie 2 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 75–93; Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, eds., Soziale Ökologie: Grundzüge einer Wissenschaft von den gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnissen (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006); Egon Becker, Diana Hummel, and Thomas Jahn, “Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse als Rahmenkonzept,” in Handbuch Umweltsoziologie, ed. Mathias Groß (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 75–96; Brand and Wissen, “Die Regulation der ökologischen Krise.“

  47. 47.

    Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Andreas Mayer, and Anke Schaffarzik, “Zur metabolischen Transformation von Gesellschaft und Soziologie,” in Groß, Handbuch Umweltsoziologie, 97–120.

  48. 48.

    See, in particular, Brand and Wissen, “Die Regulation der ökologischen Krise” and Weingarten , “Krise der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse.”

  49. 49.

    On the possibilities of distinguishing between “disaster” and “crisis” in the communication system “society” from narratological angles, see Ansgar Nünning, “Krise als Erzählung und Metapher: Literaturwissenschaftliche Bausteine für eine Metaphorologie und Narratologie von Krise,” in Krisengeschichte(n): ‘Krise’ als Leitbegriff und Erzählmuster in kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, ed. Carla Meyer, Katja Patzel-Mattern, and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, Beihefte der Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 210 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 117–144, particularly 126f. Good examples of sudden disturbances are large volcano eruptions, tsunamis , or earthquakes , see the contributions of Martin Bauch, George Saliba, Verena Daiber, and Stefan Knost in this volume.

  50. 50.

    Weingarten , “Krise der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse,“ 407f: ”Widerfahrnis”; Luhmann , Ökologische Kommunikation, 97f., 210, 218–226, speaks on 40–50, 96–100, 218–226, 269 of the “Resonanz” of the system, with which it reacts to environmental events according to its own structure (as “disturbance”—in German, Störung—of the main difference).

  51. 51.

    On the terminology see the most comprehensive discussion yet of the different definitions of disaster in Enrico L. Quarantelli, ed., What is a Disaster ? Perspectives on the Question (London : Routledge, 1998). See also Anthony Oliver-Smith, “‘What is a Disaster ?’ Anthropological Perspectives on a Persistent Question,” in The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman (New York: Routledge, 1999), 18–34; Carsten Felgentreff and Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Hazard-, Risiko- und Katastrophenforschung,” in Naturrisiken und Sozialkatastrophen, ed. Carsten Felgentreff and Thomas Glade (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 13–29.

  52. 52.

    See Donald Winch, “Malthus ,” in Three Great Economists, ed. David D. Raphael, Donald Winch, and Robert Skidelsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 105–218; for differing positions see Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Nicolas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  53. 53.

    Garrett Hardin, “ The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.

  54. 54.

    See e.g. the discussion of Wittfogel ’s theses below, note 117f.

  55. 55.

    Werner Rösener, “Zur Erforschung der Marken und Allmenden,” in Allmenden und Marken vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit: Beiträge des Kolloquiums vom 18. bis 20. September 2002 im Museumsdorf Cloppenburg, ed. Uwe Meiners and Werner Rösener, Kataloge und Schriften des Museumsdorfs Cloppenburg 14 (Cloppenburg: Museumsdorf, 2004), 9–16; Elinor Ostrom , Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elinor Ostrom , Roy Gardner, and James Walker, eds., Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Brand and Wissen, “Die Regulation der ökologischen Krise;” Arun Agrawal and Elinor Ostrom , “Collective Action, Property Rights, and Decentralization in Resource Use in India and Nepal ,” Politics and Society 29, no. 4 (2001): 485–514.

  56. 56.

    See in particular the contributions of Stuart Borsch , Thomas Labbé, Nitin Sinha, and Monisankar Misra in this volume.

  57. 57.

    For definitions see above, note 51; Jacques Berlioz and Grégory Quenet, “Les catastrophes : Définitions, documentation,” in Histoire et mémoire des risques naturels: Actes du séminaire international ”Histoire et mémoire des risques naturels en région de montagne” organisé par l’équipe Histoire Economique, Sociale et Politique (HESOP) du Centre de Recherche d’Histoire de l’Italie et des Pays Alpin (CRHIPA), Université Pierre Mendès France —Grenoble 2 au Musée Dauphinois de Grenoble les 25 et 26 novembre 1999, ed. René Favier and Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset (Grenoble: CNRS—Maison Sciences de l'Homme-Alpes, 2000), 19–37, particularly 24–28, Dieter Groh, Michael Kempe, and Franz Mauelshagen, “Einleitung: Naturkatastrophen—wahrgenommen, gedeutet, dargestellt,” in Naturkatastrophen: Beiträge zu ihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Groh, Kempe, and Mauelshagen, Literatur und Anthropologie 13 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), 11–33, particularly 15–19; on threshold values, see the discussion in Felgentreff and Dombrowsky, “Hazard-, Risiko- und Katastrophenforschung,” 20–25; Ben Wisner et al., eds., At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed. (London : Routledge, 2004),10f.

  58. 58.

    See Mischa Meier, “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe in der griechischen Historiographie: Einige einleitende Anmerkungen,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 44–56; Anna Akasoy, “The Man-Made Disaster : Fires in Cities in the Medieval Middle East,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 75–87, particularly 75–78.

  59. 59.

    Latterly Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit? ‘Disastro,’ Katastrophe, Strafgericht—Worte, Begriffe und Konzepte für rapiden Wandel im langen Mittelalter,” in Meyer, Patzel-Mattern, and Schenk, Krisengeschichte(n), 177–212; and the shortened english version: Gerrit Jasper Schenk, "'Disastro,' Catastrophe, and Divine Judgement: Words, Concepts and Images for ‘Natural’ Threats to Social Order in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in: Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400-1700, ed. Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45–67; Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Viewing Disasters: Myth, History, Iconography, and Media across Europe and Asia,” in Disaster as Image: Iconographies and Media Strategies across Europe and Asia, ed. Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2015), 7–40.

  60. 60.

    See Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, s.v. “disastro,” accessed August 31, 2013, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/.

  61. 61.

    See Andrea Giannetti, ed., Libro dei Sette Savi di Roma: Versione in prosa F, Scrittura e scrittori: Serie Miscellanea 25 (Alessandria: Edizione dell’Orso, 2012), 121.

  62. 62.

    See Udo Gerdes, “Sieben weise Meister,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, vol. 8, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), cols. 1174–1189, and more generally the website of the Society of the Seven Sages, accessed August 30, 2013, http://myweb.dal.ca/hrunte/seven_sages.html.

  63. 63.

    See Gerd Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 53 (Stuttgart: Thorbecke 2005), and some contributions in Günther Oestmann, Rutkin H. Darrel, and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds., Horoscopes and Public Spheres: Essays on the History of Astrolog y, Religion and Society 42 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005).

  64. 64.

    See note 59; Francesco Bonaini, ed., Statuti inediti della città di Pisa dal XII al XIV secolo, vol. 3 (Florence: Vieusseux, 1857), 535; Burkhardt Wolf, Fortuna di mare: Literatur und Seefahrt (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2013), 11–14, 89–109; Sylvain Piron, “L’apparition du resicum en Méditerranée occidentale aux XIIème–XIIIème siècles,” in Pour une histoire culturelle du risque: Genèse, évolution, actualité du concept dans les sociétés occidentales, ed. Emmanuelle Collas-Heddeland et al. (Strasbourg: Université d Haute-Alsace 2004), 59–76, particularly 61–68.

  65. 65.

    See the Libellus de diluviis, Manuel Alonso Alonso, ed., “Homenaje a Avicena en su milenario: Las traducciones de Juan González de Burgos y Salomon,” Al-Andalus 14, no. 2 (1949): 306–308, particularly 306. On the textual history see Jean-Marc Mandosio and Carla Di Martino, “La ‘Météorologie’ d’Avicenne (Kitāb al-Šifā’ V) et sa diffusion dans le monde latin,” in Wissen über Grenzen: Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter, ed. Andreas Speer and Lydia Wegener (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 406–424, particularly 420.

  66. 66.

    See Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 189f.

  67. 67.

    On the Toledo letter, see Dorothea Weltecke, “Die Konjunktion der Planeten im September 1189: Zum Ursprung einer globalen Katastrophenangst,” Saeculum 54, no. 2 (2003): 179–212; Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit, 17–158.

  68. 68.

    Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius and Joannes Riuius, En tibi lector candidissime, Macrobius, qui antea mancus, mutilus, ac lacer circu[m]ferebatur, nu[n]c primu[m] integer, nitidus [et] suonitori restitutus, in quo graecae maiestatis dignitas quo ad eius fieri potuit superstes reperit[us] (Venedig: Lucantonio Giunta, 1513), fol. 1r; for the broad reception of Macrobius ’s commentaries of Cicero ’s Somnium Scipionis see Bruce Eastwood, “Manuscripts of Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, before 1500,” Manuscripta 38, no. 2 (1994): 138–155.

  69. 69.

    See Heike Talkenberger, Sintflut: Prophetie und Zeitgeschehen in Texten und Holzschnitten astrologischer Flugschriften, 1488–1528, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 26 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), 154–335, 436 and 520 fig. S7; Gabriele Wimböck, “In den Sternen geschrieben—in die Bilder gebannt: Die Furcht vor der Großen Sintflut im Zeitalter der Reformation,” in AngstBilderSchauLust: Historische Katastrophenerfahrungen in Kunst, Musik und Theater, ed. Jürgen Schläder and Regina Wohlfahrt (Dresden: Henschel 2007), 212–239.

  70. 70.

    Aby Moritz Warburg, Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 26 (Heidelberg : Winter, 1920), 29–35; see e.g. Paola Zambelli, “Introduction: Astrologer s’ Theory of History,” in Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time, ed. Paola Zambelli (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 24; Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome : Laterza, 1987), 185–215. On the perception of the planetary conjunction of 1524 in China with differing interpretations see David W. Pankenier, “The Planetary Portent of 1524 in China and Europe,” Journal of World History 20, no. 3 (2009): 339–375.

  71. 71.

    See Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 194–199, with all necessary references for the following.

  72. 72.

    See also Mischa Meier, “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe;” Olaf Briese and Timo Günther, “Katastrophe: Terminologische Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 51 (2009): 157–163, 167.

  73. 73.

    Internationale Thesaurus-Kommission, ed., Thesavrvs lingvae Latinae, (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), 3:598; fully treated by Alan Rosen, Dislocating the End: Climax, Closure, and the Invention of Genre, Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature 35 (New York: Lang, 2001), 6–11; Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 161–163, who completely overlooked the medical term; cf. the following paragraphs.

  74. 74.

    See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Dis-Astri: Modelli interpretativi delle calamità naturali dal medioevo al Rinascimento,” in Le calamità ambientali nel tardo medioevo europeo: Realtà, percezioni, reazioni; Atti del XII convegno del Centro di Studi sulla civiltà del tardo Medioevo S. Miniato, 31 maggio–2 giugno 2008, ed. Michael Matheus et al., Centro di Studi sulla Civiltà del Tardo Medioevo San Miniato, Collana di Studi e Ricerche 12 (Florence: Firnze University Press, 2010), 23–75, in particular 68f.; Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 195f.

  75. 75.

    See Rosen, Dislocating the End, 6–11; Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 164f.

  76. 76.

    See Philipp Melanchthon , Philippi Melanthonis opera quae supersunt Omnia, vol. 2, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider, Corpus Reformatorum 2 (Halle a.d. Saale: C.A. Schwetschke et filium, 1835), 546 no. 1009; see also Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 124–173.

  77. 77.

    Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 164 (translated from German by the author).

  78. 78.

    For example in France , see Paul Imbs, Trésor de la langue française: Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard 1977), 5:299. In the mid-fifteenth century, François Rabelais uses “catastrophe ” in an astrolog ical context (comet) with a negative connotation, but narratively integrated, see François Walter, Katastrophen: Eine Kulturgeschichte vom 16. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010), 16f; Briese and Günther , “Katastrophe,” 163, 165; see also Michael O’Dea, “Le mot ‘catastrophe ,’” in L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle: Du châtiment divin au désastre naturel, ed. Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre, Bibliothèque des Lumières 73 (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 35–48, on the later development; Olaf Briese, “‘Genommen auß den Comoedien:’ Katastrophenbegriffe der neuzeitlichen Geologie,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Begriffsgeschichte: Terminologische Umbrüche im Entstehungsprozess der modernen Wissenschaften, ed. Michael von Eggers and Matthias Rothe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 23–50, in particular 30f. on development in the English-speaking world.

  79. 79.

    See a recent and more differentiated account in Briese and Günther , “Katastrophe,” 172–195.

  80. 80.

    On the complex entanglements of cultural “flows” see Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7, no. 2 (1990): 295–310, in particular 296–301 (but limited to the the modern era).

  81. 81.

    See Piron, “L’apparition du resicum,” particularly 61–68.

  82. 82.

    The author is preparing a separate study on the translingual history of the term and concept “risk .”

  83. 83.

    Schenk, “…prima ci fu la cagione,” 370; Anna A. Akasoy, “Islamic Attitudes to Disasters in the Middle Ages : A Comparison of Earthquakes and Plagues,” The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 2 (2007): 387–410, in particular 398.

  84. 84.

    See e.g. Martin Mulsow and Jan Assmann, eds., Sintflut und Gedächtnis: Erinnern und Vergessen des Ursprungs (Munich: Fink, 2006); Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Kapur, Vulnerable India , 97–104, 108–114.

  85. 85.

    See e.g. Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Maria Moog-Grünewald and Verena Olejniczik Lobsien, eds., Apokalypse: Der Anfang im Ende, Neues Forum für allgemeine und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 16 (Heidelberg : Winter, 2003); Adam Jones, ed., Weltende: Beiträge zur Kultur- und Religionswissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1999); Anna A. Akasoy, “Interpreting Earthquakes in Medieval Islamic Texts,” in Natural Disasters , Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global Environmental History, ed. Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (Lanham: Lexington, 2009), 183–196.

  86. 86.

    See e.g. Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians, in particular 478–481, and the overview of different millenialisms in Catherine L. Wessinger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  87. 87.

    Subrata K. Mitra, The Puzzle of India 's Governance: Culture, Context, and Comparative Theory (London : Routledge, 2006), 5.

  88. 88.

    With reference to the culturalist perspectives on natural disasters , fires (see the contributions by Christian Pfister , Syrinx van Hees, and Cornel Zwierlein) are a particularly illuminating example of the limits to demarcating natural and human-induced disasters .

  89. 89.

    Basic comments on epidemics are found in William Hardy McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976); for a detailed study on the Black Death see Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition. Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  90. 90.

    See Dieter Schott, “Stadt und Katastrophe, ” in “Stadt und Katastrophe,” ed. Schott, special issue, Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 2 (2003): 6f. Contemporaries had to at least mention the “natural” factor in disastrous events, but not necessarly classify it as such (e.g. divine or magical powers may also be held responsible); the classification as “natural” follows from the analysis of the researchers.

  91. 91.

    Carsten Felgentreff and Thomas Glade, “Naturkatastrophen—Sozialkatastrophen: Zum Geleit,” in Glade and Felgentreff, Naturrisiken und Sozialkatastrophen, 1–10.

  92. 92.

    On the crucial role of context see also the contributions in Andrea Janku, Gerrit J. Schenk, and Franz Mauelshagen, eds., Historical Disasters in Context: Science, Religion, and Politics, Routledge Studies in Cultural History 15 (New York: Routledge, 2012).

  93. 93.

    Lowell Juillard Carr, “Disasters and the Sequence-Pattern Concept of Social Change,” American Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2 (1932): 207–218, with his characterization of disasters as processes, boosted the development of social constructivist perspectives, see Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Again and Again: Is a Disaster What We Call a ‘Disaster ’?” in Quarantelli, What Is a Disaster , 19–30; and Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Zur Entstehung der soziologischen Katastrophenforschung—Eine wissenshistorische und -soziologische Reflexion,” in Felgentreff and Glade, Naturrisiken und Sozialkatastrophen, 63–76.

  94. 94.

    For a geographical perspective see Kenneth Hewitt, Regions of Risk: A Geographical Introduction to Disasters (Harlow: Longman, 1997), 3f.; Juergen Weichselgartner, Naturgefahren als soziale Konstruktion: Eine geographische Beobachtung der gesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit Naturrisiken (Aachen: Shaker, 2002), 58–66. In the social sciences , see note 93; Wieland Jäger, Katastrophe und Gesellschaft: Grundlegungen und Kritik von Modellen der Katastrophensoziologie (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977); William J. Petak and Arthur A. Atkisson, Natural Hazard Risk Assessment and Public Policy: Anticipating the Unexpected (New York: Springer, 1982).

  95. 95.

    See e.g. Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London : Routledge, 1992); Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, The Angry Earth; Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds., Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2002).

  96. 96.

    See e.g. Quarantelli, What is a Disaster ?; Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, “Introduction: The Urban Catastrophe —Challenge to the Social, Economic, and Cultural Order of the City,” in Cities and Catastrophes: Coping with Emergency in European History / Villes et catastrophes : Réactions face à l’urgence dans l’histoire européenne, ed. Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Harold L. Platt, and Dieter Schott (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002), 9–42, in particular 10; Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters: Nature , Power, and Culture,” in Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, Catastrophe and Culture, 23–47, particularly 24.

  97. 97.

    See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Historical Disaster Research: State of Research, Concepts, Methods , and Case Studies,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 9–31. For Antiquity see Holger Sonnabend, Naturkatastrophen in der Antike: Wahrnehmung—Deutung—Management (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999); for the Middle Ages , see Christian Rohr , Extreme Naturereignisse im Ostalpenraum: Naturerfahrung im Spätmittelalter und am Beginn der Neuzeit, Umwelthistorische Forschungen 4 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007); James A. Galloway, “Coastal Flooding and Socioeconomic Change in Eastern England in the Later Middle Ages,” Environment and History 19 (2013): 173–207; for the early modern period see Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Sturmflut 1717: Die Bewältigung einer Naturkatastrophe in der Frühen Neuzeit, Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution 24 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992); for Europe and beyond see Mauch and Pfister , Natural Disasters ; Gerrit Jasper Schenk, ed., Katastrophen: Vom Untergang Pompejis bis zum Klimawandel (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2009); Monica Juneja and Franz Mauelshagen, eds., “Coping with Natural Disasters in Pre-industrial Societies,” special issue, The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 1–2 (2007); Janku, Schenk, and Mauelshagen, Historical Disasters in Context.

  98. 98.

    See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Managing Natural Hazards: Environment, Society, and Politics in Tuscany and the Upper Rhine Valley in the Renaissance (1270–1570),” in Janku, Schenk, and Mauelshagen, Historical Disasters in Context, 31–53, particularly 44 with note 75.

  99. 99.

    See e.g. Gerhard Fouquet, “Für eine Kulturgeschichte der Naturkatastrophen: Erdbeben in Basel 1356 und Großfeuer in Frankenberg 1476,” in Städte aus Trümmern: Katastrophenbewältigung zwischen Antike und Moderne, ed. Andreas Ranft and Stephan Selzer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 101–131; Robert P. Wolensky and Kenneth C. Wolensky, “Local Government's Problem with Disaster Management: A Literature Review and Structural Analysis,” Policy Studies Review 9, no. 4 (1990): 703–725; Wisner et al., At Risk.

  100. 100.

    See Hewitt, Regions of Risk, 141–168; more recently, see Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters,” 43–45; Virginia García-Acosta, “Historical Disaster Research,” in Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, Catastrophe and Culture, 49–66, particularly 60–62; Greg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, and Dorothea Hilhorst, eds., Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development, and People (London : Earthscan, 2004); Nancy Meschinet de Richmond, “Histoire et vulnerabilité: D’une perception empirique et globale à une approche théorique et sectorielle,” Revue du Nord, hors série collection art et archéologie 16 (2011): 19–26.

  101. 101.

    Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters,” 25f.

  102. 102.

    Greg Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster : Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines (London : Routledge, 2003), 152–183.

  103. 103.

    Greg Bankoff , “Comparing Vulnerabilities: Toward Charting an Historical Trajectory of Disasters,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 103.

  104. 104.

    Besides the Philippines as a “culture of disaster,” Japan is a candidate for a national “earthquake culture :” Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gennifer Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster : Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley 2012); Charles J. Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Recently, Italy reflects on itself as a “culture of disaster,” see the activities of the Centro euro-mediterraneo di documentazione per la conoscenza e la memoria degli eventi estremi e di disastri (EEDIS) in Spoleto under the director and historical seismologist Emanuela Guidoboni, accessed August 25, 2013, http://www.eventiestremiedisastri.it/.

  105. 105.

    Bankoff, p . 52f. in this volume.

  106. 106.

    See Christian Rohr , Extreme Naturereignisse, 44, 60n27 (“Risikokulturen”). This is backed up by the observation that medieval supplicatory processions only follow extraordinarily strong flooding , put forward in Thomas Labbé, “Essai de réflexion sur la réaction aux inondations en milieu urbain au XVe siècle: Du seuil de tolérance catastrophique des sociétés riveraines à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Revue du Nord: Hors série; Collection Art et Archéologique 16 (2011): 173–181, particularly 178f.

  107. 107.

    See Florence Rudolf, “Von einer Krisen- zur Risikosoziologie in Frankreich: Ein Beitrag zur Katastrophenforschung,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 115–130; Collas-Heddeland et al., Pour une histoire culturelle du risque; François Walter, Bernardino Fantini, and Pascal Delvaux, eds., Les cultures du risque (XVIe–XXIe siècle), Travaux d’histoire Suisse 3 (Genève: Presses d’histoire suisse, 2006); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London : Sage, 1992), originally published as Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); Niklas Luhmann , Risk: A Sociological Theory (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993); Ortwin Renn, Risk Governance: Coping with Uncertainty in a Complex World (London: Earthscan, 2008).

  108. 108.

    See the discussion in Felgentreff and Dombrowsky, “Hazard-, Risiko- und Katastrophenforschung,” 20–25; Ben Wisner et al., At Risk, 10f.

  109. 109.

    See Rohr , Extreme Naturereignisse, 55–62: lack of help, lack of explicability and social insecurity; direct or indirect involvement; unexpectedness; accumulation of disastrous natural events in a short time ; symbolic character; general crisis mood.

  110. 110.

    See references to the discussion in notes 51, 57, 93–96, 100, 108, and 109. In all the contributions in this volume an event is assessed as a disaster in the perception and interpretation of contemporary citizens when it has the following characteristics: it is extraordinarily harmful, is unexpected (but not necessarily sudden or unpredictable), and it momentarily overwhelms society and challenges it to find interpretations.

  111. 111.

    On the history of perception and its methodology see the foundational work of Hans-Werner Goetz, “Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster als methodisches Problem der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in “Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster in der Kultur des europäischen Mittelalters,” ed. Hartmut Bleumer and Steffen Patzold, special issue, Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 8, no. 2 (2003): 23–33; Jacques Revel, “Sind ‘Mentalitäten’ eine französische Spezialität? Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs und seiner Verwendung,” in Methoden und Kontexte: Historiographische Probleme der Bildungsforschung, ed. Rita Casale, Daniel Tröhler, and Jürgen Oelkers (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 15–41, particularly 16–18, 20f., 30–33; in disaster research: David Alexander, Confronting Catastrophe : New Perspectives on Natural Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–82, 84–189.

  112. 112.

    See the contributions on flooding by Thomas Labbé and Nitin Sinha in this book.

  113. 113.

    In the spirit of Martin Voss, Symbolische Formen: Grundlagen und Elemente einer Soziologie der Katastrophe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006).

  114. 114.

    In the spirit of Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  115. 115.

    See above note 95 and Julie Dekens, Local Knowledge for Disaster Preparedness: A Literature Review (Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 2007).

  116. 116.

    See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “‘Human Security ’ in the Renaissance? ‘Securitas,’ Infrastructure, Collective Goods, and Natural Hazards in Tuscany and the Upper Rhine Valley,” Historical Social Research 35, no. 4 (2010): 209–233 and Schenk, “Managing Natural Hazards.”

  117. 117.

    Karl August Wittfogel , Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

  118. 118.

    David H. Price, “Wittfogel ’s Neglected Hydraulic/Hydroagricultural Distinction,” Journal of Anthropological Research 50, no. 2 (1994): 197–204, particularly 192–198, rightly points out that critics often overlook Wittfogel’s differentiation into “hydroagricultural” and “hydraulic society;” he only sees the latter as conntected to oriental despotism: e.g. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, 17–19. On the criticism see also Stefan Breuer, Max Weber s Herrschaftssoziologie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1991), 110f.; Udo Witzens, “Kritik der Thesen Karl A. Wittfogels über den hydraulischen Despotismus mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des historischen singhalesischen Theravāda-Buddhismus” (PhD diss., University of Heidelberg , 2000), accessed September 16, 2010, http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/1937.

  119. 119.

    See the contributions of Verena Daiber, Stefan Knost, and Michael Falser in this book.

  120. 120.

    See migration patterns, contact zones, and cycles specified in André Gunder Frank, “The Centrality of Central Asia,” Studies in History 8, no. 1 (1992): 50–53, 59f., 67–69, 90–92.

  121. 121.

    See Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein , The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), who specifies that he would like to hold to his 1974 thesis of a “capitalist world economy” (xxix, emphasis by the author) starting in sixteenth-century Europe against the criticism of Eurocentrism. On the criticism, see Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). On medieval developments see Folker Reichert, Begegnungen im Mittelalter: Die Entdeckung Ostasiens im Mittelalter, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 15 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992); Faruk Tabak, “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis? A Geohistorical Perspective on Pax Mongolica,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 19, no. 1 (1996): 23–48; Ulrich Menzel, “Imperium oder Hegemonie?” pt. 2, “Pax Mongolica 1230–1350 und die Globalisierung vor der Globalisierung,” Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialwissenschaften 79 (Juni 2007): 47–58.

  122. 122.

    Africa is represented via the contributions on Northern Africa and Egypt (Büssow-Schmitz, Borsch, Quack, Chalyan-Daffner, von Hees, Rassi). Unfortunately, the history of natural disasters in Sub-saharan Africa is mostly unexplored and so cannot be included here.

  123. 123.

    Greg Bankoff , “Design by Disasters: Seismic Architecture and Cultural Adaptation to Earthquakes,” in Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction, ed. Fred Krüger et al. (London : Routledge, 2015), 53–71.

  124. 124.

    See Detlef Müller-Mahn, “Riskscapes: The Spatial Dimensions of Risk,” in The Spatial Dimension of Risk: How Geography Shapes the Emergence of Riskscapes, ed. Detlef Müller-Mahn, The Earthscan Risk in Society Series 27 (London : Routledge, 2013), 22–36.

  125. 125.

    Bankoff, “Design by Disasters,” 64.

  126. 126.

    See the contributions by Thomas Labbé, Kristine Chalyan-Daffner, and Nitin Sinha in this book.

  127. 127.

    See Albrecht Classen, introduction to East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 14 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 135–137, 211–216.

  128. 128.

    On the term and its emergence from the mid-twentieth century see Olaf Bach, Die Erfindung der Globalisierung: Entstehung und Wandel eines zeitgeschichtlichen Grundbegriffs (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013); the matter—globalisation as a process—is, however, generally dated back to the sixteenth or late eighteenth century; on this and the problem of periodisation, see Conrad, Globalgeschichte, 146–163.

  129. 129.

    See the much-discussed books of Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China , Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London : Allen Lane, 2011); André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

  130. 130.

    If the degree of environmental degradation as a result of human action is to serve as a criterion for a different division into epochs, we must consider the observations of John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). He also sees large-scale human-induced ecological changes in non-European cultures , before the colonial expansion of the West.

  131. 131.

    See above, note 40; back in 1967, US medievalist and historian of technology Lynn White Jr. found specific developments of medieval Christianity to be responsible for an allegedly unique, nature -exploiting and destroying western mentality, namely the linear time conception (history of salvation/ideology of progress), anthropocentrism (dominium terrae, imago Dei), the destruction of natural sanctification (disenchantment, secularisation) and the paradigm of creation as a work of art (artifex mundi), see White, Historical Roots.

  132. 132.

    “Universalgeschichtliche Probleme wird der Sohn der modernen europäischen Kulturwelt unvermeidlicher- und berechtigterweise unter der Fragestellung behandeln: welche Verkettung von Umständen hat dazu geführt, daß gerade auf dem Boden des Okzidents, und nur hier, Kulturerscheinungen auftraten, welche doch—wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen—in einer Entwicklungsrichtung von universeller Bedeutung und Gültigkeit lagen?” Max Weber , Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920), 1. This passage has not been translated in Max Weber , The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

  133. 133.

    Eric Lionel Jones , The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  134. 134.

    Jones , The European Miracle, 3–152.

  135. 135.

    Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of its Special Path (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Arie de Ruijter, “Globalization: A Challenge to the Social Sciences,” in Globalization and Development Studies: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Frans Johan Schuurman (London : Sage, 2001), 31.

  136. 136.

    Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 and 2009).

  137. 137.

    See the contributions in Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu, eds., Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 1300–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

  138. 138.

    See Franz Mauelshagen, “Disaster and Political Culture in Germany since 1500,” in Mauch and Pfister , Natural Disasters , 41–75, particularly 49–57; Schenk, “Managing Natural Hazards,” 44f.

  139. 139.

    Members: Kristine Chalyan-Daffner, Eleonor Marcussen , and Gerrit Jasper Schenk; see the website of the project A6 “Cultures of Disaster ” within the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University, accessed August 18, 2013, http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/a-governance -administration/a6.html.

  140. 140.

    On these activities, see the project’s website, accessed August 8, 2013, http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg .de/en/research/a-governance -administration/a6/activities.html.

  141. 141.

    The contributions by Christian Pfister , Martin Bauch, and Michael Falser were written for this volume. Greg Bankoff sharpened his concept of “cultures of disaster ” for the first chapter. Cornel Zwierlein contributed a culturally comparative paper on social interaction with fire disasters . The following papers were published in more discipline specific collections: Fabrizio Nevola, “Picturing Earthquakes in Renaissance Italy ,” in Juneja and Schenk, Disaster as Image, 99–109, 227; Schenk, “Managing Natural Hazards.”

  142. 142.

    On the research status, see Monica Juneja and Franz Mauelshagen, “Disasters and Pre-industrial Societies: Historiographic Trends and Comparative Perspectives,” The Medieval History Journal 10, nos. 1–2 (2007): 1–31, particularly 23–28; Jürg Helbling, “Coping with ‘Natural’ Disasters in Pre-industrial Societies: Some comments,” The Medieval History Journal 10, nos. 1–2 (2007): 429–446.

  143. 143.

    The following paragraphs contain several unmarked quotations or paraphrases from the call for papers collectively drafted in the Junior Research Group; see the website of project A6 at http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg .de/en/research/a-governance -administration/a6.html, accessed August 18, 2013).

  144. 144.

    See Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte,” in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, ed. Reinhart Koselleck, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 38–66 (“Orientierungswissen”). In our context see Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “‘Learning from History’? Chances, Problems, and Limits of Learning from Historical Natural Disasters ,” in Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction, ed. Fred Krüger et al. (London : Routledge, 2015), 72–87, and Uwe Lübken, “‘Historia Magistra Vitae,’ as the Saying Goes: Why Societies Do Not Necessarily Learn from Past Disasters,” in Learning and Calamities: Practices, Interpretations, Patterns, ed. Heike Egner, Marén Schorch, and Marin Voss (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 112–122.

  145. 145.

    See e.g. Rüdiger Glaser and Heiko Stangl, “Climate and Floods in Central Europe since AD 1000: Data, Methods , Results, and Consequences,” Surveys in Geophysics 25, nos. 5–6 (2004): 485. “Knowledge of the past is a key for understanding present and future; this is especially true for climate history.”

  146. 146.

    See e.g. Diamond, Collapse; Sigmar Gabriel, “Wort zum Geleit: Der Klimaschutz—Eine Menschheitsherausforderung,” in Der UN-Weltklimareport: Bericht über eine aufhaltsame Katastrophe, ed. Michael Müller, Ursula Fuentes, and Harald Kohl (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2007), 17–25, particularly 18–23; Nicholas H. Stern, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity (London : Bodley Head, 2009).

  147. 147.

    See e.g. Christian Pfister , “Learning from Nature -Induced Disasters: Theoretical Considerations and Case Studies from Western Europe,” in Mauch and Pfister, Natural Disasters , 17–39, Greg Bankoff , “Historical Concepts of Disaster and Risk,” in The Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction, ed. Ben Wisner, J. C. Gaillard, and Ilan Kelman (London: Routledge, 2012), 37–47.

  148. 148.

    See note 100, particularly Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters,” 43–45.

  149. 149.

    See e.g. William F. Tucker, “Natural Disasters and the Peasantry in Mamluk Egypt ,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 24, no. 2 (1981): 215–224; Akasoy, “Islamic Attitudes;” Akasoy, “Interpreting Earthquakes.”

  150. 150.

    See Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 303–328; overview: Bankoff, Frerks, and Hilhorst, Mapping Vulnerability.

  151. 151.

    See e.g. Jörn Birkmann, ed., Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2006); as an example of the premodern era in Europe see Schenk, “‘Human Security ’ in the Renaissance?”

  152. 152.

    See e.g. Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2006); on the precolonial age, see Ranabir Chakravarti, “Natural Resources and Human Settlements: Perceiving the Environment in India,” in The World in the Year 1000, ed. James Heitzman and Wolfgang Schenkluhn (Lanham: University Press of America, 2004), 48–65.

  153. 153.

    Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson , “Glocalization, Globalization, and Migration: The Case of Scottish Football Supporters in North America,” International Sociology 21, no. 2 (2006), 172; Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London : Sage, 1995), 25–44.

  154. 154.

    See Dekens, Local Knowledge .

  155. 155.

    The contributions do not need to be summarised here; see the conclusions of each contribution and the abstracts.

  156. 156.

    Because of the destruction caused by the civil war in Syria since 2011, Verena Daiber’s photos have a documentary character.

  157. 157.

    Regarding astrometeorology and Apocalypse see chapter three of this book; regarding the deluge see the contribution of Georges Saliba in this book and Christian Rohr , “Sintflutdarstellungen: Ein transkultureller Mythos durch Zeiten und Räume,” in Mensch. Natur. Katastrophe: Von Atlantis bis heute; Begleitband zur Sonderausstellung, ed. Gerrit Jasper Schenk et al., Publikationen der Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen 62 (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014), 166–171.

  158. 158.

    See Chap. 3 and the contributions by Michael Labbé, George Saliba, and Juliette Rassi.

  159. 159.

    See e.g. Nikolas Jaspert, “Austausch-, Transfer- und Abgrenzungsprozesse einer maritimen Großregion: Der Mittelmeerraum (1250–1500),” in Die Welt, 1250–1500, Globalgeschichte 1000–2000 3, ed. Thomas Ertl and Michael Limberger (Wien: Mandelbaum and Magnus, 2009), 138–174.

  160. 160.

    Without individual reference texts, this is primarily about the very diverse search for explanations for the theological interpretation of disasters , the practice of coping by public religious action (services, processions ) and the discourses about political responsibility for disastrous action. Premodern non-European cultures are apparently not more fatalist about disasters than European cultures , see e.g. the contributions by Pfister and Borsch in Chap. 2 and by von Hees and Zwierlein in Chap. 4. It bears repeating that, with reference to the entanglements that have always existed, it is not advisable to idealise the concept of culture —on closer inspection, the borders of ideal cultural types become blurred; the concept is only a (helpful and necessary) analytical tool.

  161. 161.

    See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Common Grounds in Early Modern Disaster Experiences? Some Remarks on New Trends in Historical Disaster Research as Part of Environmental History and Climate History,” in An Environmental History of the Early Modern Period: Experiments and Perspectives, ed. Martin Knoll and Reinhold Rieth (Wien: LIT, 2014), 11–18, here 17f.

  162. 162.

    Best reflected in the entanglement of differing explanatory models, e.g. astrometeorology in chapter 3 (by Joachim Friedrich Quack, Audrius Beinorius, Kristine Chalyan-Daffner, and Eleonor Marcussen ).

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Schenk, G.J. (2017). Historical Disaster Experiences: First Steps Toward a Comparative and Transcultural History of Disasters Across Asia and Europe in the Preindustrial Era. In: Schenk, G. (eds) Historical Disaster Experiences. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9_1

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