Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies by Bas van Bavel et al.

Abstract

On May 17, 2021, cyclone Tauktae made landfall in the state of Gujarat on the west coast of India. Classified as an extremely severe cyclonic storm by the Indian Meteorological Department, Tauktae resulted in at least 169 deaths and the displacement of more than 200,000 people. Its destructive force was boosted by India’s struggle with the second global wave of covid-19 at the time. Tauktae made landfall on the day when India recorded its second highest single-day death toll at the time. India had to deal with two disasters simultaneously, one meteorological-hydrological and one biological.Disasters and History helps us to understand such disasters by treating historical disasters as a laboratory “to test theories with relevance beyond particular time-space contexts” (43). The authors show what seemingly diverse events such as earthquakes, droughts, or epidemics have in common. Although varying considerably in both their causes and consequences, these disasters are all triggered by biophysical shocks and hazards. Whether a particular shock, or set of shocks, turns into a disaster depends on the social, economic, political, and cultural setting in which it occurs. Various pre-conditions make a society more or less vulnerable to these hazards. Moreover, the manner in which people react to these shocks, or fail to do so, determines the results. Hence, the two central concepts that this book features, as the subtitle clearly suggests, are vulnerability and resilience.The authors have gained extensive experience in researching historical disasters, both independently and collaboratively. Their combined effort allows them to cover the period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. The case studies that illustrate the core arguments of the book may be limited in number, but they aptly represent different types of disaster—The Black Death of 1348, the medieval and early modern North Sea floods, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the 1930s American Dust Bowl, the twentieth-century famines of Sub-Saharan Africa, and the tsunami in Japan that led to the Fukushima disaster.This book is, above all, an excellent guide to research about historical disasters; each entry in the table of contents could apply to the design of a distinct research project. Chapter 3, about materials and methods, is particularly helpful in this respect. When attempting to assess the severity of an initial ecological shock in the period before instrumental recording, scholars often faced difficulties in finding reliable evidence. Whenever direct recordings of hazards by historical contemporaries, such as those in English manorial accounts, are not available, the authors suggest a turn to “indirect recordings of processes and phenomena that were influenced by environmental conditions,” such as harvest accounts or registers of taxes and rents (44). Similarly, a lack of direct evidence about the severity of a disaster, such as mortality statistics, can find some compensation in a range of proxy data like parish registers or burial records.For scholars who approach disasters from an interdisciplinary perspective, the sub-chapter about combining historical data with sources from the natural sciences is highly instructive (53–57). The rapidly developing discipline of paleoclimatology—an obvious boon to scholars of historical disasters—has opened new windows onto climate history and extreme weather events in the past. The authors present both the possibilities and the limitations of paleoclimatic reconstructions. Although these data add an additional layer to the written records mentioned above, they still need to be viewed critically since they vary in their geographical coverage and temporal resolution. The relevance of Disasters and History to every conceivable disaster, whether past, present, or future, makes it an invaluable resource for interdisciplinary scholars of climate and environment.