Description Edited collection of six articles that explore eighteenth-century catastrophes around the globe. Studies consider questions of risk, vulnerability, resilience, colonialism, and the human role in creating “disasters.” Creator Johns, Alessa, ed. Publisher New York: […]
Tag Archives: natural disasters
A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination
Description Miller links the French Revolution and the violence of the Terror to eighteenth-century understandings of the natural world (for example, earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains) by examining the rhetoric and writings of the revolutionaries themselves. […]
This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason
Description To date, the most complete, well-researched, and historically sound study on the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake – considered one of the most transformative “natural” disasters in history. Explores the urban, social, and political landscape of […]
Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783
Description This text surveys the British Caribbean from 1624 through the calamitous hurricane season of 1780. Mulcahy examines the various natural hazards that the region was prone to, including food shortages and disease, but focuses […]
“De la percepción popular a la reflexión erudite: La transmisión de la ‘cultura de la catástrofe’ en la España del siglo XVIII”
Description In this article, Alberola argues that while the first formal reflections on the physical nature of disasters appeared in the philosophical and scientific works of the Classical era, it was in the eighteenth century […]
Natural Disasters and the Debate on the Unity or Plurality of Enlightenments
Description Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel’s thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment […]