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SoSe 20: (Natural) Hazards and Security in Early Modern History

Cornel Zwierlein

Information for students

digital formats will be used; further information will be available via Blackboard/email

Comments

Though we are perceiving still today the world as being in danger and threatened by a multitude of technical and natural hazards, eventually framed by a global climate crisis, in fact, early modern states and societies, far more depending from ´nature´ as rooted in a 90% agrarian economy, were surely far more vulnerable at least to natural hazards than modern ones, in general. Draughts, floods, earthquakes, fires, epidemics and diseases, insect attacks and other kinds of hazards were constant threats. The Great Fire of London 1666 and the Lisbon earthquake 1755 are just two very famous events still remembered today in the society´s collective memory, but state and society, literature, religion and science in all regions of Europe were confronted with similar threats and were trying to cope with them by ways of security provisions and infrastructures, institutions and means of resilience like insurances, organizations, new forms of planning and rescuing human beings, cattle and mobile goods. Private companies were likewise dealing with those problems. The enlightened learned societies and academies were promoting price contests and were discussing the origins of earthquakes, how to secure houses from lightening, how to cope with diseases. Preachers tried to explain the meaning of those calamities in the framework of punishment theology or, later, within more sophisticated forms of ´physicotheology´ taking into account the latest research in natural sciences and trying to merge it with the biblical concept of the world. Since some years, early modern historiography has recognized this to be an important field of research, touching many disciplines, stimulating many methodological debates and necessitating always the dialogue across periods -: in the end, those natural hazards were, in similar forms, a similar problem from the late medieval times until the age of industrialization, whereby the question of change, development and difference between the periods is important as well as recognizing the eventually long-lasting continuities even until today what might be renown as the ´World Risk Society´. close