Disasters: The "Oceanic Age", 1200-1550CE (original) (raw)

Disasters are a complex subject, not least because we disagree over how to define them. From a historical perspective, a recent synthesis on "disasters and history" has argued for more clarity in terminology-making a distinction between "hazards" (anticipated environmental or biological processes that create pressure or stress on a society), "shocks" (a hazard that is unexpected), and "disasters". Whether these hazards or shocks turn into full-blown disasters-defined as creating a major negative impact on society-depended on direct interventions from different institutions and individuals, the likelihood and nature of which were dependent on relationships to and distributions of resources (Van Bavel et al., 2020). Those societies able to prevent disasters might well be classified as "resilient"-although, as iterated later in this chapter, this is also a complex term, full of pitfalls and contradictions, with very different meanings across cultural contexts, and often loaded ideological and politicized baggage. When measuring the negative impact of a disaster on society, there are several indicators that spring to mind. Deaths, scale of mass displacement, damage to housing, capital goods, and land, aggregate economic destruction (measured in GDP, for example) or economic redistribution (measured by Gini coefficients of wealth, for example) are quite straightforward to reconstruct and fairly uncontroversial. Others are more difficult or come with nuances-especially if played out over a longer time span such as ecological degradation (the effects unfolding incipiently over the course of centuries before "turning fast" such as sand drifts), diminished health status, and trauma. The next question is to what extent can we reconstruct these indicators in the period 1200-1550CE? The short answer is perhaps unexpected-it is rather difficult. First, we often lack source material. Even with the most basic indicator such as number of deaths caused by a disaster, reliable serial information does not exist in large amounts prior to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Where we do have fragments of this information before 1550CE, it is usually for a select few areas of western Europe (less frequently, eastern Europe: Guzowski,