Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Bas van Bavel, Daniel R. Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Matthew Hannaford, Maïka
de Keyzer, Eline van Onacker, and Tim Soens. *Disasters and History: The
Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies*. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020. x + 231 pp. $29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1108477178.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Ilan Noy, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand.



History’s path is strewn with disasters, and at least this reader did not
require any convincing that the history of disasters and disasters’ impact
on history are both worthy topics of a book-length investigation. Van
Bavel, Curtis, Dijkman, Hannaford, de Keyzer, van Onacker, and Soens
collaborated in writing a book that aims to provide a comprehensive
description of the insights learnt from investigating the global history of
disasters. And, indeed, the book delivers on this promise, and provides the
interested reader with many nuggets of insights and ideas to ponder. The
authors, a group of mostly historians and sociologists from the Low
Countries, cover a long time span (from the Pre-Christian Mediterranean
Basin to the West Africa Ebola epidemic of 2014), a varied geographic
terrain, and several types of mostly sudden-onset disasters. They further
elucidate on how historical developments are both catalysts for disasters,
shape their impacts and their immediate aftermath, and are also affected by
disasters in the long term, throughout a sometimes decades-long recovery
process.

I first approvingly note that the authors managed to make the book “open
access.” The book is available as a PDF file, for free, on the publisher’s
website (Cambridge University Press). Given the primacy of disaster
concerns in many places — including in very disadvantaged ones — it is
important that this book be made available to anyone who might benefit from
its insights. And, indeed, it does provide insights that can be beneficial
to the puzzled policymaker who is tasked with reducing disaster risk,
improving disaster risk management or the post-disaster emergency phase, or
with designing policies for long-term community recovery.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake-fire-tsunami disaster was perhaps the first
modern disaster — one about which a lot of data were collected, and which
was international in its scope. It is the prototypical event the authors
aim to learn from and indeed describe. Many of the themes that constantly
crop up – for example the role of inequality in shaping the impact, the
immediate response, the longer-term recovery, and the potential for
disasters to change governance and legal institutions – were all clearly
present in the 1755 event. However, instead of vertiginously ranging across
space and time and picking examples from these diverse places and time
periods, the book could have benefitted from diving into a few example
events and describing them more thoroughly. History, after all, is often
hidden in the details.

As the authors note, “disasters can be understood and explained only by
placing them in their social, economic, political, and cultural contexts.”
This would be the conventional historical argument. At the same time, they
also believe in the external validity of the lessons one can learn from
past disasters to inform our behaviour before, during, and after the
disasters that are destined to occur.  As an economist, I share this
aspiration for external validity. Determined to learn global contemporary
lessons from very specific circumstances, however, the authors sometimes
stray too aggressively in that direction (for example, in their discussion
about unequal mortality burdens and the deaths of clergy in a 1693
earthquake in Sicily which toppled many churches). But these are quibbles,
and overall, the book manages to provide many insights, based on a lot of
examples.

Many of the terms used by the authors — e.g., vulnerability, resilience,
adaptation, mitigation, exposure, and even disaster — have multiple
definitions, which often diverge across the various disciplines that study
disasters. For example, economists (my tribe) and historians do not define
resilience in the same way, and seismic engineers define this term
differently from either. As such, I think it is incumbent on us to try and
speak in the same language, rather than hoping others will grasp our own.
The authors themselves seem to define some terms differently across
chapters, and that may further confuse the reader.

Fortunately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) have produced
simple glossaries, defining many of these contentious terms. We ought to
start using them. Economists frequently pay little attention to such heated
terminological disagreements, and largely adopt the view that what looks
like a duck, walks like a duck, and is understood by most people to be a
duck, should be called a duck. It is perhaps regrettable that the authors
are too polite and end up discussing these terminological disagreements at
length. They thus miss several opportunities to move us away from rather
pointless disagreements and toward a consensus shaped by the IPCC and UNDRR.

One other quibble is that most of the history they cover focuses on
high-income countries and their travails (with a specific and
understandable focus on the Low Countries). Disasters, however, are more
consequential in other parts of the world, parts which are poorly served by
limited historical scholarship and hence by the authors themselves.
Clearly, we need to do better as the most difficult challenges for disaster
risk management are in those parts of the world we know least about. The
authors readily acknowledge this lacuna, but as happens only too
frequently, they are unable or unwilling to fill in what is lacking.

What is mainly lacking for me, as an economist, is quantifications. The
authors describe myriad ways in which disaster dynamics are shaped by
culture, by institutions, by economic structures, and by other mechanisms,
but they almost never try to describe the magnitude of these channels, or
indeed determine which ones are more important. Even when discussing the
main global database that measures disaster impacts (EMDAT — collected by a
research centre at the University of Louvain), they inaccurately define the
criteria it uses (p. 63) and do not mention the quantifications it contains.

Finally, the book was published in 2020, but it was written before a new
coronavirus variant somehow escaped its zoonotic host and changed our
thinking about the possible ways in which epidemics could evolve and affect
us. Indeed, our assessments as to which countries are more resilient to
this type of disaster shock proved completely off the mark; unexpectedly,
countries like Vietnam or Taiwan (or my own country, New Zealand) proved to
be much more successful in handling the pandemic than the United States,
the United Kingdom, or indeed all the rest of Europe. Had we done more
historical research, on the 1918 Influenza pandemic for example, would we
have been able to predict that?

I do hope that the authors, having observed the last three years since they
finished writing this book, are now hard at work on a sequel, one that
tries to take all the insights learned from historical disasters, and
especially from past epidemics, and consider them in reference to the very
diverse local experiences that we have all observed and lived through since
COVID-19 emerged.



Ilan Noy is the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, at
Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. He is the founding
Editor-in-Chief of *Economics of Disasters and Climate Change *and recently
authored (with Tom Uher) “Four New Horsemen of an Apocalypse? Solar Flares,
Super-volcanoes, Pandemics, and Artificial Intelligence” in that journal.

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