On the History of Disasters…

Dear Editor:

Professor Burnham’s review in Perspectives, April 1988, of research on the history of natural disasters almost ignores work done outside the United States and seriously under­rates the volume and coherence of the litera­ture now available. While Burnham is right that historians for long have treated disasters as transient shocks of no systematic sig­nificance, published historical work in English is by no means restricted to the output of items he calculates at “one or two a year, mainly in local history journals.” His finding may reflect the poverty of the abstracting services avail­able to historians but it is misleading.

Moreover, the quality of the conceptualizing in recent works is far better than in tradition­al, single-incident, “agent-specific” studies (which refer to individual shocks caused by particular types of natural event). Local his­torians, natural science specialists, and sensa­tion-seeking journalists have certainly con­centrated on individual events or on compiling unweighted lists of occurrences, hut interna­tionally we do have a growing secondary literature which attempts to construct fruitful generalizations about the impact of disasters in history.

I would like to inspire a little more con­fidence in American scholars by noting that the non-American (but still English-language) literature does indeed contain studies of dis­ aster history. In particular I draw attention to the work published over the past ten years or so by the Comparative Economic History Group at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. The modern literature, of which ours in part, seeks to classify disasters and ex­plore their general effects.

Despite fragmentation, the difficulties of collating evidence, tracing secondary authorities, or coping with the lack of system in many secondary sources, the history of dis­asters as a whole now exists as a developing area of the historical sciences. I hope that American scholars will play a full role in this international exercise.