Franz Mauelshagen No.

of words: 8880
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities

DISASTER MANAGEMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE

Introduction

The field of historical disaster research is not much older than twenty years.1 To be sure, books
and articles about the history of earthquakes, about the bubonic plague or famines were written
and published much earlier, and the chronologies of misery that emerged from those studies
proved useful not only for the field of history.2 Our knowledge about the deep history of hydro-
meteorological extreme events is also based on older research that coincides with the beginnings
of historical climatology, brought to life some fifty years ago by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
Hubert Horace Lamb.3 All of these research fields ran parallel for a long time owing to the frag-
mentation of history into sub-disciplines such as the history of medicine, urban history, and rural
history. It was only around the mid-1990s that historians discovered disasters as an overarching
research field. This was not entirely coincidental, as the United Nations had — in a brilliant coup
— proclaimed the last decade of a century of misery the International Decade of Natural Disas-
ter Reduction. The thus implied focus on natural disasters coincided with a growing interest for
the relationship between nature and culture as well as for research in the field of environmental
history. However, historical disaster research never fitted the framework of environmental histo-
ry entirely, and the more research interests have broadened to present, the smaller the risk for the
field to be swallowed by a sub-discipline or any other niche.

1
The emergence of historical studies of disaster has been sketched by Franz Mauelshagen and Monica Juneja,
"Disasters and pre-industrial societies: Historiographic trends and comparative perspectives," The Medieval History
Journal 10, no. 1-2 (2007), 4-10; for more recent summaries see Frank Ükötter, Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), 84-88, and Cornel Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus.
Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen früher Neuzeit und Moderne, Umwelt und Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2011), 16-24, and Eleonora Rohland, "Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1718-1965: a history of adaptation"
(Inaugural Dissertation, Ruhr University Bochum, 2013), 26-35 (unpublished). Only Rohland includes recent re-
search in the United States. Other recent research has been published Australia (Charles Zika and his group) and
England.
2
Enzo Boschi, Catalogo dei forti terremoti in Italia dal 461 a.C. al 1990 (Rom1997); Grégory Quenet, Les
tremblements de terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. La naissance d'un risque (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), Gisler
for Switzerland; France: Quenet.
3
For a brief history of historical climatology and the recent involvement of climate impact research with the history
of disasters see Franz Mauelshagen, Klimageschichte der Neuzeit 1500-1900 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 2010), 20-28 &114-130; furthermore Franz Mauelshagen and Christian Pfister, "Vom Klima zur
Gesellschaft: Klimageschichte im 21. Jahrhundert," in KlimaKulturen, ed. Harald Welzer, Hans-Georg Soeffner, and
Dana Giesecke (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010), of which an English translation is soon to be published: Franz
Mauelshagen and Christian Pfister, "From climate to society: Climate history in the 21st century," in Climate and
society: A global perspective, ed. Ranjan Chakrabarti (Delhi: Primus Books, forthcoming). Just recently, Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie has published his own account of the birth of climate history: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
Daniel Rousseau, Naissance de l'histoire du climat, Collection Météos (Paris: Hermann, 2013),
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The value of the synthesis created by the term “disaster” unfortunately rarely gets high-
lighted compared to the usual lament about its vagueness. Surely, this is a consequence of the
modern habit of speaking of a “disaster” in a by now multitudinous variety of events, regardless
of temporal, geographical and cultural differences. Yet, even if the inflationary use of “disaster”
only came about during the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is possible to employ the term
for a comparable spectrum of events in pre-modern Europe. At that time those occurrences were
rather summarized in the vocabulary of mischief, as “calamity”, “accident”, or “plague”.4 These
terms were established in almost all European languages by way of the old lingua franca, Latin.
This early linguistic diffusion created a sphere of communication and action, which may be unit-
ed with the modern discourse on disasters without running the risk of being anachronistic.
In the past twenty years, studies about disasters in Europe clearly have had their epochal
focus in pre-modern history, that is before the nineteenth and twentieth century, for various rea-
sons: Historians of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and of the early modern period have taken up the
subject more rapidly and readily than their colleagues in modern and contemporary history; the
historiography of the plague, influenced by the caesura marked by the European pandemic of the
fourteenth century, had already created a focus on the late Middle Ages and the early modern
period (at least Cholera as a problem of the history of medicine and as a problem of public health
has become the focus of some scholarly research on the nineteenth century); and famines have
(not quite justly) stopped being a subject of research for contemporary history since the Europe-
an “liberation from the Malthusian trap” as a consequence of industrialization.5 A whole array of

4
The linguistic turn may have left many scholars unaffected; it has nevertheless made futile any opposition against
the linguistic constitution of the social world and against a contemplation of the history of concepts (Begriffsges-
chichte). There are some attempts at delineating the Begriffsgeschichte of “disaster” and “catastrophe”: a brief ac-
count can be found in the introduction to Dieter Groh, Michael Kempe, and Franz Mauelshagen, eds.,
Naturkatastrophen: Beiträge zu ihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis
ins 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 13, Literatur und Anthropologie (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), 15-9; Olaf Briese,
"„Genommen auß den Comoedien“. Katastrophenbegriffe der neuzeitlichen Geologie," in Wissenschaftsgeschichte
als Begriffsgeschichte. Terminologische Umbrüche im Entstehungsprozess der modernen Wissenschaften, ed.
Michael Eggers and Matthias Rothe (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009; Olaf Briese and Timo Günther,
"Katastrophe. Terminologische Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft," Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 51(2009) are
much more complete surveys, but they hardly consider the Middle Ages and have a clear preference for German
sources. Gerrit Jasper Schenk, "Vormoderne Sattelzeit? Disastro, Katastrophe, Strafgericht – Worte, Begriffe und
Konzepte für rapiden Wandel im langen Mittelalter," in Krisengeschichte(n). ‚Krise‘ als Leitbegriff und
Erzählmuster in kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, ed. Carla Meyer, Katja Patzel-Mattern, and Gerrit Schenk,
Beihefte der Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2013) provides many
important addenda. Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen früher Neuzeit und
Moderne: 17, criticized that the existing focus on the terms “disaster” and “catastrophe” is insufficient to meet the
standards of traditional Begriffsgeschichte. He is certainly right that other words need to be considered for a more
complete account of the historical semantics involved with earlier and present discourses of disaster. An attempt to
do this based on ancient Greek historiography is Mischa Meier, "Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe in der
griechischen Historiographie – einige einleitende Anmerkungen," Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007).
5
See Anton Brandenberger, Ausbruch aus der "Malthusianischen Falle". Versorgungslage und
Wirtschaftsentwicklung im Staate Bern, 1755-1797 (Bern: Lang, 2004), and also Robert William Fogel, "Second
thoughts on the European escape from hunger, famines, chronic malnutrition, and mortality rates," in Nutrition and
Poverty, ed. Siddiqur R. Osmani (Oxford and New York: 1992; Robert William Fogel, The escape from hunger and
premature death, 1700-2100. Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), However, there are later subsistence crises, particularly at the end of the first World War, that deserve greater
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 3

scourges Europeans struggled with for centuries were on the decline in the nineteenth century.
The latter is also true for urban conflagrations. Even though cities in most parts of Europe grew
much quicker than before, the new availability of stone as a building material became the main
cause for a reduction of the fire hazard, which has been called the “fire gap,” and is clearly visi-
ble in the fire statistics of the nineteenth century.6 It is quite understandable that the European
liberation from some of the oldest traumatic threats has been fostering a rather unbroken faith in
progress to this day. It is expressed in a feeling of the calculability of risks, that industrialized
societies have rendered nature controllable, and that society merely needs more self-control in
order also to ban technological hazards. This feeling, still deeply ingrained in the sciences, has
essentially shaped the image of a successful modernity and to this day has masked the fact that
risks in the modern world have not only multiplied but exponentiated. Yet, what is even more
significant in the long-term, is the fact that the deeply colonial consciousness of the civilizing
control over nature has become globalized in our present post-colonial world.
The self-consciousness of modernity has blurred our vision on earlier epochs of European
history. That is, in a kind of argumentum e contrario today there is a rather widespread consen-
sus that European pre-industrial societies were almost helpless in the face of the forces of nature
and that they hardly had any means to manage and prevent disaster situations — a pattern that
has also become part of “Western” constructions of the “Third World”.7 This belief further holds
that for lack of knowledge, technology, and capital, those societies ultimately had no alternative
to religious fatalism and that they accepted disasters as a punishment from god without re-
sistance. It certainly takes little effort to dismantle such clichés. The following typology of medi-
eval and early modern disaster management would already suffice, despite the fact that no com-
prehensiveness can be expected at the current stage of research. It is rather more difficult to trace
the temporal development of disaster management, as the current state of research hardly offers
avenues to such questions. I will propose one of the more obvious solutions to this problem in
the following paragraphs, namely, to connect the development of disaster management with the
history of state power and state formation in Europe.8

attention. Agrarian crises may not have lead to major famines with high mortality in the 19th and 20th centuries.
However, their economic effect is still visible in statistics of agrarian productivity.
6
Lionel E. Frost and Eric L. Jones, "The fire gap and the greater durability of nineeenth century cities," Planning
Perspectives 4(1989). The statistics in Jones / Porter has been criticized by Pearson. The best survey over the statis-
tical evidence of fire risk and its conjunctures over the centuries is given by Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus.
Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen früher Neuzeit und Moderne: 74-120.
7
Greg Bankoff, "Rendering the World Unsafe. "Vulnerability" as a Western Discourse," Disasters 25, no. 1 (2001)
has convincingly traced the historical roots of recent discourses of vulnerability in global risk geographies back to
colonial discourses about tropicality and the (colonial and post-colonial) discourse on development. See also Greg
Bankoff, Georg Frerks, and Dorothea Hilhorst, eds., Mapping vulnerability: disasters, development, and people
(London, Sterling: Earthscan Publications, 2004).
8
I have had the opportunity to present research on early modern disaster management and its potential implications
for the history of state power in Europe on various occasions. This is the point to thank the participants and discus-
sants at conferences and workshops in St. Andrews (ESEH, 2001), Florence (ESEH, 2005), Ascona (conference on
“Statebuilding from Below”, 2005), Grenoble (conference on “Solidarité et assurance: Les sociétés européennes face
aux catastrophes, 17e-21e siècles”, 2006), Zürich (lecture series of the Institute for the History of Medicine, 2006),
Berlin (conference entitled “Urbs incense”, 2007), and Heidelberg (workshop on “Cultures of Disaster”, 2009) for
their extremely valuable comments and suggestions for improvement.
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Typology of Disaster Management

Essentially, the requirements for a typology of disaster management in preindustrial Europe are
restricted to studies about singular disastrous events. One consequence of this starting point is
that we have accumulated a comparatively large amount of detailed knowledge about specific
cases while mid- to long term processes are relatively difficult to assess. The evolution of disas-
ter management can best be reconstructed on the example of city fires or of epidemics, such as
the cholera or the plague. With regard to the plague, it is a particular advantage that research
reaches back into a time when approaches of structural history dominated the field, which are
more apt at providing a glimpse of processes than the micro-perspectives of cultural histories.
Historical disaster research is an excellent example of how the erstwhile post-modernist avant-
garde fostered a conservative revival of histoire événementielle. As a consequence of this inner-
disciplinary development, our historical knowledge has been suffering from fragmentation in
many areas of study. Among other things, this has also affected the practical relevance of histori-
cal research.
There are many definitions of disaster (or: emergency) management, among which those
are most useful that combine the aspects of disaster preparedness, response and recovery.9 In this
perspective, disaster / emergency management is an organised form of action (which includes
communication as a form of action) aimed at preparedness for disasters (protection, mitigation)
or their prevention, response to and recovery from disasters. This tripartition offers a temporal
structure easily applicable to various historical contexts. But should we at all speak of “manage-
ment” with regard to the pre-modern past? Assuming that “management” is a late modern con-
ceptualization, historians of medieval and early modern Europe may hesitate using this word.
However, one does not need to be overly cautious, as it would be rather questionable to make the
existence of managerial action depend on the invention of a neologism; moreover, “to manage”
and “management” were in fact words invented into the Italian, French and English languages
during the early modern period, and they became applied to a wide spectrum of action, including
governmental action, as early as the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century.10
The role of religion in pre-industrial Europe must be considered a more serious obstacle
to speaking of medieval or early modern “disaster management”. There are too many historians
and sociologists still believing that “modern” disaster management is the outcome of a victory of
scientific rationality over religious “superstition” — as if disaster or emergency management
were impossible before the scientific revolution by virtue of an anathema of “the Church”. It is
truly remarkable how the myth of an Ancien régime of fear has kept historians of early modernity
and modernity from noting the complexity and ambivalence of religious discourse.11

9
E.g. the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies defines disaster management as “organi-
zation and management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies, in
particular preparedness, response and recovery in order to lessen the impact of disasters.” See
http://www.ifrc.org/en/what-we-do/disaster-management/about-disaster-management/, last accessed 31 August
2013.
10
English dictionaries are evidence for this, see ...
11
There is one book in particular to be held responsible for the intellectual damage that has been done: Jean
Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles): une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), a “classic” that has
never been translated into English, but has left a deep impression on French and German scholars.
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 5

To illustrate the latter point, one only needs to reconsider the idea of peccatogenic causa-
tion of disasters or, in other words, disasters as divine punishment — an idea that was shared
across different Christian confessions, and even between religions (Christian, Jewish and Mus-
lim).12 It seems that little else was more universally shared in ante-Enlightenment Europe than
peccatogenic modes of thought. However, drawing any generalising conclusions about its con-
crete influence is a tricky undertaking, unless one stays in the safe realm of Platonic ideas. Nei-
ther was divine punishment an externalisation of responsibility, as some sociologists have ar-
gued13 — it was obviously the opposite —; nor was it simply a useful tool for political authori-
ties to keep their populations in check by virtue of a harmonious cooperation with “the church”;
nor was it an argument for fatalistic inaction. In reality, there was sometimes inaction, though
hardly ever due to shear fatalism; there was not one church but many confessions (and churches),
and their relations with political authorities were often far from harmonious. And last but not
least, there were political and economic interests outside religion, and there were other than pec-
catogenic explanations for disasters.
Sins required social management, and the churches saw themselves as institutions led by
experts in handling sinful people. The only direct, general and reliable conclusion we may draw
from the idea of peccatogenic causation is that disasters were serious disturbances in the “moral
economy” of community life as they provided unambiguous evidence that something was rot-
ten.14 However, this was the point where the unambiguity ended. When real people apply ab-
stract ideas in concrete situations, the result is ambiguity. Just one example: When lightening
ignited the belfry of Zürich’s central church building, the Großmünster, in 1572, it was not con-
troversial that God’s wrath had been over the city. But while the city’s reformed clergy an-
nounced a decline in the number of attenders at church to have been the cause, some members of
the community believed the fire had been a clear sign of divine discontent with the clergy’s posi-
tion on the question of poor relief; somewhat later, in a closed hearing, the clergy blamed the city
council for its failures in the area of moral management arguing that the fire of the Großmün-
ster’s belfry was a symbolic hint at the city council. Grinding their teeth, the city council agreed
to issue a moral mandate and to pay for the repair of the church. Still, it seems that the greatest of
all concerns was that the Catholic enemies of the city would use the fire as yet another oppor-
tunity to polemicize against the Reformation.15
There are many good reasons to start a typology of disaster management in pre-industrial
Europe with a discussion of religion, instead of reducing the impact of religion to its (supposed)
negative effects on scientific and technological progress. Religious rituals and discipline were
clearly conceptualized as a measure of prevention against divine wrath (preparedness), but only

12
The neologism “peccatogenic” was inspired by the word “anthropogenic” and first coined by my colleague Mi-
chael Kempe; we introduced it in our introduction to Groh, Kempe, and Mauelshagen, Groh, Kempe et al. (Hg.)
2003 – Naturkatastrophen, 20.
13
For example: Kurt Imhof, "Katastrophenkommunikation in der Moderne," in Katastrophen und ihre Bewältigung.
Perspektiven und Positionen. Referate einer Vorlesungsreihe des Collegium generale der Universität Bern im
Sommersemester 2003, ed. Christian Pfister and Stephanie Summermatter (Bern: Haupt Verlag, 2004).
14
The term was coined by Edward Palmer Thompson, "The moral economy of the Englisch crowd in the 18th
century," Past and Present 50(1971) and later picked up by German historians, Dieter Groh in particular, but also by
Wolfgang Behringer.
15
Franz Mauelshagen, Wunderkammer auf Papier: Die Wickiana zwischen Reformation und Volksglaube,
Frühneuzeit-Forschungen (Epfendorf: bibliotheca academica Verlag, 2011),
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 6

radical confessional minorities would claim a monopoly of explanation. Religious opposition

against technological self-protection, e.g. against flooding (dikes) or lightening (conductors), is
generally overrated. In a majority of those disputes, church representatives were concerned that
“natural” explanations would claim exclusivity and, therefore, they argued in defence of divine
power as causa finalis. In the past, many historians overlooked that this was a position both will-
ing and capable of integrating natural causes.
Humanitarian action is another reason to start with religion, because it is deeply rooted in
religious traditions of charity and has been practiced by the churches for centuries. Ecclesiastical
institutions were in charge of poor relief and public health care all over Europe before the state
began becoming active in this field. The church’s long-standing charitable practices also gave it
a particularly strong role when it came to coping with loss of life and property. Had ministers
confined themselves to preaching that the occurrence of disasters was people’s own fault, they
would at best have been ignored, or, more likely, lynched. Therefore, reducing the church’s ac-
tions to the rhetoric of sin and punishment would come close to equaling the politics of present-
day parties with their electoral program.
Furthermore, food and financial donations provided after city fires and earthquakes also
stood in the context of Christian caritas. Neighboring communities regularly stepped in to help
with clearing debris or rebuilding. Donors were usually wealthy burghers of the disaster-stricken
city or surrounding towns or villages. Neighboring communities often gave the offering of their
parish church, collected money over several weeks, or initiated special collections. Apart from
the church, cities and princes also donated funds from their tax revenue. A special kind of soli-
darity – even across relatively large distances – is observable in city confederations. As the prac-
tice of donations in disaster situations acquired forms in early modern Europe, the question
arose, how far solidarity was optional or compulsory. No definite answer can be given to this
query, as principles of reciprocity in disaster aid or territorial structures could indeed render do-
nations seemingly obligatory. For the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Bartlome and Flückiger
showed for the city of Bern how the geography of donations changed after three great urban con-
flagrations (1405, 1535 and 1575), reasoning that the enlargement of Bern’s territory had an im-
portant part in the change. Doubtlessly, in this context the pressure for donations was great, yet
presumably also reciprocal so that over the long-term, Bern would not remain the only city reap-
ing the benefits of the new territorial structures.16 It is likely that the growing number of places
from which donations originated mirrors an intensification of state formation.
Insurance is still deemed the flagship of modernity and is often portrayed as an alterna-
tive to the traditional model of charity. Marine insurance against the risk of drowned trade goods
had its beginning in fourteenth-century Italy. This practice spread from Florence, Genoa, Paler-
mo and Venice in different directions, for example to the east via Ragusa, but also through La
Rochelle, Nantes and Rouen to the north, to Antwerp and London. While marine insurance ini-
tially concentrated on the Mediterranean, it soon started playing an important role for colonial
trade across the globe. Insurance was a form of economic preparedness the use of which essen-
tially lay in the securing of capital in case of loss, that is, in the realm of recovery. Eventually,
the differentiation of new forms of insurance had repercussions on the legal system. Concretely,

16
Niklaus Bartlome and Erika Flückiger, "Stadtzerstörungen und Wiederaufbau in der mittelalterlichen und
frühneuzeitlichen Schweiz," in Stadtzerstörung und Wiederaufbau. Zerstörung durch Erdbeben, Feuer und Wasser,
ed. Martin Körner, Niklaus Bartlome, and Erika Flückiger (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1999)
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 7

new forms of insurance such as fire insurance, life insurance, and reinsurance, generated new
forms of contracts and, as a consequence, legal conflicts. The latter, in turn, fuelled the develop-
ment of new groups of experts.
Around 1680, different modes of fire insurance emerged in London and Hamburg which
came to serve as models for the later, national, developments of the industry. The Anglo-
American sphere came to be dominated by the private economical model, while the authoritarian
state model came to dominate the German-speaking countries. The German model was rooted in
a particular tradition of organized, cooperative self-help which is often retraced to the medieval
guild system. In Germany, cameralist administrative reforms strengthened the authoritarian in-
surance model throughout the course of the eighteenth century. While the Netherlands preferred
the British model, in France, insurance hardly played a role as late as the early nineteenth centu-
ry. The insurance boom of the nineteenth century was due to an expansion into new realms of
business, in particular through new risks of industrial accidents. Furthermore, the flourishing of
insurance was owed to the capitalization and liberalization of European markets during industri-
alization, which promoted the spread of the British insurance model to the continent. New insur-
ance tools such as specialized reinsurance were added around the same time. The emergence of
private reinsurance companies has to be seen in direct connection to large-scale city fires, such as
the Great Fire of Hamburg in 1842 and the Fire of Glarus (Switzerland) in 1861. Both disasters
led to the foundation of reinsurance companies, Kölnische Rückversicherungsgesellschaft and
Schweizerische Rückversicherungsgesellschaft, which are operating to this day (as Gen Re and
Swiss Re, respectively).
All in all, insurance never fully replaced the practice of charity. The question whether
relieving disaster losses with insurance only would show a better balance than the organized do-
nations of medieval and early modern times is almost impossible to answer. The scale of dona-
tions in the aftermath of urban fires is clearly astonishing. In many cases, the funds covered sixty
to eighty percent of the losses, sometimes even more. Reconstruction had the highest priority and
city councils generally appointed committees to accelerate the process. The importance is best
exemplified in measures such as the purchase of entire forests, or by a temporary ban on wood as
a building material, which was reserved for the reconstruction of the city. Preventive measures
such as the broadening of alleys against the spread of fire, or bans of flammable building materi-
als, appear in the realm of urban planning. Examples are legion and they are particularly well-
documented in urban building codes. One of the research desiderata of historical disaster re-
search is to link systematically changes in building codes with disaster events. So far, there are
only a few scattered examples, which point to the fact that there is a close relationship here. A
further important and unanswered question is how the knowledge, reflected by those codes, was
continued across caesuras in legal traditions.
So far, my focus has been the management of urban fire disasters. However, the scheme
of preparedness, response and recovery applies with the same ease to other types of disaster that
occurred frequently in pre-modern Europe. Plague epidemics are particularly interesting because
the painful learning process that started from the Black Death of the fourteenth century contra-
dicts the intuitive assumption that a full understanding of the chains of infection was a necessary
condition for any effective measures. While this may more or less be true for the treatment of
infected individuals, it is certainly not in the area of epidemiology. If protection against the
plague had been as dependent on the heroes of microbiology, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, as
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 8

the decryption of Ancient hieroglyphs was on the hero of Egyptology, Jean-François Champol-
lion, European populations would probably have been reduced to their ratio of biological immun-
ity. In fact, a last plague flare-up occurred in England in 1668, whereas it had not reached Scot-
land since 1647.17 The last great plague epidemic in a western region of Europe broke out in
Marseille in 1720-22. In the east, the black death prevailed for a while longer; the Balkans was
affected as late as 1828-29. In Western Europe, singular cases of plague outbreaks were regis-
tered even after 1720, however, they no longer reached the scope of an epidemic. All this ex-
plains why Pasteur’s and Koch’s disciples had to seek fame in India, China and Australia.
Quarantine and cordons sanitaires spelt the end of the plague in Europe. Cordons sani-
taires were established in Spain in 1647, they were set up around Paris in 1668 and at the border
of the Elbe in Braunschweig-Lüneburg in 1680-82, in 1709 in Prussia and in 1720 around Mar-
seille. It seems that increasingly sealing off Europe against those regions in which the plague was
endemic (mostly Africa and the Orient) proved effective. In a time of strongly expanding coloni-
al trade, this success in keeping one of the most feared human epidemics at bay was by no means
a matter of course. On the Italian peninsula, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and South of
France, port cities were responsible for the import of the disease. Successful prevention in cities
such as Genoa, Venice, Marseille, Amsterdam or London, entirely depended on the strict execu-
tion of quarantine measures, which had become customary since the fourteenth century. Sanitary
councils became permanent institutions in those cities much earlier than in others. In Eastern
Europe, Austria established a Cordon of 1900 km, reaching from the Carpathians to the coast of
the Adriatic which served as an early warning system for military purposes as well as against
epidemics. Returning to the expert group of nineteenth-century microbiologists, their emergence
must be seen in a more long-term tradition of medical practitioners, and medical institutions such
as health councils, which involved with the plague and other epidemics.
I will return to the subject of plague epidemics in the following sections of this paper. My
typology of disaster management in pre-industrial Europe is in many ways incomplete and un-
systematic. Flooding as a frequent threat in various European environments, other diseases (in-
cluding cattle disease), and of course famines must be considered (I will present a systematic
scheme during my presentation at the workshop).

Threats to Political Order

Disasters pose threats to political and social order. Those threats surface in many accounts of
catastrophic experience. Giovanni Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death in Florence 1348
provides a frightening vision of social chaos and governmental breakdown.18 In 1720, when yet
another great epidemic ravaged Marseille and Provence, a pamphlet compared the plague with a
“sharp cutting knife, which not only cuts off the thread of life within a few hours or days but also

17
In 1670, the spread of the plague came to a standstill in the region of the present-day Benelux states, in 1679 in
the western part of Germany and Switzerland, in 1711 in Spain, in 1712 in Scandinavia, in 1714 in north and central
Italy, and in 1716 in the Habsburg countries.
18
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. Faithfully translated by J. M. Rigg. With illustrations by Louis Chalon
(London: A. H. Bullen, 1903),
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 9

cuts the bond of human society into pieces”.19 As outlined in the previous section of this paper,
late medieval and early modern authorities, both urban and rural, took a variety of measures to
prepare for epidemics (and other types of disaster), to mitigate their impact, and to recover from
them. For the support of almost all those measures governments issued legal regulations, some of
which emerged as standard elements in the political practice of preparedness and coping. Enact-
ing plague ordinances was the most basic mechanism of all, once the outbreak of an epidemic
could no longer be denied. Those ordinances were called “orders”. Printed guides for individual
behaviour, which did not have a legal status, but put rules of conduct in times of emergency into
words, were often entitled regimina pestilentiae.
Such titles underline that epidemics were seen to rule the situation and, temporarily, im-
pose a socio-political order of its own right. To justify their announcement, authorities explicitly
referred to the reigning calamitous circumstances in their mandates (Sittenmandate) claiming, at
the same time, that they only re-established the rules applied previously under similar conditions.
Just one example: The “Great Mandate” of St Gallen 1611 picked up the thread of an earlier
mandate (issued in 1601), then prompted by an earthquake, and pointed to the “hard times”
(schwären zyten) caused by famine, the threat of war, and the “retribution of contagion”
(heimsuchung der Contagion).20 Though topical, mention of the biblical triad of fames, bellum,
pestis was not merely rhetorical, certainly not in this particular case, as the previous year, 1610, a
severe plague epidemic had ravaged the city. Here, as in many other cases, biblical common-
places were a means of placing the actual experience of calamity in the framework of Christian
memory, which supported the idea that there was nothing new under the sun, and no invention
made by authorities in establishing rules that met the demands of the occasion.
Nevertheless, disaster legislation was rarely ever a permanent solution to the problem of
social disorder and governmental control. Rather, it created new areas of conflict and provoked
resistance. Many tried to escape isolation and quarantine, as Daniel Defoe described in his Jour-
nal of the Plague Year, or from committals to hospitals that were considered (often with good
reason) equivalent to a death warrant. François Chicoyneau, who had been the leader of the Roy-
al sanitary delegation to Marseille 1720-1 and a prominent opponent of quarantine and forced
hospitalization, denounced the “violence faite à la liberté publique” and even spoke of “insultes
faites au droit des gens”.21 Desperation increased the potential for violence during epidemics.
Conflicts continued in their aftermath, when owners or their heirs protested against the burning
of “infected houses” and other properties bringing their demand for compensation to trial. After

19
Vgl. Scheuchzer, Loimografia, Zürich 1720, S. 2f.: “scharffschneidendes Messer/ welches nicht nur in wenigen
Stunden und Tagen den Lebens=Faden ab= sondern das Band der Menschlichen Gesellschaft entzwey schneidet.”
Cf. p. 4: “Das Band der Menschlichen Gesellschaft wird entzwey geschnitten/ und bleibet selbs dem Natur=Recht
nichts über.”
20
Ziegler (Hg.), Mandat St. Gallen 1611 (ed. 1983), 3.
21
François Chicoyneau and Jean Baptiste Senac, Traité des causes, des accidens, et de la cure de la peste: avec un
recueil d'observations, et détail circonstancié des précautions qu'on a prises pour subvenir aux besoins des peuples
affligés de cette maladie, ou pour la prévenir dans les lieux qui en sont menacés (Paris: Chez Pierre-Jean Mariette
imprimeur-libraire . 1744), , 171; cf. Franz Mauelshagen, "Neuerfindung einer medizinisch-politischen Kontroverse.
Johann Jacob Scheuchzer und die Debatte der Kontagionisten und Antikontagionisten während der Pestepidemie
von 1720-1722," Cardanus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 7(2007), 157
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 10

the epidemic period of 1630-3 Florentine records count no less than 332 legal proceedings.22
Protests against the treatment of the dead have spawned some of the most shining examples of
resistance against the “rule of epidemics”. Death is a highly ritualized transition in every reli-
gious community. For Christian communities in medieval and early modern Europe it involved a
complex procedure of confession, lubrication, individual burial and rites of memory. Jews and
Muslims also had their ritual forms. Disasters have always been a threat to those rituals. Re-
strictions of, or entire bans on, funeral ceremonies, were imposed with the intention to break the
chain of infection; burials in mass graves, which were often placed outside the city walls, be-
came standard in the repertoire of measures taken by authorities when deaths reached their peak
during a plague epidemic.
Under normal conditions only the mortal remains of animals, social outcasts, suicides,
blasphemers, and criminals were treated in such dishonourable ways. Consequently, in 1710,
angry Swedish parishioners from the province of Blekinge devastated the plague cemetery,
which had been set up on a nearby hill outside the village, returning the exhumed corpses back to
the graveyard by their local church. During another plague epidemic in Sweden 1730/1, Per
Månsson, a gravedigger in the province of Småland, resisted mass burials. He buried his wife
and his children individually and then offered his services to other families, for which he was
finally punished. Mass burials tore apart the community of salvation, formed by the living and
the dead, both of which faced the horror of a “death without future” (Emmanuel Lévinas), i.e.
without personal memory. European memory culture has a long tradition of seeking compensa-
tion for this collapse of individual remembrance, but never achieved more than substituting its
loss through plague cemeteries and plague columns, which became the destinations of proces-
sions and, thus, collective memory. However, in such processions the dead remained an anony-
mous body of “victims”.
So far, I have selected examples from cases of epidemics. Other types of disaster, particu-
larly those occurring with some frequency in urban agglomerations — floods, fires, or earth-
quakes —, also substantiate that disasters were threats to political order. Earthquakes and city
fires in particular provided the scenery for cases of looting. Yet, instructive as the urban land-
scape may be as a hazardous environment, we must not forget that agriculture was the dominant
economic sector before industrialization, and it was in agricultural production where 80-90 per-
cent of the population in pre-industrial Europe was making a living. Food production was ex-
posed to a variety of hazards, some natural, some man-made. The long chronology of subsistence
crises and famines in early modern Europe is entangled with another chronology, that of peasant
revolts and uprisings. Peasant revolts were not always, and everywhere, “triggered” by rural dis-
asters. Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that, in many cases, crises of rural production were
turned into conflicts over resources and, thus, became politicized. The precise number of revolts
is unknown, and their spectrum reaches from the short-term mutiny of a few hours, through more
or less spontaneous riots in streets or markets, to uprisings lasting several weeks or months. The
latter, in particular, were a challenge for the aristocratic or bourgeois powers that often put them
to a violent end.23

22
Vgl. Giulia Calvi, The Florentine Plague of 1630-33: Social Behaviour and Symbolic Action, in: Maladie et socié-
té (XIIe-XVIIIe siècles). Actes du colloque de Bielefeld 1986, hrsg. von Neithard Bulst u. Robert Delort, Paris 1989,
327-336.
23
Fernand Braudel, Frankreich, vol. 3. Die Dinge und die Menschen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 176-8.
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 11

Extreme cases of disaster — such as the Black Death 1347-53, the Great Fire in London
1666, the Christmas Flood in 1717, the “Lisbon” earthquake and tsunami in 1755, and many
more city fires, floods, famines and epidemics — overturned community life into to a chaotic
state of emergency. However, the terms “state of emergency” or “state of exception” are not
easily applicable to the political culture of medieval and early modern Europe. They require the
framework of the modern constitutional state which supposes a “state of normality” placing
“emergency” outside the norm. As a result of Europe’s constitutional tradition of legal thought
since the eighteenth century (and some earlier urban traditions), it has become a matter of debate
among theorists today whether the “state of exception” shapes a sphere within or outside the
law.24 Though it is true that “the state of exception/emergency” had its precursors — mainly the
ius necessitatis (right of necessity) in Roman Law — the terminological difference remains sig-
nificant, as far at least as “necessity” does not necessarily imply “exception”. It is obvious that
early modern European authorities followed a different idea of law as they considered disaster to
impose its own particular type of rule — at least temporarily. “Order” is, in fact, the term that
used to be common to describe legislation without a distinction between normality and exception
being made. The difference was not a matter of legislative procedure but one of substantial de-
mands in response to disaster. Obviously, the gap between pre-modern and modern times cannot
be bridged if one clings to a “constitutional” understanding of the “state of exception”. There-
fore, if the concept is to provide us with a valid basis for the purposes of analysis and compari-
son, “emergency” should be handled a socio-political (instead of a merely legal) category that
describes a situation in which disaster may affect legal norms or customary law. Furthermore,
“state of…” has to be detached from a constitutional understanding of “the (constitutional)
state”. In this wider sense, even the early modern “orders”, just mentioned, may be understood as
emergency legislation — an approach that may be useful to open the field for comparison over
time and space.

Disasters and State Power

In histories of state formation the subject of disaster has hardly been touched — let alone, sys-
tematically studied. Despite a certain sensitivity for the “stresses of the fifteenth through eight-
eenth centuries in Europe”, to which respective societies “reacted” in a way that is supposed to
have led to “sharply more standardized institutions and administration”,25 historians have tacitly
agreed on excluding disasters from their accounts of state formation in early modern Europe.
However, previous sections of this paper have sought to demonstrate the potential the history of
disasters and their management in early modern Europe bears to turn over a new leaf in the histo-
ry of political power and state formation. Disasters deserve a place in the comparative and inte-
grated political history of early modern Europe and, more specifically, the history of state power.
So far, war has been the guiding theme in the existing historiography on state power and
state formation. However, that connection has been made with almost complete neglect of the
destructive consequences of warfare on societies and their obvious challenges to maintaining
political order. Instead, historians of state power have emphasized the many indirect effects of

24
Giorgio Agamben, State of exception (Chicago, Ill. ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
25
James B. Collins, "State building in early-modern Europe: the case of France," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3
(1997), 603.
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 12

warfare. Starting from an analysis of power relations, the general focus of attention has been war
finance and standing armies, and more specifically: the impact of warfare on taxation, infrastruc-
ture, bureaucracy, and centralization. Historians also considered the development of military
discipline, the control over armies of mercenaries, and the role of technological change. At the
same time, the often-adverse effects warfare had had on the control of political power have too
rarely been dealt with. Most historians of state power have regarded war as an element of compe-
tition between states rather than a violent and destructive force or a hazard to social order and
political rule.26
This point touches upon one of the most serious omissions in the historiography of state
formation, which failed to consider a danger imminent to all governmental power, notably state
failure or even collapse. Though it has been subject to analyses in the political sciences over the
last decade or so, historians have rarely dealt with state failure.27 However, based on Charles
Tilly’s work, Jeffrey Herbst stated: “there is nothing novel about the phenomenon of state fail-
ure.” Tilly estimated that “the ‘enormous majority’ of states in Europe after 1500 failed.”28 He
also points to the fact that historical evidence for state failure in this period has not been fully
acknowledged. “The disproportionate distribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant
situation of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only the
positive cases are well-documented.”29 Considering the possibility and the reality of failure as
part of the history of state formation — not just as its flipside — seems essential to avoiding tel-
eological narratives.
It is an obvious conclusion from these general considerations that the destructive power
of catastrophes is no reason to exclude them from the history of state power. Disasters may lead
to failure of political management, temporarily or permanently, but they may just as well turn out
the other way when political powers seize the opportunity to expand their authority into new
areas, which they seem to do whenever they smell the opportunity.
Probably, the negligence of catastrophe in the history of state formation has been influ-
enced by the idea of moderate economic loss through disasters in capitalist economic theory. For
John Stuart Mill “perpetual consumption and reproduction of capital” — one of his basic theo-
rems — “affords the explanation of what has so often excited wonder, the great rapidity with
which countries recover from a state of devastation; the disappearance, in a short time, of all
traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war. An ene-
my lays waste a country by fire and sword, and destroys or carries away nearly all the moveable
wealth existing in it: all the inhabitants are ruined, and yet in a few years after, everything is

26
Philippe Contamine, War and competition between states (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), can be
read as a sum of this approach.
27
Useful summaries of research and further references are given in the following collections of case studies: Robert
I. Rotberg, ed. State failure and state weakness in a time of terror (Cambridge, Mass., Washington, D.C.: World
Peace Foundation; Brookings Institution Press, 2003) and Robert I. Rotberg, ed. When states fail: Causes and
consequences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
28
Jeffrey Herbst, "Let them fail: state failure in theory and practice. Implications for policy," in When states fail:
Causes and consequences, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 303.
29
Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the history of European state-making," in The formation of national States in
Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly and Gabriel Ardant (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1975), 38.
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 13

much as it was before.”30 Short term destruction was to be considered irrelevant, because what
“the enemy” — or other hazards — “have destroyed, would have been destroyed in a little time
by the inhabitants themselves: the wealth which they so rapidly reproduce, would have needed to
be reproduced and would have been reproduced in any case, and probably in as short a time.
Nothing is changed, except that during the reproduction they have not now the advantage of con-
suming what had been produced previously.”31 For Mill, economic recovery was a natural force
— for which he used the Latin term vis mediatrix naturae (healing power of nature) —, an ex-
planation which leaves modern readers as perplexed as Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand”.
As obscure as Mill’s theorem may seem, studies of demographic recovery from the ef-
fects of famines, plagues, and wars in Europe confirmed that peaks in fertility followed mortality
peaks and helped populations recover their numbers after a decade. Much in the spirit of Mill,
Jan de Vries commented on Christian Pfister’s study of Swiss agrarian crises in the second half
of the eighteenth century and John Dexter Post’s book on The last great subsistence crisis in the
Western World in 1816/17 (after the eruption of Mt. Tambora, 1815). Both books were published
in the late 1970s, and both their authors attributed climate a significant role in the types of crises
they had studied. De Vries, a Berkeley economic historian, argued that Post and Pfister had fo-
cused “attention primarily on highly unusual crises”, and “Unless these crises can be shown to be
something other than unique, exogenous shocks, a skeptic might feel justified in concluding that
short-term climatic crises stand in relation to economic history as bank robberies to the history of
banking.”32 Not only economic historians have shared such views in the past, but in fact many
historians studying disasters still seem to share them — a symptom of which is a clear preference
for the “single-event approach”. The still-dominating event-focus may in fact be considered the
main obstacle to integrating the history of disasters into the longue duree of European history.33
When structuralist perspectives on historical change prevailed, before the “cultural turn”
(which has encouraged a renaissance of histoire des événements), twenty or thirty years ago,
long-term studies of “crisis” were fairly popular among historians. The diagnosis of a long-term
demographic stagnation in the fourteenth century, which hampered economic recovery from the
effects of a series of plague epidemics, during and after the Black Death, recognised that the ac-
cumulation of disasters in this period made a difference compared with the impact of isolated
events. Accumulation and coincidence: the onset of the Little Ice Age hit European populations
at the peak of a Malthusian cycle in 1315, causing one of the gravest subsistence crisis in the
history of pre-modern Europe, and so did the Black Death in 1348. Governments and people
were ill prepared to deal with the consequences. Moreover, the Hundred Years War (1337-1453)
between the kingdoms of France and England seriously increased the vulnerability of the com-
batting countries and their populations. The composition of harmful events and circumstances
(climate change is more of a circumstance than an event) in fourteenth-century Europe resembles

30
John Stuart Mill, Principles of political economy with some of their applications to social philosophy (London:
J.W. Parker, 1848), Book I, Chapter 5, §7.
31
Ibid.
32
Jan de Vries, "Measuring the impact of climate on history: The search for appropriate methodologies," in Climate
and history: Studies in interdisciplinary history, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 23.
33
Cf. Grégory Quenet, "Earthquakes in early modern France: from the old regime to the birth of a new risk," in
Historical disasters in context: Science, religion, and politics, ed. Andrea Janku, Gerrit Schenk, and Franz
Mauelshagen (London, New York: Routledge, 2012), 95 (event-focus of historical disaster studies in France).
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 14

the constellations held responsible for the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century, when the
coldest average temperatures in the last Millennium coincided with the greatest number of mili-
tary conflicts before the twentieth century, frequent outbreaks of epidemics, and major subsist-
ence as well as financial crises. Starting from a pair of articles Eric Hobsbawm published in Past
& Present in 1954, and many articles that followed in the same journal, debate over the “general
crisis” has been the mother of all debates over crises among historians.34 It is particularly rele-
vant in our context for two very different reasons: first, because Hugh Trevor-Roper’s diagnosis
of “a crisis in the relation between society and the State” in this period may stand the test of
time;35 and second, because Geoffrey Parker’s new book Global Crisis: War Climate Change
and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century provides a new, and deeper, analysis of the accumu-
lative effects of catastrophe on a global scale and will most likely revive a debate that had fallen
silent.36
Compared with Parker’s recent opus magnum, Eric Lionel Jones’s study of the “Europe-
an miracle” is a much earlier example of the cumulative economic effects of repeated disasters
questioning Mill’s theorem. In his comparison between early modern Europe and China Jones
suggested that disasters — natural, biological and man-made (as he classified them) — had much
more adverse impacts on capital accumulation in China than in Europe, mainly due to a higher
number of earthquakes and floods.37 Consequently, disaster history became an important element
in his attempt to explain why modern states and economies developed first in Europe, although
Europe had been late-coming and peripheral within the geographical framework of Eurasia. In
the meantime, the validity of Jones’s statistical material has been questioned. According to
(probably) more precise estimates, floods and droughts were indeed more frequent in China,
while famines, epidemics, and wars were not.38 Nevertheless, catastrophe accumulation deserves
reconsideration in the context of the “great divergence” (K. Pomeranz).
Few historians have made an effort to bridge the obvious gap between single-case, event-
focused micro-studies of disaster and the existing macro histories of crisis, which may well re-
gain popularity.39 However, making such an effort is precisely the challenge implicated by the
question what traces disaster management and governance have left in the history of state for-
34
Eric J. Hobsbawm, "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century," Past and Present 5(1954;
Eric J. Hobsbawm, "The Crisis of the 17th Century--II," Past and Present 6(1954). Compilation of contributions to
the debate: Trevor Aston, ed. Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660. Essays from "Past and present", 5th impr. ed. (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
35
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the 17th Century," Past and Present, no. 16 (1959), ...
36
Geoffrey Parker, Global crisis: war, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013), ...
37
Cf. chapter two on “Disasters and capital accumulation” in Eric L. Jones, The European miracle: Environments,
economies, and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), . The book was published first in 1981 and has been translated into various languages.
38
For a critique of Jones’s statistics see Jürg Helbling’s contribution in Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger,
eds., Agriculture, population and economic development in China and Europe, vol. 10, Der europäische Sonderweg
(Stuttgart: Breuninger Stiftung, 2003), p. 93-104, with further references. It must be added that most figures on dis-
aster occurrences before 1800 are speculative or based on questionable catalogues such as Josef Nussbaumer, Die
Gewalt der Natur. Eine Chronik der Naturkatastrophen von 1500 bis heute (Grünbach: Edition Sandkorn, 1996), .
Estimations of casualties and economic damage are even more problematic.
39
A recent attempt to merge disaster and crisis is Carla Meyer, Katja Patzel-Mattern, and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, eds.,
Krisengeschichte(n). ‚Krise‘ als Leitbegriff und Erzählmuster in kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, Beihefte der
Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2013).
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 15

mation in early modern and modern Europe. Studying frequent disasters of the same or similar
type over the long term, in a well-defined regional or local setting, is probably the most promis-
ing strategy, to which risk geography is the best guide. It is here, where historians can learn the
most from geographers and epidemiologists. Hazards accumulate due to natural (geological, bio-
logical, hydro-meteorological etc.) and social factors. Disasters occur most frequently, and there-
fore: pose permanent challenges to societies, where natural and social circumstances work to-
gether in a network. Cities were always multiple risk-prone, because urban settlements are ac-
cumulations of people, germs, material value and capital; they have their “fire regimes”, which
have evolved in a great variety over time;40 and they also have their “war—”, “earthquake—”,
“epidemic—”, and “flood regimes”. The long-term effects of continuous challenges posed by
various types of disasters have left their traces in the management of the social and environmen-
tal geographies of cities and their political institutions.
The existing long-term studies of complex risk geographies in the Philippines, the Ger-
man and Dutch North Sea Coast, and the Mississippi delta (Gulf of Mexico) have focused pre-
dominantly on the evolution of “cultures of disaster” or, more generally, on coping and adapta-
tion practices.41 Nevertheless, they provide ample material for discussion in the context of state
power and state formation. The dike cultures of the Dutch and German North Sea coast are mod-
el examples of long-term processes of centralization, professionalization, and nationalization in
“hydraulic societies”.42
Martin Dinges has published pioneering studies on the connection between plague epi-
demics and state formation in a comparative European perspective.43 His research revealed a
North-South divide in the fight against the plague, reverse of our present-day expectations.44
Thus, in the Italian trade centers and on the Iberian Peninsula state authorities considered sanita-

40
Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds., Flammable cities: urban conflagration and the making of the
modern world (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 8-9.
41
Anthony Oliver-Smith, "Peru's five hundred year earthquake: vulnerability in historical context," in Disasters,
development and environment, ed. Ann Varley (Chichester, New York: J. Wiley, 1994); Greg Bankoff, Cultures of
disaster. Society and natural hazards in the Philippines (New York: Routledge, 2003); Franz Mauelshagen,
"Disaster and Political Culture in Germany (Since 1500)," in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies
Toward a Global Environmental History, ed. Christoph Mauch and Christian Pfister (Lanham, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2009); Rohland, "Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1718-1965: a history of adaptation,".
42
The term “hydraulic society” was coined by Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental despotism: a comparative study of
total power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), and it deserves reconsideration, although Wittfogel’s con-
cept of “oriental despotism” has no potential for rehabilitation. In my own study of North German dike culture, I
used a related term (hydrographic society), which I adopted from Simon Schama, The embarrassment of riches: An
interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House,
1987), Cf. Mauelshagen, "Disaster and Political Culture in Germany (Since 1500)," I confess that I was not familiar
with Wittfogel’s work when I wrote this article. Preferring his term over similar alternatives is mainly to pay credit
to his subtle analysis of the societal challenges imposed by large-scale water management.
43
Martin Dinges, "Pest und Staat," in Neue Wege in der Seuchengeschichte ed. Martin Dinges and Thomas Schlich,
Medizin und Gesellschaft, Beihefte 6 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), p. 72 (“Befund unzureichender Verkopplung der
Historiographie von Seuchen mit der allgemeinen Geschichtsschreibung”).
44
Martin Dinges, "Süd-Nord-Gefälle in der Pestbekämpfung. Italien, Deutschland und England im Vergleich," in
Das europäische Gesundheitssystem. Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in historischer Perspektive, ed. Wolfgang
Uwe Eckart and Robert Jütte, Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte; Beiheft (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994).
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 16

tion a legitimate public concern already in the 1290s.45 In almost all matters concerning the fight
against the plague, Italy was a century ahead of Germany and Great Britain. Considering the
long-term effects of the politics of public health, it becomes evident that the European experi-
ence of the bubonic plague played an important part in the process of modern state-formation.
The organizational challenge posed by the epidemic in many places led to the creation of perma-
nent institutions such as sanitary councils or to the building of hospitals. Yet, the ongoing pro-
cess of state-building also had a part in the fight against the plague. That is, only the standing
armies of the seventeenth century enabled the spatially extensive control of Cordons Sanitaires.
What is more, the development of political administration under European absolutism led to the
expansion of political planning and administrative implementation in the first place. In other
words, state formation and fighting the plague are two dependant processes.
I have argued in this section why medieval and early modern practices of disaster man-
agement deserve consideration in historical accounts of institution building and state formation
in Europe. Seeing the history of disaster management in this wider perspective of a long procès
(rather than the longue durée) places the emergence of disaster relief organizations and expert
groups in a framework that also helps explaining the mode of operation of international organiza-
tions and its legal framework in a world of nation-states today. It is obviously too early for a
complete account, which ought to reach out beyond European borders to include colonial and
postcolonial global perspectives.

Summary

Historical disasters have developed into a growing field of study over the last fifteen years.
However, as was to be expected, studies have clustered unequally in different periods and in dif-
ferent geographical areas of investigation. This paper focuses on pre-industrial (i.e. late medieval
and early modern) Europe, for which a sufficient number of case studies are available on how
disasters were managed politically and economically — sufficient to essay a provisional (and
certainly incomplete) typology of disaster aid within and between communities and states. The
question arising from such a typology is to what extent (if at all) it represents patterns of disaster
management that are characteristic for pre-industrial Europe. Any answer requires comparison,
either between Europe and other parts of the world or between different periods, or both, which
goes beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I will argue that the role of religion in pre-industrial
(or pre-modern) Europe has too often been reduced to an obstacle for a more “rational” handling
of emergency situations. Contrary to such views, the many traces of religious practices in the
history of disaster management deserve being emphasized. Moreover, in this paper I will address
the challenge any long-term study of disaster history is confronted: the challenge of conceptual-
izing the historical role of disasters in the general history of Europe. I will argue that the inherent
threats of catastrophe to political stability and governance are key to understanding the long-
lasting impact of disaster history. Catastrophe has played a rarely considered role in the history

45
Cf. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and history: disease, power and imperialism (New Haven etc.: Yale University
Press, 1997), 8. In 1993 Robert C. Palmer came to the conclusion that the Black Death changed “the nature of Eng-
lish governance”. Changes were “directed to the problem of retaining traditional society in the wake of demographic
catastrophe”. See Robert C. Palmer, English law in the age of the Black Death, 1348-1381: a transformation of
governance and law (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993),
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 17

of state power and state formation in Europe. This perspective might shed new light on the
emergence of practices of international aid and its framework in a world of 206 sovereign states.
The anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith called disasters “totalizing events” as they lay
bare all aspects of societal and cultural life of a given society. Theories of social vulnerability,
which embed disaster events in long-term processes of cultural and economic evolution, have
reinforced this perspective. The more one deals with the history of disasters, and the more one
broadens the spectrum of events, the stronger the impression that we are faced with a new kind
of histoire totale.
 MAUELSHAGEN / Disaster Management / 18

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