All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making

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Bandopadhyay
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All Is Well
 All Is Well
Catastrophe and the Making of the
Normal State

S A P TA R I SH I BA N D O PA D H YAY

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2022

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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bandopadhyay, Saptarishi, author.
Title: All is well : catastrophe and the making of the normal state /
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021041502 (print) | LCCN 2021041503 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197579190 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197579206 |
ISBN 9780197579220 | ISBN 9780197579213 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Emergency management—History—18th century—Case studies. |
Disasters—Political aspects—History—18th century—Case studies. |
Disasters—Social aspects—History—18th century—Case studies. |
Disasters—History—18th century—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV551.2 .B36 2022 (print) |
LCC HV551.2 (ebook) | DDC 363.34/8—dc23/eng/20211109
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041502
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041503

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197579190.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 For ma and dad

and for baby Bandopadhyay who will arrive

just before this book and outshine it forever
 Contents

Preface  ix

1. In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen  1

2. Corner Pieces  21
3. Marseille 1720: Administrative Catharsis as Disaster
Management  41
4. Portugal 1755: Empire of Accident  79
5. Bengal 1770: Famine, Corruption, and the Climate of Legal
Despotism  107
6. Risk Thinking and the Enduring Structure of Vicissitudes  149
7. The Past-​Imperfect Future  173

Notes  211
Acknowledgments  293
Abbreviations and Documentary Sources  297
Index  299
 Preface

I began thinking about the relationship between disasters and state-​like

authorities long before I caught myself doing it.
In April 2001, with a year of law school behind me, I moved to the cen-
tral Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to intern in the offices of the Narmada
Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). The movement began in
the 1980s, in response to the Narmada Valley Development Project’s pro-
posal to construct over three thousand dams on the Narmada River to
supply hydroelectric power and water to drought-​affected Gujarat, Madhya
Pradesh, and Maharashtra. By the 1990s, it was apparent that the Project
would submerge thousands of hectares of forest land and displace hundreds
of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were Adivasis and Dalits,
native and lower-​caste populations. The dams, many modest, some enor-
mous, represented temples of Nehruvian modernism with its vision of an
independent India nurtured and armored by socialist planning, mega infra-
structure projects, and, begrudgingly, nuclear power.
The Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD), in Kevadiya, Gujarat, is the tallest and
most controversial of these projects. Its infrastructure consists of an enor-
mous concrete dam and roughly 155 miles (250 km) of backwaters in
Madhya Pradesh, 43.5 miles (70 km) downstream flow, as well as over 6213
miles (over 10,000 km) of canals. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the
foundation stone in 1961, but construction didn’t start for another twenty-​
six years.
The dam was initially funded by the Indian government and the World
Bank. But, it was quickly apparent that the SSD would not fulfill expected
outcomes; it would, however, wreak widespread displacement and ecolog-
ical havoc in the Narmada valley. In 1993, following years of agitation by
the Andolan and a punishing independent report, the Morse Commission
Study, the World Bank withdrew its funding. Nevertheless, investments had
been made, deals had been struck, and the accompanying political rhetoric
quickly transformed the SSD into a mythical test of Gujarati pride. Despite
widespread protests and endless evidence against the SSD’s feasibility, state
governments continued to fund it. The Andolan filed a writ petition against
x Preface

the project’s continuation, and for a time construction was restrained by ju-
dicial order.
In 2000, when the Supreme Court finally entertained arguments in
Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India, the SSD project had submerged
the lands of thousands of people. In a peculiarly broad opinion, the Court
settled the dispute in favor of the government in particular, and mega in-
frastructure projects more generally. State governments promised to submit
plans for effective restitution and rehabilitation prior to restarting construc-
tion. (A promise that remains unfulfilled to this day.) In the meantime, con-
struction continued and thousands of inhabited hectares earmarked for
remediation were drowned in the dam’s catchment. Prime Minister Narendra
Modi inaugurated the SSD in 2017.
As an eager lawyer-​in-​training, I had perused the Court’s decision before
arriving at the Andolan’s offices in rural Madhya Pradesh. But it was on the
ground that I witnessed just how effectively the Court had extinguished peo-
ples’ claims against the state. A few legal skirmishes were still playing out
in New Delhi. But down in the Narmada valley, the Andolan served a very
different function. It organized protests, hounded officials for answers, and
gathered data on everything from land and biodiversity loss to ineffective
and incomplete relocation, restitution, and rehabilitation measures. My brief
time with the movement offered an unexpected education and set this book
in motion.

***
One sweltering morning, I accompanied a group of Andolan activists to the
modest village of Chikhalda abutting the Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh.
I stepped into the village square already feeling the tension in the residents’
faces. Off to a side, a group of eight or ten villagers had linked their arms and
surrounded three of the government’s surveyors in a human chain. One of
the surveyors was grumbling into this walkie-​talkie. A few feet away, another
group had corralled several police constables, mimicking and blocking the
constables’ movements so they couldn’t reach the experts they were meant to
guard. Some of the activists joined the chain while others lobbed questions
at the surveyors who dismissed them, waiving a government order, and
demanded to be let out.
The experts were dressed in off-​white safari suits; the senior among them
wore a kind of pith helmet and white sneakers. The constables, in their khaki
shirts, shorts, and sandals, carried arm-​ and-​a-​ long wooden lathis
half-​
 Preface xi

(batons) and made jaded, threatening motions toward the protestors. The
villagers and activists continued to hold hands, a kind of sense-​memory
flowing between them: arms flexing and loosening, elbows cornering and
easing, their feet weaving back and forth away from the lathis.
Moments later, a pair of officers, in full-​length trousers and boots, rushed
into the square and began threatening to bust skulls. The constables, like eve-
ryone, felt the energy shift. A couple of them held out their lathis, shoving
them like shields against the fence of arms holding them in. The officers
came up from behind, grabbing the protestors’s arms and falling on them to
break the chain. Emboldened, the constables raised the lathis high over their
shoulders as if loading a spring mechanism and rained them down in hap-
hazard blows. Hearing screams, more constables swept in after the officers,
whipping their lathis and striking agitators across the back, waist, and legs.
As people drew their arms close, the human chain came apart. One of the
activists had an open head wound.
The constables and surveyors retreated to a police jeep and truck outside
the village. The agitators rushed close behind. I followed them out and we
stood on the road, arms linked in a cordon blocking the exit to the highway.
Without warning, one of the officers stepped out of the jeep and fired his
pistol into the air. Everyone collapsed. Peeking over the men prostrated in
front of me, I watched the officer recede to the back of the truck and climb
in. The vehicles honked and we scattered like cockroaches to the edges of the
road, letting them through.
A few days later, I was present at a press conference in Indore where
Andolan activists confronted the District Collector about the incident.
He denied any knowledge of it and proceeded to read a summary of the
government’s survey identifying regions that would likely be flooded when
the monsoons came.
The dam was never mentioned. There was no indication that the immi-
nent submergence could be related to overflow from the catchment area or
backwaters where the river already sat high. It was the Monsoon that would
devastate the valley. It was the rain that would drive thousands from their
homes for good. Over the next hour, I listened as scientific conclusions, os-
tensibly shared to aid disaster preparedness, tucked governmental failure be-
hind an Act of God defense. Risk management meant dusting the china by
tiptoeing around the bull.

***
xii Preface

If there is a “science” to mining one’s youth for mythical beginnings, my

sense of a “normal” relationship between catastrophe and state power was
brewed in the sacrificial crucible of the Narmada valley. But this jarring peek
behind long-​cherished illusions of Indian democracy did not offer any life-​
sustaining truths. I was well aware of the myriad class, caste, and religious
inequities that sustained the Indian upper and middle classes. But I had
never experienced my government as being in the business of producing
catastrophes.
On returning to law school at the end of summer, I was (almost) relieved
to find that the urban middle-​class India that I had momentarily exited was
still intact. Over the next months, familiar dismissals greeted me like a warm
bath. Andolan activists are media-​hogging, anti-​progress populists (Socialists!
Anarchists! Anti-​nationalists!); they are still beating a tired drum and making
extreme or impractical demands; and, importantly, the SSD controversy has
been settled by India’s environmentally conscious, human rights–​affirming
apex court. I was nineteen, and Calcutta and the Narmada valley seemed
to exist in different universes. I made sense of things by writing a diplo-
matic little essay for the city paper; I noted my compassion for the Andolan’s
struggles while distinguishing my own views as democratic, liberal, scien-
tific, and pragmatic.
The essay was a lie set in black soy ink. I had witnessed the massive archi-
tecture of the Indian state pursuing “progress,” “prosperity,” and “order” as
ahistorical self-​justifying goals. Over the next decade, I would see variations
of this architecture elsewhere in India and around the world.
In 2012 I flew to Ladakh, a militarized mountainous space, formally an
India “Union Territory” that rests in the politically contested highlands of
eastern Kashmir. Two years earlier, a sudden “cloud burst” had precipitated
deadly flash floods, landslides, and mud flows which had devastated the cen-
tral district of Leh. The civil administration there was miniscule and entirely
unprepared. Since the early-​2000s, New Delhi had regarded Ladakh as a
marquee “flag planting” site. As part of asserting sovereign control over the
region, the government had nurtured breakneck urbanization and economic
development through tourism. Every summer, thousands of people from
India and abroad descended on Leh, stretching the region’s water and sanita-
tion systems thin. By 2012, the city’s streets boasted such pleasures as “India’s
Highest Paint Ball Arena” and “New York Style Hot Dogs.”
When the floods hit the capital city of Leh, Ladakh had transformed into
a visually arresting tourism wonderland secured behind barbed wire and
 Preface xiii

perennial surveillance. The military’s hazard-​focused, command-​and-​control

approach saved many lives and quickly restored roads and basic infrastruc-
ture. However, the success of militarized relief and rescue deepened Ladakh’s
dependence on India’s national security apparatus. New Delhi returned to the
business of courting tourists and developers and divested from social vulner-
ability management, more generally. It propped a toothless and underfunded
risk-​reduction “cluster” for Ladakh and tasked local bureaucrats with de-
veloping a litany of technical plans and protocols. Most egregiously, officials
looked away as tiers upon tiers of residential and commercial buildings were
erected atop each other inside the recently flooded valley.
Like many, I had long believed that, politics notwithstanding,
governments and experts performed catastrophe management to protect
life and resources. But years later, as I started to outline All Is Well, I began
to think of the Narmada valley as a scientifically organized and legally
sanctioned “sacrifice zone.” In contrast, Ladakh was an uneasy wonder-
land overlaid with the imperatives of a “developmentalist-​security” state.
Together, Chikhalda and Leh offered a radically different but intelligible
explanation of why the state’s legal, scientific, developmental, and security
apparatus routinely produce and normalize catastrophes. Modern govern-
ance nurtures order and disorder in pursuit of idealized visions of prosperity
and rule at the limits of nature and society. Sometimes this looks like thriving
markets and tourism in a hazard-​prone, militarized space. Other times it
resembles three thousand dams that bend nature to benefit the visible few at
the expense of the unseen many. Chikalda and Leh showed me that socialist
modernization in the heartland is often indistinguishable from muscular-​
neoliberalism at the country’s fringes.
During the writing years, I observed disaster management in Haiti and the
Philippines. I read hundreds of historical and contemporary accounts of this
endeavor and discussed the stakes with scholars and clear-​eyed practitioners
from around the world. From 1720 Marseille to 2011 Fukushima, I experi-
enced “states” and “catastrophes” as shape-​shifting phantoms, each defined
by the production of the other across space and time. All Is Well is a study
of how this relationship was reimagined during the eighteenth century. It
asserts that the history of this transformation offers crucial insights into how
“normal” political authorities and disaster risks are produced and distributed
in our time.

***
xiv Preface

A few months before my visit to the Narmada valley, on January 26, 2001
(Indian Republic Day), large swathes of western Gujarat were wrecked by
a two-​minute earthquake and days of aftershocks. In its aftermath, then
Chief Minister Narendra Modi rose to national prominence for organizing
swift emergency response and stimulating rapid economic development.
Mr. Modi received international acclaim for adopting a technoscientific and
growth-​focused approach that aligned with World Bank’s best practices and
used the Western rhetoric of build-​back-​better/​smarter to garner popular
support. Indian middle and upper classes hailed Mr. Modi as a visionary and
set him on a course to the country’s highest office.
I recalled this story in early May 2021, on a day when over four hundred
thousand Indians tested positive with the Covid-​19 coronavirus. As the fear
and spectacle of the pandemic occupied every inch of the public conscious-
ness, few could be faulted for forgetting the many slow-​burn catastrophes
still smoldering around the country. But living in relative safety, in Canada,
I found it impossible to assess the success or failure of day-​to-​day corona-
virus management without recalling Faulkner’s caution that the “past is
never dead. It’s not even past.”
The Narmada damming misadventure that began in the 1940s remains
alive and well today. In September 2019, three months before “Wuhan,” the
Gujarat government decorated the SSD with flowers and lights and filled its
reservoir to the lip for the first time since the dam was inaugurated. It was a
birthday party. The ‘birthday boy,’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi, posed for
photos by the Narmada’s shores, strolled across the dam and celebrated his
sixty-​ninth year by dispersing flower petals over the waters in a gesture of
gratitude. Upriver, in the dam’s wake, over 170 villages in Madhya Pradesh
were submerged well before resettlement and rehabilitation measures had
been completed. There, a few hundred of the dispossessed gathered on a
bridge to observe “Damnation Day.” Many shaved their heads in mourning
while others burned the Prime Minister’s effigy before launching it in
the river.
Disaster management is a science of the future; what it needs is a past.
 1
In the Shadow of Leviathans
Seen and Unseen

We are taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though one were
always at hand and the other distant, far away. And this opposition is
false. Events are always at hand. But the coherence of these events—​
which is what we mean by reality—​is an imaginative construction.
Reality always lies beyond, and this is as true for materialists as for
idealists, for Plato and for Marx. Reality, however one interprets it,
lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen,
partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to
consolidate its own power. Reality is inimical to those with power.
—​John Berger, “The Production of the World”

During the eighteenth century, nascent state-​ like authorities began to

emerge across Europe.1 They bubbled up from a bloody contest between
secularizing rulers and ebbing theological institutions. In their quest for
supremacy, would-​be rulers were assisted by an emerging class of scientist-​
politicos who insisted that environmental uncertainty could be mastered by
rationality and ingenuity.2 The resulting authorities were modern in that they
prepared to meet natural forces and restore normalcy by relying on empir-
ical knowledge and rational policies instead of prayer and penance. But their
motives were the same as the kings and high priests they replaced. To re-
claim the hegemony over reality that these predecessors had lost in the face
catastrophe; to declare, after the very theodicy they decried, “Whatever is,
is right.”3 (Horrified by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire chastised this
mawkish faith in providence as “tout est bien,” or “all is well.”4) Detractors,
in turn, challenged the supremacy of these emerging authorities, advancing
competing visions toward the same glorious ends of prosperity and order
through mastery over disasters.

All Is Well. Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197579190.003.0001
2 All Is Well

The eighteenth century echoes loudly in our world today. Humans have
always acted upon their environment and adapted to its ways. Historian
William McNeill has summarized this reciprocal relationship, writing: “The
risk of catastrophe is the underside of the human condition—​a price we
pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the
earth.”5 But the peculiarly technical and instrumental character of human
domination over nature during the last 250 years has produced a world on
the brink, where generational storms, tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires
have become routine.6 A world in which, in 2019, children marched in the
streets, feeling the impact of civilizational hubris, conceived in early modern
Europe, on their skin and in their lungs.7
Today, a pandemic lingers, pall-​like, over the world.
News stories about states struggling, alone and together, to mitigate the
impact of these events are mundane. While saying much about the state of
our world, these scripts, and the conversations they inspire, assume that
states exist to protect society from the inevitable occurrence of disasters.
This is a comforting belief.
It neatly parses natural hazards and human efforts, sifting rationality and
expertise from chaos, human error, negligence, and technological failure.
Rulers and their political rivals invoke this belief when they stand atop the
rubble and proclaim that culprits will be uncovered (or, that it’s no one’s
fault), but also, that, whatever the cause, society will build back bigger, better,
and “smarter.” Each year, thousands of people act on this belief when they
abandon their submerged homes or crawl out from beneath the debris to beg
for relief, file lawsuits, buy insurance, and wave another thousand little flags.8
In common parlance, “disaster management” is a process through which
states and international institutions forestall natural hazards or mitigate their
impact on society.9 Experts and officials, even as they may disagree on spe-
cific approaches, decisions, or policies, generally accept this premise; their
efforts sustain people’s faith in the state and the international order.10
Yet, the belief that these authorities are intrinsically opposed to disasters
should be a cold comfort. In the last twenty years alone, we have watched
states and international institutions repeatedly fail to forestall or miti-
gate the impact of natural hazards and technological failures alike. Worse,
we have witnessed politicians’ myopic refusals to take responsibility for
global warming11 in its myriad life-​threatening forms. Still, as with so many
cherished beliefs, the categorical distinction between the (bad) causes of
catastrophe and the (benevolent) reasons of state are deeply rooted in the
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 3

public consciousness. To challenge this distinction and depose the under-

lying belief, we need equally trenchant accounts of the relationship between
two of the most outlandish fictions in existence: states and catastrophes.12
All Is Well offers one such account.
I begin from the premise that the existence of both disasters and states
needs to be explained and justified—​that their existence has always needed
explanation and justification. I argue that during the eighteenth century,
rulers and their rivals struggling for political power were, in effect, com-
peting for the responsibility to manage catastrophes. Their goal was to realize
the modernist dream of a “normal” society where prosperity and order were
safeguarded by rationality and scientific knowledge of nature. Contenders
championed rivalrous visions of how best to harmonize the boundary be-
tween civilization (the social order) and the environment (the natural order)
to prevent future catastrophes.13 However, unlike God, no mere human or
secular group could be trusted with this role in the long run. So, would-​be
rulers cast themselves, after God and the Church, as model authorities that
would perform this harmonization routinely and make calamites tolerable.
In my account, then, “disaster management” is shorthand for the mutually
constitutive relationship between society’s need to manage (“conservate”)14
catastrophes and its desire for an enduring and default, or “normal,” au-
thority.15 By undressing “disaster management” into “catastrophe conserva-
tion” and “state formation,” I argue that the ideas, instincts, techniques, and
practices that facilitate the former are also the ideas, instincts, techniques,
and practices that engender the latter. Politicians, experts, city dwellers,
housing activists, courts and the police conservate floods and earthquakes
in the same moments they battle over the future of urban development in
the shadow of seismicity and global warming. Catastrophes may be existen-
tial disruptions, but they are also the stigmata through which the modern
state renews itself. Disaster management is the instrument through which
this balance is maintained.
Today, as in the eighteenth century, disaster management narratives,
whatever their form, source, or content, must meet three challenges.
They must: define the disaster as a resolvable problem; project an ideal-
ized, normative vision of how the problem should be resolved; and, finally,
identify who should be empowered to realize this vision. For millennia,
civilizations that failed to master these criteria have tended to go extinct,
their tools and bones, songs and scripts pushing up daisies for others to
trample.
4 All Is Well

Modern states first emerged as the default form of territorial authority

by conservating, not eradicating, the existence and experience of disasters
sans divine assistance. Today, as in the eighteenth century, state power is sus-
tained by an idealized managerial performance in pursuit of raison d’état, or
interests and reasons of state; interests and reasons that are independent of
the desires of individual citizens but deeply concerned with harmonizing
the boundary relationship between nature and society.16 The performance is
characterized by the impersonal, bureaucratic control of large populations,
natural resources, and the production of truth and meaning—​or reality—​in
society.17
This performance, in turn, presumes “moments” that test the authority’s
managerial capacity, their ability to govern. Disasters are such moments—​
occurrences that by their scale and intensity mark a grand deviance from the
normal conditions of life18 and justify a specialized mode of management
designed to avoid or recover from such aberrant times.19 The state succeeds
in this all-​important performance to the extent that, through a mixture of
‘proof,’ persuasion and violence, it can project master narratives about truth,
normalcy, deviance, and trustworthiness onto the public imagination.
During the eighteenth century, divine logic ceased to be the dominant
frame for understanding calamities (though God still remains the go-​to
scapegoat when the state fails in its duties).20 In His stead, imperial ambitions,
scientific expertise, and discourses of risk and political economy struggled
against environmental forces to define “disasters” and shape the need for en-
during solutions. The comprehensive and perennial nature of these solutions,
as opposed to localized, ad hoc relief and rescue measures, transformed the
character of hierarchical governance in England and western Europe. They
sketched an idealized, or “normal,” authority—​the modern state—​whose
raison d’être was the conservation of catastrophes.

Disasters and States

Contemporary literature on disasters regularly counts on history for

“lessons.” But our understanding of disaster management as a global enter-
prise is largely built on post–​Cold War international security discourses.21
As the Soviet Union dissolved, multilateral institutions and international
legal frameworks exploded, postcolonial states entered global roundtables
(on their own behalf), and market democracies proliferated. These shifts
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 5

ushered in utopian visions of cooperative internationalism unseen since

the immediate aftermath of World War II. Disaster management became a
global enterprise. Colonizing and recently decolonized states, at least for-
mally, remained in control of their own destinies. They renewed their com-
mitment to the legal fictions of “sovereign equality” and “non-​interference”
in each other’s territorial affairs, exemplified by the exclusive right to manage
localized catastrophes.22 As international law scholar David Fidler has
observed: “The historical relationship between international law and disaster
relief indicates that . . . both assisting, and victim states retain virtually unfet-
tered sovereignty in the context of natural disaster policy.”23
However, this principled, post-​war equality was coupled with discursive
and technical explanations for how authority and responsibility should be
divvied between states and the “international community,” international
institutions, and civil society. States relied on “fairly” negotiated compromises
to settle the linguistic framing of international rules.24 They trusted “objec-
tive” evaluations of knowledge, technology, and legal and political sophisti-
cation, which drew boundaries between national and international authority
on any given issue. States claimed deep knowledge of local hazards, needs,
and available resources, while international institutions and transnational
civil society asserted superior scientific knowledge and universal expertise
on transboundary issues and “good government.”
In the shadow of these roles, states struggled against the international
community over the distribution of authority and responsibility on eve-
rything from terrorism to fishing. But even as states clung to assertions of
sovereign right, the “international community” reinforced its authority
through a litany of treaties and technical standards, and regular avowals of
free trade, development, and civil and political freedoms.25 (As we will see in
Chapter 7, the mutuality between these projects is a product of eighteenth-​
century thinking directed, in part, at disaster management.)
Intergovernmental institutions led by northern states spread Western
ideals and expertise globally, funding a veritable cottage industry of edu-
cational institutions, civil society networks, and cultural and technology
transfer programs. They persuaded weaker states to adopt preferred notions
of value; they rationalized metrics and governance practices that bolstered
and were, in turn, enforced through international rules and standards, pri-
vate contracts, policy reform, and judiciary training. In the developing
world, the popular imagination was consumed with the mythology of tech-
nical experts, foreign aid, and aid workers crisscrossing the earth to share
6 All Is Well

the benefits of state-​of-​the-​art scientific knowledge with innocent victims

stuck in dangerous places. In many ways this remains the mainstream under-
standing of disaster management today.
This “international” influence has, in turn, precipitated accusations of ne-
ocolonialism, the neoliberal capture of markets and democracy, bureaucratic
mismanagement, and outright corruption. Importantly, both interpretations
promote the now commonplace notion that during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, modern states developed the “field” of international disaster
management to sustain free trade and institutionalize liberal and scientific
governance.26
But disaster management is not, in the first instance, an international
problem. Localized crises have historically thrown the legitimacy of political au-
thority into question. Long before the European Enlightenment, for instance,
Chinese emperors of the Zhou dynasty (1046–​256 bce) who failed to avert
famine were seen to have lost the mandate of heaven.27 In the late twentieth cen-
tury, however, several developments deepened the relationship between polit-
ical authority and the occurrence of disasters. The increasing purchase of global
warming discourse and the easy dispersion of vivid, post-​disaster imagery
brought the knowledge and drama of disasters into our homes.28 These shifts
in availability were accompanied by data aggregates showing a rapid increase in
the number of disasters and their consequences around the world.29
Data aggregates, in turn, were influenced by and informed social-​science
research. Until the 1970s, disaster research was dominated by the objec-
tivist “natural hazards” paradigm that understood disasters as the result of
external hazards (typhoons or earthquakes). Starting in the 1970s, however,
researchers placed their weight behind the “vulnerability” paradigm which
explained disasters by emphasizing the role of systemic deficiencies within
the affected society (endemic poverty or poor urban planning) over the in-
fluence of external hazards. Contemporary (official) discourses of disaster
management weave both approaches together; but the emergence of the
“vulnerability” approach effectively implicated the state in the occurrence
and impact of disasters.30
Understandably, states continue to place a high premium on maintaining
exclusive control over local occurrences.31 The Covid-​19 pandemic has
shown that despite international leadership by institutions such as the World
Health Organization, national governments remain the primary movers
of disaster management. (Despite its hapless handling of the coronavirus
outbreak, it is inconceivable that the United States would allow another
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 7

government to intervene in its affairs.) States guard the right to disaster man-
agement jealously, but not only because they are exceptionalist or cannot
accept reality. They do so because disaster management is inherently a “con-
stitutional” act, the very substance of state formation.
During the formative years of state-​like authority, would-​be rulers responded
to the threat of disasters by interpreting them as occasions for the testing and
development of a generalized power that would deepen as the event faded from
memory. Today, we behold the public-​facing version of this narrative, most
clearly, in the aftermath of disasters. We hear it when officials tell survivors that
more surveillance, police power, insurance, and privatization will help society
“build back better.” We see it when political rivals take the stage to challenge these
assertions and propose a different vision of prosperity and order. We should sense
it when pundits take sides on disaster management with seemingly no sense that
the opposing positions, together, (re)constitute the state’s authority.
On occasion, when First World officials, experts, and elites discuss in-​
country disasters self-​consciously, the most violent disavowals equate man-
agement failures to normal life in the Third World.32 This easy analogy
between disasters and normal life in poorer and politically weak societies is
a clue that the character of the state in such societies is seen to reflect how
these societies have, historically, mismanaged their relationship with nature.
Controversies surrounding disaster management, then, highlight a primor-
dial problem of governance: disasters are, first and foremost, an existential
threat to the sanctity of the state.
Disasters threaten “state failure” because they threaten the notion of “nor-
malcy,” rooted in an eighteenth-​century ideal of the invulnerable, modern
(European) state. Every disaster motivates us to strive for this ideal, while
management solutions promise a new way there. Disaster management,
then, is a precondition of the modern, “normal” state, not merely its result.

The Turning of Screws

There is an abundance of official, scholarly, and popular writing about the

liberal, internationalist character of contemporary disaster management.
Much of the writing consists of solutions-​focused, positive analyses that un-
critically assume this global mandate.33 The relationship between disasters
and states, and certainly the character of disaster management itself, remain
unexplored.
8 All Is Well

As we shall see, liberal internationalism, with its global reach and empire-​
like sense of inevitability, is itself grounded in eighteenth-​century premises of
disaster management.34 Its proponents have encouraged, even enforced, irre-
sponsible approaches to political economy, ecological management, and global
governance35 that have produced global warming and paupered the developing
world. Solutions to these problems emerge from this same historical discourse.
Western states and international institutions flatter themselves that global
disaster management can transform weak and surly sovereigns into productive
members of a multilateral world order. However, the balm of development and
modernization has historically followed on the heels of disaster imaginaries
which discount the ability of weaker states to control their own fates.36 In the
twentieth century, when softer developmentalism failed to create “normal,”
First World–​friendly states, these countries were repeatedly subjected to
crippling economic and political “shocks.”37 Ecological downturn and the suf-
fering of millions were explained away as growing pains, natural pre–​“take-​off ”
phases, and the lingering effects of historical and cultural pathologies such as
feudalism, nationalism, moral corruption, and scientific deficiencies. (Notably,
this list of pathologies did not include centuries of imperialism, enslavement,
and historical and ongoing extraction of resources and wealth.)
More recently, nationalisms have reemerged around the world to reclaim
political authority over people and their environments. But their populist
and anti-​liberal self-​righteousness is also defined by a quest to conservate
catastrophes (past and future) and reconstitute state power. International fi-
nancial institutions, in turn, have doubled down on existing strategies but
have better adapted them to local beliefs (“irrationalities”), resource limi-
tations, “natural” (geographic) risks, and democratic priorities alike. More
governmental restructuring, more privatization and market liberalization,
and more international oversight is the answer.
Disaster management is a necessary and urgent enterprise. It reassures
us that unthinkable calamities can be understood and made tolerable.
Who would want otherwise? Like other “constitutional” projects (say, lib-
eralism or human rights), the work of disaster management carries enor-
mous moral weight. Its bona fides are bolstered by the scientific character
of investigations and experts’ commitment to policy solutions, charac-
teristics that lend the practice of disaster management a kind of apolit-
ical grace.
Critically examining this process is an arduous and disillusioning task,
forever susceptible to accusations of triviality and nihilism. But it is a
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 9

necessary task. To conservate a catastrophe is not simply to forestall a hazard

or mitigate its impact. It is to “correct” the relationship between the social
and natural orders and thereby legitimize, alter, or dramatically overturn the
existing status quo of prosperity and rule—​to produce a “right” and normal
society. The conception and exercise of disaster management, like the grand
discourses of rationality, liberalism, and human rights, has often normalized
economic inequality, social hierarchies, and ecological destruction as part
and parcel of civilizing reality for human use.
Consider Bekele Geleta’s faith in the future. In 2009, Geleta, then Secretary
General of the Red Cross, noted, “We are moving from disaster relief to dis-
aster preparedness.”38 His emphasis on anticipatory governance was at once
appropriate and telling. Appropriate because preparedness, adaptation, and
resilience-​building form the plinth on which twenty-​first-​century states are
being re-​built the world over; telling, because, in the twenty-​first century,
Geleta was marking civilizational progress by a shift that, in my account,
occurred some three centuries earlier.
Geleta’s view is unsurprising. He, like us, lives in an era in which the
struggles underpinning political authority have been concealed behind a
secular faith in statistical risk regulation, technical control of nature, and
market solutions to personal and social welfare concerns. To appreciate the
prefigurative character of disaster management, we must look back to the
promise and tumult of the eighteenth century and recover the politics that
characterize catastrophe conservation and its intimate relationship with the
eruption of modern states.
For this reason, much of this book looks past contemporary government
rhetoric and the near history of international legal conflicts, humanitarian
logistics, and transnational civil society partnerships—​a haze that the Red
Cross has called “the world’s largest unregulated industry.”39 Chapter 7 is, in
part, dedicated to showing the structure underlying this seeming chaos, a
kind of Catherine wheel on which the social and natural orders in the Third
World are routinely stretched and sometimes broken.

The Argument

Disasters are popularly characterized as exceptional occurrences that bring

unexpected ruin and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, scientific, and adminis-
trative contestation called disaster management. Droves of scholars, in turn,
10 All Is Well

have supported and challenged different bits of this claim, showing how indi-
vidual states have forestalled but also caused disasters.
In All Is Well, I make a more radical wager. I propose that the nature of
modern states, and of the disasters they seek to dispel, is determined by the
character of disaster management.40 Specifically, my claim is this: while
floods, plagues, earthquakes, and famines are all real, there is no such thing
as “a disaster” outside of narratives, techniques, and practices of political
struggle within and between societies. In other words, struggles to conservate
the existence and experience of localized socio-​ecological uncertainties pro-
duce hegemonic, state-​like authorities, and vice versa.
States develop official discourses of disaster management, explaining why
disasters occur and how they might be prevented, to justify their authority. But
the ways in which they construct their authority itself creates the conditions
within which things called “disasters” can occur and recur. The stakes are
enormous: prosperity and order versus social and environmental collapse.
Understandably, struggles over disaster management are perpetual and cut
across central objectives of governance like the production of truth, the accu-
mulation of value, the legitimation of violence, and the mastery of ecological
uncertainties.
In eighteenth-​century Europe, as would-​be rulers attempted to displace
divine authority in favor of natural rights, Enlightenment ideals, and colonial
rule, they also produced and tried to wrangle a variety of crises. The stress
and strain of their efforts culminated in the formation of state-​like author-
ities that aspired to a modernist ideal. I suggest that this ideal continues to
guide the hand of “normal” statecraft today. The process of disaster man-
agement, in turn, inaugurated modern meanings of truth, normalcy, risk,
safety, power, and responsibility—​the foundational concepts we use to ex-
plain the existence and experience of disasters and the legitimacy of the state
to govern. In sum: the conservation of catastrophe is inherent in the art of
modern rule. Catastrophes do disrupt the social order. But while they may be
symptoms of failure, they are also molts by which state power renews itself.
Catastrophes are not occurrences, they are inventions.41
This overarching claim is supported by three crisscrossing tent poles
that have been rehearsed in earlier pages but are grouped here for ease of
reference:

• First, as a narrative of mastery over an environment, disaster manage-

ment is based on the premise that humans can perfect the relationship
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 11

between the social and natural orders and that the resulting “right” or
“normal” society would avert or ameliorate disasters and ensure the mu-
tual security of prosperity and rule.
• Second, in the eighteenth century, rulers and rivals struggling for power
engaged in disaster management to constitute themselves into state-​like
authorities that would defend society against risks that they themselves
would define (or “conservate”). In effect: a historical examination of
disaster management reveals underlying legal structures and political-​
economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside ratio-
nalized representations of past catastrophes and future risks.
• Third, and finally, at least since the eighteenth century, seemingly ob-
vious questions about the nature of states and causes of disasters
have been determined by the imperatives and character of disaster
management.

***
This is not a true “global,” “longitudinal,” or “comparative” history of dis-
aster management, though it does borrow from and contribute to such
perspectives. I do not, for instance, trace the historical development of spe-
cific protocols around the world or offer typologies of different states based
on their handling of one or another kind of disaster over time. In fact,
I unpack “disaster management” into “catastrophe conservation” and “state
formation” for precisely the opposite reason; to urge readers to distrust ob-
jectivist accounts of disasters and positive correlations between event char-
acteristics and governance methods. This is not to say that disasters are not
“real.” Nor am I suggesting that threats and hazards cannot be traced to bi-
ological, geological, or technological factors. However, I do mean to argue
that events and causes cannot be meaningfully distinguished from humans’
struggle to manage the boundary between nature and society, which has his-
torically produced state-​like authorities.42
At the same time, I do not claim a perfect continuity between disasters
and states in the eighteenth century and the present. Rather, this history
of disaster management reveals unexplored characteristics and costs of
present-​day struggles to control nature and produce “normal” states around
the world. I suggest that the swell of bodies in the wake of hurricanes,
earthquakes, floods, and epidemics are neither happenstance nor incidental
to the occurrences themselves. To the contrary, the production of innocent
victims, today, is a secular proxy for ritual sacrifices once used to empower
12 All Is Well

new visions and authorities to redeem our world. Put bluntly: disaster man-
agement is not always about saving humanity, but it is always about refining
statecraft. When the two cosmologies intersect, the result is more like a
loosely choreographed dance than a revealed truth.

Anatomy of a Puzzle

Longue durée environmental history is crucial to this story of how visions

of crisis produce blueprints of rule, and vice versa. But it, alone, cannot cap-
ture the interdisciplinary character of disaster management. Happily, nei-
ther disasters nor states are unknown unknowns. Scholars across disparate
fields, such as disaster studies, geography, sociology, science and technology
studies, political ecology, and critical approaches to international law and de-
velopment, have devoted significant time and attention to their study. Their
insights are valuable guides for our own foray into the subject, as well as
restraints against which my argument pushes.
In Chapter 2, we will distill these insights and begin to work the big picture
of disaster management like veteran puzzlers: from the corners in. I assume
no specialist knowledge on the part of the reader. For this reason, Chapter 2
will serve different functions for different readers. It will introduce students
and lay readers to current thinking on disasters and state formation; it will
also locate my methodology and distinguish my arguments from others, so
seasoned readers can evaluate my approach to the subject.
But the picture within the borders is not immediately discernible.
Neither disasters nor states are monochromatic squares, and their relation-
ship cannot be pictured without meeting the challenge of narrative history.
Chapters 3 through 5 serve this ambition.
In Chapter 3, we will explore the legal, political, and administrative
circumstances underlying a plague in early modern Marseille. Beginning
roughly seventy years before the onset of plague, we will see how the French
monarchy, in its quest for political and economic supremacy, revolutionized
the once sleepy fishing village into a modern commercial port. Louis XIV
and his principal advisor, Jean Baptiste Colbert, were clearly aware that in
opening Marseille to the world they were exposing its denizens to a new order
of risks—​specifically, the threat of plague which often laced the rewards of an
expansive trading empire.
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 13

To prepare, Colbert reorganized the city’s public institutions and civic cul-
ture in ways that radically altered the existing balance between commercial
prosperity and civic duty. When the disease eventually found its way into the
sewers, streets, and kitchens of Marseille, the state responded with a mix-
ture of brute force and scientific interpretations of the crisis. These responses,
alongside the altered material and cultural shape of Marseille, imagined the
city into a microcosm of the ideal French administrative state, even as the
state failed to understand or cure the sickness. Revolutionary local narratives
of disaster management, in turn, were at once duels over the character of risk
and the authority of the state to govern. The plague of 1720 shows how the
history of disaster management is inextricable from the history of instincts
and techniques dedicated to realizing an imagined “right” social order and
the ideal (“normal”) authority to rule it.
In Chapter 4, we turn south, to Lisbon, the capital of the Kingdom of
Portugal, as it stood on the morning of All Saints’ Day, 1755.43 We examine
the infamous earthquake that followed the inauguration of church services
and study how the process of disaster management rescued Portugal—​then
ruled by the Catholic Church and hostage to English and Spanish rivalry—​
from its peripheral status within Europe. Disaster management under the
authority of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquês de Pombal, sta-
bilized the imaginary of a modern state by insisting that the calamity was a
natural accident that could be mitigated by centralized authority, economic
development, and scientific methodologies.
This interpretation discounted existing narratives of divine judgment and
allowed ideals of secular anticipatory governance to dominate public expec-
tations of the future. The process of defining the disaster and charting sal-
vation was also the process of state formation. Through moral, economic,
and physical oppression, the Portuguese state destroyed its primary political
rival, the Jesuit order. It tightened control over people and natural resources,
developed an English-​inspired mercantilist economy, and created new social
hierarchies that empowered wealthy merchants over nobility and the poor.
The state’s response enforced a new, comprehensive narrative of risk, nor-
malcy, and prosperity. It offered the world a template for the modern, sci-
entific state rising out of the ashes of natural chaos, irrationality, and moral
confusion.
In Chapter 5, we will venture east to the Indian province of Bengal to see
how a modern, calculative liberalism, foreseen by the plague in Marseille and
14 All Is Well

the Lisbon earthquake, produced a historic famine in the same moment that
it inaugurated colonial rule on the subcontinent.
The famine killed millions, by some accounts a third of Bengal’s popula-
tion. It pushed the society into civil war, starved its people to the point of
cannibalism, and ruined the once-​prosperous region for decades to come.
In this study, we will witness how the East India Company (Company)—​and
eventually the British government—​caused, interpreted, and addressed (i.e.,
“conservated”) the catastrophe in ways that stimulated state formation in
multiple spaces: a liberal, constitutional state in England and its imperial re-
flection in India. British neglect, indifference, ignorance, and rapaciousness
defined modernist disaster management. Bengal exemplifies the contempo-
rary suspicion that disaster management occurring in a space may not be for
the benefit of people residing there.
Through the self-​involved gaze of colonialism, in Bengal’s darkest hour, it
was British society that was deemed vulnerable. While there is some writing
on the differences between European and non-​European processes of state
formation, this study shows how these differences may be the result of a
deeper process of making one society safe to be preyed on by another. The
fate of Bengal forecasts the resilient relationship between disaster manage-
ment and the colonial state that would find its stride in the early nineteenth
century, run until the mid-​twentieth, and settle the terms of everyday life in
independent India.44
Relative to global histories of continuity or rupture, my choice of case
studies may appear idiosyncratic. But it follows from my desire to dismantle
a frustrating complacency of sovereign and intergovernmental authori-
ties, which is uncritically accepted by the news media and lay publics. This
complacency presents in two forms: first, the overt conviction that “disaster
management” is something modern authorities are doing to quell bad things
called “disasters”; and second, the hubris that such authorities can actually
succeed without confronting the degree to which their motivations, organ-
izational characteristics, and conceptions of a better future depend on pro-
ducing and inequitably distributing the costs of catastrophe. In keeping with
this agenda, each study elaborates on one or more of the overlapping tent
poles that comprise my argument.
More generally: to the extent that disasters accrue credentials based on
mortality rates, the scale and duration of social disruption or economic loss,
the case studies presented here are “historic” and widely accessible. The cases
highlight how early modern efforts at catastrophe conservation prioritized
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 15

secular causes, Enlightenment imperatives, scientific solutions, and neoco-

lonial ambitions at a moment in history when divine influence and natural-
ness were still the trusted indicators for where legal and political authority
should rest.
Marseille and Lisbon, for instance, showcase how narratives and the work
of disaster management facilitated incomplete transitions from an absolutist
monarchy in the heart of Europe, and a theocratic kingdom at its political
margins, to the calculative rationality of the modern European state. The
resulting state-​like form served as a template for colonial and post-​colonial
states in centuries ahead.
These transitions were incomplete because across early modern Europe,
people and rulers still lived in awe of nature’s wrath and were susceptible
to religious admonitions. Millions of people in the world’s most advanced
democracies still labor under a similar ambivalence.45 The cases similarly
foreshadow the tensions between God, nature, and human actions that char-
acterize disaster management today. At the same time, the cases also em-
phasize aspects of “conservation” and state formation that are true across
different varieties of disasters, and which continue to echo in the structure of
global disaster management operations in the twenty-​first century.
But the critical mission of this book is just as well served by dwelling on
the particularities of each study. Marseille and Lisbon, each in its own way,
subverts a dominant narrative of the relationship between disasters and states
frequently peddled by media reports and governments alike: that disasters
are society-​wide ruptures that call for a fundamental reconsideration of truth
and power in the affected society. The Lisbon earthquake is widely believed
to exemplify this disaster-​as-​opportunity routine. However, by studying the
earthquake, in the context of catastrophe conservation and state formation,
we can appreciate the cracks in this story. The Lisbon study shows us that
a revolutionary state apparatus legitimized by the promise of rationalistic,
scientific victory over nature and superstition carried within it an ancien
régime–​style propensity for authoritarianism, inequality, social hierarchies,
and violence.
Liberal state technism, today, remains similarly defined by the theology it
rejects, the naturalist epistemologies it promises to subsume, and the ration-
ally ordered social welfare it purports to advance. In the aftermath of crises,
leaders in a scientific superpower like the United States regularly ask God to
bless rebuilding efforts even as they blame nature’s power for overwhelming
mitigation measures. All the while, police and military forces violently
16 All Is Well

remove people from their lands to make room for market actors who claim
this new terra nullius for profit. This was the true legacy of Hurricane
Katrina’s impact on New Orleans—​one built atop destructive but “normal”
political economy and legal governance stretching back to the 1920s.46
Disaster as revolution can be a red herring. Often, when the dust settles, we
find that power structures responsible for the disaster are strengthened and
claim even deeper control over the affected society. French theorist Maurice
Blanchot recognized this phenomenon in the final decade of the twentieth
century, writing: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving eve-
rything intact.”47 The Marseille study shows how this absurd result can be
traced back to the public culture and everyday struggles between rulers and
subjects to create a “right” society, long before a plague comes ashore.
Contrasting the Marseille and Lisbon case studies with Bengal throws
up a new set of counterintuitive insights. For instance, Marseille shows how
European states began, at least formally, to see their own modernity as a cal-
culable liberalism that could produce “right” societies free of environmental
uncertainty. This self-​involvement, in turn, allowed European powers to view
their colonial impositions as a kind of scientific stewardship over subjects
deemed incapable of such feats. In sharp contrast to the other studies, the
Bengal famine reveals how disaster managers can render some crises invis-
ible or blame them on the sufferers themselves.
By placing Bengal alongside Marseille and Lisbon we can also question the
easy assumption that disasters punctuate a society’s sense of time and history.
Historical time and progress, I suggest, may be better understood as a func-
tion of “disaster management” and not of disasters themselves. Viewing the
problem of temporality in this way allows us to explain why some disasters
perpetuate power relations or produce progress in real time, while others re-
construct temporality in the affected spaces for centuries to come. Bengal
of the 1770s–​1790s, for instance, can hardly be called “early modern” rela-
tive to the European world. In turn, nineteenth-​century British famine-​con-
trol experiments—​easily captured by “disaster management” as understood
here—​brought even deeper ruin and deferred the country’s development for
another century. Disaster imagainaires routed India, like other colonies, into
a unified course towards stability and progress along a western European axis
of historical time.
Juxtaposing the cases so, we can reconsider popular assumptions about,
and acquire unexpected insights into, the norms and practices of dis-
aster management (e.g., why is anti-​corruption a paradigmatic response
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 17

to disasters in the Third World but not the First?). We can ask how disaster
management functions, when it “succeeds,” why it “fails,” and who it serves.
Chapters 3 through 5 emphasize how preparedness, development, relief,
and reconstruction efforts have historically wedded catastrophe conserva-
tion and state formation. But they say little about disaster “risk,” which had
not yet been conceived of in the way we think of it today. For this reason,
the case studies cannot, on their own, posit a genealogy of risk management,
which is a crucial part of the practice of disaster management today.
I develop this genealogy in Chapter 6. There, we will observe the emer-
gence of anticipatory risk-​assessment discourses that round out the process
of catastrophe conservation as state-​formation. In Europe, risk grew out of
maritime insurance contracts called “risks” designed to guard commercial
interests against hazards emanating from “chance” and irrationality. At the
same time, the possibility of misfortune aroused people’s appetites for profit.
In pursuit of a kaleidoscope of interests and compulsions, early modern
merchants, gamblers, lawyers, and mathematicians produced metrics that
organized human choices and natural chaos into statistical patterns of hazard
that could be mined for dangers and opportunities alike. In time, rulers and
agitators reified these patterns into hard rules and softer heristics that guided
social reforms, structured the world, and occasioned its future.48
The move toward probabilistic risk assessment recoded the politics of
European state formation. The state’s existence (raison d’être) and the security
of rule (raison d’état) were animated by objective, scientific calculations that
eventually produced global understandings of normalcy, deviance, risk, and
resilience. Chapter 6 allows us to identify the emerging relationship between
scientific and socio-​scientific assessments of risk and the emergence of a sec-
ular justification for the state’s existence; a relationship that is woven into the
DNA of disaster management and continues to be perfected to this day.
In reading a genealogy of risk alongside the narrative set-​ pieces of
Marseille, Lisbon, and Bengal, we can, for the first time, behold the historical
puzzle at work. We can reach for this book’s ultimate prize: understanding
the relationship between disasters and modern states in our time. This in-
trepid task falls to Chapter 7.
In the 1970s, First-​World states, experts, and international institutions,
heirs to the managerial techniques and instincts studied in previous chapters,
invested in growing disaster management as a relatively coherent, global en-
terprise. They focused on redesigning state power in the Third World to bring
its social and environmental circumstances into line with Western economic
18 All Is Well

interests and political ambitions. This meant imagining disaster management

as a co-​productive process between the conservation of catastrophes and the
globalization of the early modern imaginary of a modern (“normal”) state.
The welfare state, in various forms across North America and western
Europe, is arguably a shining example of the normal state template. Whether
rooted in laissez faire freedoms or a more regulated economic growth, the
welfare state’s myriad forms display a shared commitment to aggregate pros-
perity, socio-​economic mobility, and social safety nets sponsored by the
instrumental regulation of environmental, technological, cultural, and in-
tellectual facets of society. Above all, these commitments are guaranteed by
a hegemonic security apparatus. Recent histories of the welfare state have
shown its origins in the mission of disaster management,49 though, as we will
see, even the First World’s narrative of itself has grown a survivalist edge.
Most of the underdeveloped and developing Third World lives far from
this seeming oasis of prosperity and order. A prolonged history of invasions,
colonial rule, resource extraction, and relative powerlessness before inter-
national institutions has marked these countries with tenuous claims to
sovereignty. For the worst-​off in this group, statehood is a dream that the
“international community” has distrusted, discounted, deferred, and denied.
Every year, these regions face a disproportionate number of the world’s
disasters, making them attractive laboratories for the testing of global
standards and practices of disaster management. Geographic and historical
conditions, together with expert narratives about these conditions and nec-
essary responses, contribute to the conservation of disasters. They prepare
the ground for the continued marginalization of affected peoples and the
provincialization of state power in the Third World.
The history of the welfare state does not explain the character of dis-
aster management in the Third World. Once they had picked their colonial
shackles and had their ankles gnawed by Cold War rivalries, Third World
nations were convinced by their former occupiers to pursue the ideal of
the “developmentalist-​security” state. This model, as the name signals,
emphasizes the parallel pursuit of economic development and the compre-
hensive securitization of human, economic, and environmental resources.
The ideal of a developmentalist-​security state echoes the legacy of eighteenth-​
century European imperatives of disaster management in our moment. The
global threat of climate change and, recently, the Covid-​19 pandemic, have
reflected this ideal and its survivalist imperatives back onto the First World’s
perception of itself.
 In the Shadow of Leviathans Seen and Unseen 19

Disaster management is axiomatic in the modern world crowded by an

ever-​growing array of deadly uncertainties. For this reason, it finds ready ac-
ceptance in the popular imagination and permeates our lives. My aim is to
question this status quo by reintroducing one of the most powerful, world-​
building practices in history, as such. My motivations are exemplified by an-
thropologist Michel-​Rolph Trouillot’s observation that:

We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we

stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false inno-
cence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those
upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.50

I hope this book will compel us to reckon with the myriad institutions, pro-
cesses, moral, and political settlements that structure our world, whether we
be managers or the people being managed. I hope it will give us the hindsight
and critical tools to live more interventionist lives, less accepting of revealed
truths, imperceptible nudges, and marketized solutions. For if we relinquish
the right to question our saviors, we are destined to live (and die) passively, in
the shadow of grand hypotheses about leviathans seen and unseen.
 2
Corner Pieces

“What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable

agreed upon.”
—​Napoleon Bonaparte1

This book offers a modest history of sweeping socio-​ecological crises and

centuries-​long struggles to master them. Earthquakes and epidemics are
things that happen in the world, things that matter. But for the purposes of
governance, as “disasters,” such occurrences are at once real and interpretive.
To adopt this dual perspective is to acknowledge that doing something about
disasters is not only a matter of scientific discovery, technical regulation, or
even applauding traditional knowledge and stakeholder participation. It is a
project of continually reshaping the ways in which we do politics, create laws,
write history, and make meaning in the present. Adapting to this double vi-
sion is a byzantine undertaking. To ease into it, we should clarify some of the
foundational questions and themes that resonate through this book.

A Brief History of “What Is a Disaster?”

Twentieth-​century investigations into the nature of disasters have produced

two somewhat-​rivalrous positions on the subject: one views disasters as the
result of objective, external hazards, while the other blames social deficien-
cies that render society vulnerable to external hazards.2
The objectivist, external-​hazards approach holds that disasters are caused
by objective physical phenomena such as natural hazards (hurricanes or bac-
teria) or technological failures (industrial accidents) which disrupt the or-
dinary course of civic life.3 Disasters, by this logic, are situations that can be
objectively distinguished from “normal” social conditions.

All Is Well. Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197579190.003.0002
22 All Is Well

Traditional external-​hazards experts regard disasters as temporary, epi-

sodic events and exclude slower moving, processual crises such as famines,
droughts, pollution, and epidemics.4 During the 1950s, their approach in-
tegrated behavioral responses to disasters5 defined, almost exclusively, in
terms of emotional stress.6 Contemporary research, policymaking, and the
practice of emergency management are grounded in insights from behav-
ioral economics, cognitive psychology, and empirical social sciences, and
they discount the historical, moral, and political underpinnings of disasters
as epiphenomena.7
The external-​hazards approach is attractive for its commitment to em-
pirical analysis of disasters; experts in this vein have historically favored a
technoscientific approach to disaster risk and response.8 A strong external-​
hazards position, for instance, would suggest that it is possible to “manage
the planet” by perfecting our knowledge of natural, physical systems, like
the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.9 Experts committed to this
approach aim to isolate objective and distinct causal factors and impact
characteristics unique to various kinds of disasters. Floods, for instance,
might be classified as being objectively different, in cause and effect, from
earthquakes or famines.10 They focus on developing taxonomies of disasters
that could facilitate predictive modeling and the seamless translation of
datasets into causal maps linking inevitable hazards to dangerous spaces and
potential victims.11 Fervent articulations of this approach still frame official
conceptions of disasters around the world12 and contribute to the develop-
ment of state power.
Starting in the 1980s, geographers and sociologists began to turn away
from the external-​ hazards approach, emphasizing instead the role of
institutions and social and biophysical vulnerabilities in producing tech-
nological and environmental risks.13 The resulting vulnerability approach
establishes a deep reciprocity between hazardous forces and the ability of a
society to recover from their impact.14
Proponents of this approach have shown that disasters reveal preexisting
deficiencies and dysfunctions within a society which may have heightened its
vulnerability to hazards or may themselves be causes of slow-​moving crises
like drought, pollution, or generalized poverty and malnutrition.15 This cri-
tique of the external-​hazards paradigm has produced a host of now popular
conclusions such as “earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”16 “There is
no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster” is both a profound insight and, today,
something of a fetish.17
 Corner Pieces 23

The vulnerability paradigm is appealing because it views disasters as (on-

going) processual occurrences at the nexus of social circumstances, political
choices, and the natural environment.18 In doing so, this approach offers
the hope that such occurrences can be avoided or weathered by increasing
society’s “resilience”19 through better adaptation to its natural circumstances,
and securing people’s ability to access life’s necessities.20 Accordingly, the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) defines vulnerability
as the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected, and it is a result
of diverse historical, social, economic, political, institutional, and environ-
mental conditions and processes.21
However, the position that disasters are slow-​moving and processual does
not fare well in the policies and practice of states or international institutions
which remain focused on isolated events.22 For the most part, states continue
to interpret disasters as dramatic, temporary, and episodic events—​as enemy
attacks on their integrity and legitimacy.23 This war-​like posture allows
political leaders to identify distinct and abnormal—​but fixable—​causes
(unprecedented rainfall, operator error, etc.) to amplify the situation’s un-
expectedness, minimize the bodies and damage that can be associated with
the temporary crisis,24 and declare victory as soon as the waters recede, the
streets are cleared, and school buses roll by.
Nevertheless, by shifting the expert discourse away from the event and
toward background social deficiencies, the vulnerability approach draws
out the relationship between historical and ongoing political choices and
impending catastrophes.25 Emphasizing human responsibility reduces the
ability of policymakers to fall back on explanations that emphasize natural-
ness and “surprise,” and forces governments to reckon with the long-​term
effects of their choices.
Finally, in viewing external hazards as the sparks that ignite social defi-
ciencies, the vulnerability approach succeeds in absorbing some of its ob-
jectivist predecessors’ insights into itself. (While the vulnerability approach
increasingly features in the language of treaties and resolutions, states have
resisted adopting it as the default approach to disaster management.)
Vulnerability scholars have traditionally taken pains to denounce
data-​driven, technocratic management as a characteristic of the external-​
hazards approach;26 they have long insisted on the importance of his-
tory, social context, and decentralized, cooperative governance. However,
over the past decade, the vulnerability approach has mutated to match
the technoscientific character of climate change research.27 Today, in its
24 All Is Well

second—​“policy-​influence seeking”—​generation, vulnerability research is

characterized by positive, social-​science methods and a wealth of event-​spe-
cific, management case studies that obsess over “lessons” and conclude with
policy solutions.28
This is urgent and ennobling work. But the desire to “mainstream” their
approach as scientific and actionable has led vulnerability experts away from
permanent questions of history, theory, and power. Success has cost the vul-
nerability approach its self-​reflexivity and the ability to critique governments
and international institutions’ preference for technoscientific frameworks,
predictive modeling, private catastrophe-​insurance markets, and legal and
technical standardization.29 As we will see in Chapter 7, during this techno-
cratic turn, vulnerability discourse has found some purchase in global pol-
icymaking circles. First-​World states and international financial institutions
have relied on its insights to justify public-​sector reform and market liberal-
ization in developing states through conditional loans and “or else” disaster
imaginaries.
Neither the vulnerability paradigm nor the external hazards paradigm
is an axiomatic approach to disaster-​risk. Like the hazards approach, “vul-
nerability” is rooted in colonial practices of “scientifically” identifying and
subjugating dangerous spaces full of corrupt, hapless, and ungrateful people
in need of saving.30 Both approaches sit atop normative visions of how we
should live in relation to the environment. Both legitimize one or another
ideal relationship between the social and natural orders—​orders that are
continually produced and reorganized through political struggle within
and between societies straining to control each other and their natural
circumstances, over time. Despite its egalitarian commitments, then, the vul-
nerability approach also justifies deeper state and international control over
peoples and underwrites state (re)formation at the hands of national elites,
experts, and the market.
While sympathetic to the vulnerability paradigm, a subset of critical
scholars—​comprised of geographers and political ecologists like Kenneth
Hewitt and Michael Watts, historians like David Arnold, Gregory Bankoff,
Ted Steinberg, and Mike Davis, and anthropologists like Alex de Waal and
Anthony Oliver-​Smith—​have long suspected that disasters are not the re-
sult of deficiencies in the existing social order but rather a function of its
success.31 In this book, I add my voice to this skeptical tradition and argue
that the existence and experience of “disaster” is itself a product of disaster
management.
 Corner Pieces 25

Disaster management, comprised of catastrophe conservation and state

formation, is a catch-​all for narratives and actions that create vulnerabilities,
precipitate disasters, and produce hierarchical authorities to guard against
such occurrences. As we will see, since the eighteenth century, the normal
(or default) authority has been the modern state; its existence depends on
the ability of its functionaries (officials, the wealthy and elite, experts, police,
courts, universities, public outreach groups, and so on) to secure prosperity
and order through a perpetual process of catastrophe conservation.
In the twenty-​first century, states cherish formal order and accumulation
as the equivalent of safeguarding local subjects by distributing their vul-
nerabilities across vast spaces and distant populations. To understand what
a disaster is, we must take a long, sobering look at what disaster manage-
ment does, and how it became ubiquitous in modern social life. This book is
that audit.

A Near-​History of “What Is Disaster Management?”

As a form of generalized governance, “disaster management” is commonly

understood as a body of rules, institutions, expert discourses, and practices
that minimize disaster risk and direct preparedness and reconstruction
efforts.32 As a practice, disaster management is governed by national and
international regulations that incorporate a wealth of interdisciplinary
insights; the practice itself is justified by abstract principles of necessity, jus-
tice, responsibility, sustainability, and good governance.33
In international legal discourse, disaster management is conducted under
the auspices of two overlapping and rivalrous mandates: “disaster risk reduc-
tion” (DRR)34 and “climate change adaptation” (CCA).35 (I return to these
mandates in Chapter 7.) Analytically, both approaches wrap the vulnerability
playbook around the external-​hazards narrative.36 For instance, the IPCC
has noted that the nature and severity of adverse climatic impacts depends
on extreme climatic conditions as well as social exposure and vulnerability.
These factors result in a disaster when the adverse impact causes “widespread
damage and . . . severe alternations in the normal functioning of society.”37
Across the clamor of intergovernmental institutions,38 treaties,39 reports,
and in-​country operations, there is an outspoken awareness that develop-
mental deficiencies and the failure to adapt to natural circumstances, par-
ticularly in the Third World, produce regions of low social resilience with
26 All Is Well

localized vulnerabilities that, on occasion and often under the stress of ex-
ternal hazards, boil over into catastrophic events.40
Working backward from this narrative, the Red Cross defines a disaster
as “a sudden, calamitous event that seriously disrupts the functioning of a
community or society and causes human, material, and economic or envi-
ronmental losses that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope
using its own resources.”41 The UN adopts a similar definition.42 The as-
similation of the vulnerability and natural-​hazards frames is helped along
by the resurgence of sophisticated strains of geographical determinism
pushing back against social explanations.43 In addition, the notion that
disasters are seriously disruptive events precipitated by natural hazards re-
mains a valuable narrative for states; it allows them to disclaim disasters as
aberrant deviations from the normal course of social life and thus beyond
their control.
As we have seen in the debate between the vulnerability and hazards
paradigms, narratives of disaster management derive from fundamental
differences about the nature of the problem and the character of solutions. In
keeping with the popular understanding of mutual reinforcement between
vulnerabilities and external hazards, the contemporary meta-​narrative of
disaster management regards economic development and risk management
as key components of a comprehensive disaster reduction plan.44 Under this
scheme, “disaster risk is an unresolved problem of development,”45 and sus-
tainable development, increasingly reframed as “adaptive growth,” is key to
mitigating disaster risk by lowering vulnerability and shoring up social resil-
ience.46 In brief: disasters thwart development, and development is crucial
for disaster preparedness and recovery.
In policymaking circles around the world, disaster management is visual-
ized though the imaginary of the “disaster (management) cycle.”47 The Cycle,
across semantic variations, charts management over successive stages: from
preparedness to the disastrous “event,” followed by relief and rescue, and
concluding with mitigation and preparedness (comprised, once again, of
development and anticipatory risk management). By some accounts, this
model improves upon the scattered beginnings of international risk-​assess-
ment that stressed post-​disaster emergency response.48 The Cycle, popular
with legal, public administration, and emergency management experts, has
been rigorously criticized by disaster studies scholars.49 However, its popu-
larity in policymaking circles is undeniable.50 While the Cycle began as a way
of conceptualizing disaster response, it has evolved into a map of hierarchical
 Corner Pieces 27

and perpetual social and environmental control, where each stage is “part of
society’s risk management portfolio.”51
By this account, disasters are the fulfillment of uncertainties inherent in
the relationship between natural and social orders that threaten to produce
anomie. To manage disasters is to prepare for these uncertainties by com-
bining scientific knowledge (truth) and political will (morality and virtue)
against a pliable backdrop of abstract and universal rules, principles, and
processes that animate life in the state (rule of law, best practices, good govern-
ance). Uncertainties never rest, so disaster management is perennial, begin-
ning long before the occurrence of a calamitous event and continuing long
after the resulting disruption can be said to have ended.
As we will see, the imperatives of modern disaster management descended
from early modern narratives of civilizational progress. These narratives
assumed that the relationship between nature and society, from climatic
chaos to human irrationality and technological dysfunction, could—​and in-
deed should—​be rationally harmonized. This assumption sits at the heart of
disaster management in our time. As legal scholar Daniel Farber observes,
“to be fully effective, the work of calculating and planning for disaster risk
must account for ‘acts of nature . . ., weaknesses of human nature, and . . . side
effects of technology.’ ”52
The late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a series of hard laws
and a veritable cottage industry of public and private relationships directed
at facilitating disaster management internationally. This web of actors and
interests remains diffuse. But its influence on national policymaking—​
through conditional loans, reform commitments, investor expectations, as
well as a generation of trainings, certifications, and cultural and non-​govern-
mental associations53—​is transformative.
Disaster governance has globalized through a sea of guidelines, rubrics,
case analyses, and scholarly and practitioner-​oriented analyses. And yet, the
recipients of this expertise in affected states frequently view reform proposals
as perpetuating manipulative neocolonial strategies. As one senior official
at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs has noted, there is “a significant
undertow of skepticism among the intended recipients of legal rules [related
to Disaster Management],” and it is “unusual to find such a level of antipathy
so early in the . . . development of legal rules on a topic.”54
In action, modern mechanisms of disaster management merge vulnera-
bility and hazards paradigms and erode the need for deeper historical ac-
counts. We forget how power relations condition societies by organizing
28 All Is Well

the social and natural orders, a process of boundary-​making that may itself
produce and institutionalize social vulnerabilities. Conceptual innovations
like the “disaster (management) cycle” that counter vulnerability through
preparedness structure life into distinct, successive stages revolving be-
tween two extreme nodes: the normal course of life and the aberrant event.
In the first instance, this model limits our comprehension of what can at all
be a disaster and blinds us to the kinds of unseen, long-​term vulnerabilities
that Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.”55 Further, the “disaster (man-
agement) cycle” only accommodates the history of a society between these
phases: before and after the event. It ignores the dynamic relationship be-
tween the management process itself and the society where it occurs and
thus erases any scrutiny into whether the “normal” course of life makes such
tragedies inevitable.
Much of contemporary law and policy scholarship views disaster man-
agement as an internationalist project; it is comprised of a global system of
regulatory mechanisms, comprised of treaties, technical standards, and insti-
tutional arrangements, designed to thwart or alleviate crises and re-​establish
order among equal sovereigns dedicated to balancing comity with self-​in-
terest. Even sophisticated historical analyses distinguish ad hoc “natural
disasters” from the traditional problems of international law and relations,
such as sovereign equality, armed conflict, and trade disputes.56 The relation-
ship between state formation, international relations, and the conservation
of catastrophes floats unseen, like a glaucoma in a sea of perspicacity.
The globalization of disaster management practices in the twentieth and
twenty-​first centuries, by which I mean the movement of standards, aid, and
expertise from the First to the Third World, has sharpened the influence of
this industry on the internal lives of developing states. For the least devel-
oped and uninfluential members of this group, disaster management is a
contest between sovereign authority and a variety of multilateral rules and
transnational and sub-​state factors.
In the aftermath of disasters, despite diplomatic pressure and appeals to
the shared concerns of humanity, claims of sovereignty and non-​intervention
reach a crescendo, as governments, like wounded animals, gather themselves
and isolate. The tension is amplified when the embattled state is perceived
to lack the ability or political will to safeguard its people. For instance, after
cyclone “Nargis” devastated the Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, the ruling junta’s
opaque handling of the situation, which included barring the entry of aid
workers, produced a tense political standoff between the government and the
 Corner Pieces 29

international community with the latter even accusing Myanmarese rulers of

having committed “crimes against humanity.”57
Legally and materially, the state continues to sit at the center of disaster
management operations.58 Yet, the perpetual and comprehensive nature of
disaster management transcends the traditional categories of “emergency,”
“war-​time,” or “peace-​time” governance that traditionally mark moments of
state formation. To clarify the relationship between states and disasters, we
must return to a time before there was an “international community,” before
the politics of “emergency.” We must return to the eighteenth century, when
notions of rationality, liberal fairness, natural rights, and secularism gripped
the Western imagination and inflamed European rulers’ desire for harmony
at home and dominion abroad. As we will see in Chapters 3 through 5, the
sanctity of political authority already depended on rulers’ ability to prevent
disasters59 or, through a mixture of narrative and violence, persuade subjects
and other states of their ability to restore order and forestall recurrences.60
The states that emerged through this process were modern in the sense that
they aspired for a modernist ideal of normalcy, which required the perpetual
conservation of catastrophes.

Thinking Backward

Traditionally, disaster and emergency management researchers identify

X disaster as the problem to be resolved, they determine causal factors to
attempt to explain and define what happened, and then they rely on these
definitions to propose regulatory mechanisms to prevent recurrence. This
directionality can be found in external hazards,61 vulnerability scholar-
ship,62 and works that accept disasters as “essentially contested concepts” be-
yond the scope of consensus-​based definition.63 In contrast, I approach the
problem going the other way. I show that, historically, visions, techniques,
and practices of disaster management have produced both the risks and the
disruptions that we expect to be saved from as well as the authorities we hope
will deliver us.
This shift in perspective allows us to behold disaster management as a
struggle over the authority to decide what should count as a disaster and what
is a “normal” society. But to begin with, we must recall that natural and so-
cial orders, and their relationship, are neither facts nor natural occurrences.
Systemic deficiencies (dangerous spaces and at-​risk people), the scale and
30 All Is Well

frequency of external-​hazards (from industrial pollution global warming),

and the temporality of crises (event-​like or processual), in turn, are functions
of a particular relationship between these orders. As prefaced in Chapter 1,
disaster management is the art of governing this relationship.
Typologies and maps of vulnerability and disasters and the corresponding
plans for preparedness and mitigation are themselves a function of “dis-
aster management” as defined in this book. They are a function of actors and
institutions struggling to control the production of knowledge in society
in order to produce widely accepted perceptions of truth and reality. At the
same time, what will constitute official knowledge and how the nature–​
society relationship will be arranged depends on the aspirations and fears of
these institutions, actors, and movements based on their experience of each
other and their environmental circumstances.64
The process of disaster management is indeed a form of systematic action
directed against the conditions and consequences of calamity. But questions
regarding the character of uncertainty, the likelihood of risk, the state of pre-
paredness, and even whether or not a disaster has occurred are not asked or
answered in a vacuum. They, like the “recognition of the existence of a scien-
tific problem,” in Max Weber’s prose, coincide “with the possession of spe-
cifically oriented motives and values.”65 I do not intend to suggest that what
constitutes a disaster is entirely relative and dependent on the subjectivities of
the people affected. Subjectivity, like objectivity, has a history. But in investi-
gating disaster management as a process that produces state-​like authorities,
we will see that not all subjectivities matter; rather, governance objectives,
long-​term political and cultural discourse, and short-​term violence routinely
shape and reorder subjectivities to normalize preexisting, and new, power
relations.
In effect, disaster management narratives, explaining causes and pointing
to appropriate responses, are morality tales involving innocents, hazards,
heroes, continuities, ruptures, and, always, the promise of salvation. These
tales explain why inexplicable tragedies occur. And like all morality tales,
they offer lessons on where danger lurks and why, and how existing values
and rule should be reorganized to avoid recurrences.
Disaster management, then, is a prefigurative historical process that
constructs the disaster even as it constructs the subjects who must endure
it and the authorities that will manage it. The underlying relationship is inti-
mate, a whispered suspicion at the heart of official knowledge.
Another random document with
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material. Cables, zig-zags, and beads are used to ornament them,
and the whole is a good example of Assyrian taste in little things.

Fig. 228.—Comb. Actual size.

Louvre.
So far we have treated Assyrian metal-work of the ornamental
kind only as it is seen in bronze. Hardly any objects of gold or silver
have, in fact, been discovered in Mesopotamia. And yet it is
impossible that those two metals can have been very rare in the
Nineveh of the Sargonids or the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar; war
and industry certainly led to considerable accumulations of both. We
must find a reason for their absence in the success with which the
Assyrian tomb has so far avoided discovery. The tomb alone could
offer a safe asylum to such treasures, and preserve them in its
shadows for the inquisitive eyes of modern archæologists. Before
being abandoned to the slow effects of time, the temples and
palaces were pillaged. Here and there, however, in some well
contrived hiding-place or forgotten corner, a few trinkets may have
escaped the eyes of greedy conquerors, or of the later marauders
who sounded the ruins in every direction for the sake of the precious
metals they might contain.
 Fig. 229.—Comb. Actual size.
Louvre.
The oldest jewels left to us by these peoples are those found in
the most ancient tombs at Warka. Their forms are simple enough—
bronze bracelets made of a bar tapering rapidly to each end and
beaten with a hammer into a slight oval (Figs. 232, 233). These bars
are sometimes very thick, as our first example shows. The golden
ear-drops from the same tombs (Fig. 234) are made in the same
way.
At Nineveh the art is more advanced. We may form our ideas of it
from the bas-reliefs, where people are shown with jewels about their
arms, their necks, and hanging on their cheeks; and also from a few
original specimens that have escaped the general wreck. In the
foundations of Sargon’s palace, under the massive threshold, were
found too, together with a large number of cylinders, the remains of
necklaces made up of pierced stones, such as carnelian, red and
yellow jasper, brown sardonyx, amethyst, &c., cut into cylinders,
polygons, medallions, and into the shapes of a pear and of an olive
or date-stone (Fig. 235). This use of precious stones was a survival
from the days when pebbles were turned to the same purpose.
Earrings were made in the same fashion (Figs. 236, 237). In one of
the reliefs we see a eunuch wearing a necklace in which double
cones alternate with disks (Fig. 238). The same elements could of
course be used for bracelets or armlets, by shortening the wire on
which they were strung. From an art point of view such a jewel was
quite primitive; all its beauty lay in the rich colours of its separate
stones, among which beads of glass and enamelled earthenware
have also been found.

Figs. 230, 231.—Bronze fork and

spoon; from Smith’s Assyrian
Discoveries.
Kings and other high personages were not content with such
simple adornments. It would seem that princes wore necklaces
made up of separate pieces each of which had an emblematic
signification of its own (Fig. 239), because we find them constantly
reappearing in the reliefs, sometimes around the sovereign’s neck,
sometimes distributed over the field of a stele. In the stele of Samas-
Vul, the king only wears a single ornament on his breast; it is exactly
similar to what we call a Maltese cross (Fig. 116).
Figs. 232, 233.—Bracelets; from Rawlinson.

Fig. 234.—Ear-drop. British

Museum.
 Figs. 235–237.—Necklace and
ear-drops. Louvre. Drawn by
Saint-Elme Gautier.
These ornaments must have been of gold and of some
considerable size. The grand vizier, and the king when his tiara is
absent, wear a diadem about their foreheads in which the rosette is
the chief element of the decoration (Vol. I. Figs. 25 and 29). The
queen’s diadem, in the “Feast of Assurbanipal,” is crenellated (Fig.
117), reminding us of that worn by the Greek Cybele. In the same
monuments the wrists of kings and genii are surrounded with
massive bracelets (Vol. I. Figs. 4, 8, 9, 15, 23, 24, 29, &c.). In the
Louvre there is a bronze bracelet of exactly the same type (Fig.
24c).[441] We may see them figured among the objects offered in
tribute in a bas-relief at Nimroud (Fig. 241). From the same reliefs
we gather several examples of ear-pendents (Figs. 242–244). It is
probable that the same models were carried out in gold, silver, or
bronze, according to the rank and fortune of the people for whom
they were made.[442] The forms were not altogether happy.

Fig. 238.—Necklace; from Layard.

And yet the Assyrian workmen could sometimes turn out lighter
and more graceful objects than these. It was, no doubt, when they
laboured for the softer sex that they modified their methods of work.
The figure of a winged genius in which we ventured to recognise a
goddess wears several necklaces, and one of them looks like a
chain with alternately thin and stout members (Fig. 162). Now, at
Kouyundjik, a necklace has been found (Fig. 245) bearing no little
resemblance to the one here copied by the sculptor. It is composed
of slender gold tubes, separated from each other by beads of the
same metal. These beads are alternately ribbed and smooth. The
workmanship is good and very careful.

Fig. 239.—Royal necklace; from

Rawlinson.
That these articles of personal jewelry were made in the country
is proved by the fact that not a few of the moulds used by the
jewellers for the patterns most in favour have been found. They are
small slabs of serpentine or very hard limestone, in one face of
which the desired pattern is cut in intaglio (Figs. 246 and 247).
Wherever the pattern communicates with the outer edge by a small
opening, it may have been used to receive the liquid metal; where no
such gutter exists, the design must have been stamped, the leaves
of metal being placed over the hollow and beaten into it with a
mallet.[443]

Fig. 240.—Bracelet. Diameter 5 inches.

Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
It was by this latter process, no doubt, that those buttons which
have been found in such quantities by every one who has explored
the Assyrian palaces, were made. They are sometimes small disks
ornamented with concentric bands (Fig. 248), sometimes lozenges
with beaded edges (Fig. 249). These buttons have sometimes
staples for attachment like ours, but more often they are pierced with
a small hole for the passage of a metal thread. They were thus fixed
on the king’s robes and the harness of his horses. Our Fig. 250,
which is copied from a bas-relief at Kouyundjik, shows how the
leather bands that encircled the necks of the chariot-horses and
supported bells, metal rosettes and coloured tassels, were
decorated.[444]
Fig. 241.—Bracelets; from
Layard.

Fig. 242.—Ear-drop; from

Layard.
Figs. 243, 244.—Ear-drops; from
Layard.

Figs. 248, 249.—Gold buttons.

British Museum.
 Fig. 245.—Necklace. British Museum.
The habits and tastes of the Oriental saddler have not changed
since the days of antiquity. We cannot get a better idea of Assyrian
harness than by examining the sets exposed for sale in the present
day in the bazaars of Turkey, Persia, and India. More than once,
when some Kurdish bey rode past him on his Arab, Sir H. Layard felt
as if he had seen a vision from one of the Ninevite reliefs. The
leather stitched with bright coloured threads, the housings of gaudy
wool, the hawk’s bells tinkling round the horse’s neck, were all
survivals from the past. The equipment of a Spanish mule, or the
harness that used to be worn by the waggon teams of Eastern
France within the memory of men not yet old, gives some idea of the
effect produced.
Figs. 246, 247.—Moulds for trinkets; from Layard.

Figs. 248, 249.—Gold buttons. British Museum.

 Fig. 250.—Part of the harness of
a chariot-horse.
Personal jewelry and the apparatus of the toilet seem to have
been no less elaborate in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar than in
the Nineveh of Sennacherib, but we possess very few objects that
can be surely referred to that period. To the very last years of the
Chaldæan empire, if not to a still later date, must be ascribed two
golden earrings now in the British Museum (Figs. 251 and 252).
They represent a naked child, with long hair and a head much too
large for its body. We are told that they were found in a tomb at
Niffer, with other objects whose Chaldæan character was very
strongly marked. Without this assurance we should be tempted to
think their date no more remote than that of the Seleucidæ.
Among the knobs, or buttons, used so largely by joiners, tailors,
and saddlers, some have been found of ivory and of mother-of-pearl.
The jewellers, too, must have used these substances, which would
give them an opportunity for effective colour harmonies. Thus Layard
mentions an ear-pendent that he found at Kouyundjik, which had two
pearls let into a roll of gold.[445]
 Figs. 251, 252.—Ear-pendents. British Museum.
On the other hand no amber has been found in Mesopotamia.
That substance was widely used by the Mediterranean nations as
early as the tenth century before our era, but it does not seem to
have been carried into the interior of Asia. It has been asserted that
one of the cuneiform texts mentions it;[446] that assertion we cannot
dispute, but it is certain that neither in the British Museum nor in the
Louvre, among the countless objects that have been brought from
the Chaldæan and Assyrian ruins to those great store-houses of
ancient art, has the smallest fragment of amber been discovered. If it
ever entered Mesopotamia, how could it have been more fitly used
than in necklaces, to the making of which glass, enamelled
earthenware, and every attractive stone within reach, contributed?
[447]

§ 7. Textiles.

Among people who looked upon nudity as shameful, the robe

and its decorations were of no little importance. Both in Chaldæa
and Assyria it was carried to a great pitch of luxury by the noble and
wealthy. They were not content with fine tissues, with those delicate
and snowy muslins for which the kings of Persia and their wives
were, in later years, to ransack the bazaars of Babylon.[448] They
required their stuffs to be embroidered with rich and graceful
ornament, in which brilliant colour and elegant design should go
hand in hand.[449] The Chaldæans were the first to set this example,
as we know from the most ancient cylinders, from the Tello
monuments and from the stele of Merodach-idin-akhi (Fig. 233). But
it would seem that the Assyrians soon left their teachers behind, and
in any case the bas-reliefs enable us to become far better
acquainted with the costume of the northern people than with that of
their southern neighbours. Helped and tempted by the facilities of a
material that offered but a very slight resistance to his chisel, the
Assyrian sculptor amused himself now by producing a faithful copy
of the royal robes in every detail of their patient embroidery, now by
imitating in the broad thresholds, the intersecting lines, the stars and
garlands woven by the nimble shuttle in the soft substance of the
carpets with which the floors of every divan were covered.
The images on the royal robes must have been entirely
embroidered (Figs. 253 and 254). They cannot have been metal
cuirasses engraved with the point, as we might at the first glance be
tempted to think. In the relief there is no salience suggesting the
attachment of any foreign substance. Neither have we any reason to
believe that work of such intricate delicacy could be carried out in
metal. It was by the needle and on a woollen surface that these
graceful images were built up.
The skill of the Babylonian embroiderers was famous until the
last days of antiquity.[450] During the Roman period their works were
paid for by their weight in gold.[451] Even now the women of every
eastern village cover materials often coarse enough in themselves
with charming works of the same kind. They decorate thus their long
hempen chemises, their aprons and jackets, their scarves, and the
small napkins that are used sometimes as towels and sometimes to
lay on the floor about the low tables on which their food is served.
It is likely that the Assyrian process was embroidery in its strictest
sense. In the modern bazaars of Turkey and Persia table-covers of
applied work may be bought, in which hundreds of little pieces of
cloth have been used to make up a pattern of many colours; but in
the sculptured embroideries the surfaces are cut up by numerous
lines which could hardly have been produced, in the original,
otherwise than by the needle. This, however, is a minor question.
Our attention must be directed to the composition of the pictures and
to the taste which inspired and regulated their arrangement.
Fig. 253.—Embroidery on the upper part of the
king’s mantle; from Layard.
Fig. 254.—Embroidery upon a royal mantle; from Layard.
 Fig. 255.—Embroidered pectoral; from Layard.
The principle of the decoration as a whole is almost identical with
that of the bronze platters. A central motive is surrounded by parallel
bands of ornaments in which groups of figures are symmetrically
disposed. Outside this again are narrow borders composed of forms
borrowed chiefly from the vegetable kingdom, such as conventional
flowers and buds, palmettes, and rosettes. The figures are strongly
religious in character; here we find winged genii, like those about the
palace doors, adoring the sacred tree, floating in space, or playing
with lions (see Fig. 253); in another corner the king himself is
introduced, standing between two monitory genii, or in act of homage
to the winged disk and mystic palm.
All these images are skilfully arranged, in compartments bounded
by gracefully curving lines. The designer has understood how to
cover his surface without crowding or confusion, and has shown a
power of invention and a delicate taste that can hardly be surpassed
by any other product of Mesopotamian art. There is no trace of the
heaviness to which we alluded in our section on jewelry.

Fig. 256.—Detail of embroidery; from Layard.

Fig. 257.—Detail of embroidery; from Layard.
 Fig. 258.—Detail of embroidery;
from Layard.
The impression made by these compositions as a whole is
intensified when we examine their separate details. The variety of
the combinations employed is very striking. Sometimes the ornament
is entirely linear and vegetable in its origin. Look, for instance, at the
kind of square brooch worn on his breast by one of the winged genii
at Nimroud (Fig. 255). The sacred tree surrounded by a square
frame of rosettes and wavy lines occupies the centre, the palmette
throws out its wide fronds at one end. In another example we find a
human-headed lion, mitred and bearded, struggling with an eagle-
headed genius. On the right of our woodcut (Fig. 256) a bud or
flower like that of the silene inflata, hangs over the band of
embroidery; it is a pendent from the necklace. Sometimes we find
real combined with fictitious animals. In Fig. 257 two griffins have