| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
In the shadow of leviathans seen and unseen -- Corner pieces -- Marseille 1720 : administrative catharsis as disaster management -- Portugal 1755 : empire of accident -- Bengal 1770 : famine, corruption, and the climate of legal despotism -- Risk thinking and the enduring structure of vicissitudes -- The past-imperfect future |
| Summary |
"All Is Well attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility. By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying legal structures and political-economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770), and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of 'global' disaster management today. It concludes that Climate Change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 29, 2022) |
| Subject |
Emergency management -- History -- 18th century -- Case studies
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Disasters -- Political aspects -- History -- 18th century -- Case studies
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Disasters -- Social aspects -- History -- 18th century -- Case studies
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Disasters -- History -- 18th century -- Case studies
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Disasters
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Disasters -- Social aspects
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Emergency management
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| Genre/Form |
Case studies
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History
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Case studies.
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Études de cas.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2021041503 |
| ISBN |
0197579213 |
|
9780197579206 |
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0197579205 |
|
9780197579220 |
|
0197579221 |
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9780197579213 |
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