Calamitous knowledge: Disaster research in the British, French and Spanish Atlantic worlds, c.1605-1755
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Gerdelan, Louis Desmond
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Gerdelan, Louis Desmond. 2021. Calamitous knowledge: Disaster research in the British, French and Spanish Atlantic worlds, c.1605-1755. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Abstract
The period between 1605 and 1755 witnessed major transformations in the understanding of disasters in the Atlantic world. Rather than constituting stages in a secularising process, these developments consisted of changes to the shape of disaster knowledge. The key agents of epistemic change were disaster researchers — a diverse group of natural philosophers, physicians, clergy, journalists and astrologers, who recorded, collected, compiled and disseminated information about earthquakes, storms and epidemics. In the seventeenth century their techniques of information management gradually turned an extremely ambiguous category of misfortunes into coherent typologies and taxonomies. This process began in the first half of the century, when a small number of writers developed programmatic visions that distinguished calamities in the civil sphere (such as wars, rebellions and ecclesiastical schisms) from the impacts of elemental forces and illnesses. In the 1650s-60s, in the context of a sequence of devastating disasters on both sides of the Atlantic, a series of collaborative projects emerged to make the assembly of information ever more comprehensive and systematic.Disaster researchers both benefited from and helped to drive the increasing circulation of news about catastrophes, but in the 1650s-80s their growing concerns about the credibility of the available information led to the construction of new standards of evidence and new means of proving testimonies. This trend encouraged experiments with the use of statistics, particularly in studying epidemic disease. Questions of credibility and credulity were also central to debates about the interpretation of eclipses and comets as portents of calamity. Those debates called into question the utility and accuracy of astrological disaster prediction, driving both sceptical attacks and a series of projects to create a "rational astrology" on a more robust footing. As disaster researchers improved their means of collecting information they began to reach conclusions that challenged deep-rooted notions, including the idea that hazards could only affect limited spatial areas. In the 1680s-90s a sequence of large earthquakes inspired new theories of hazard transmission that encouraged thinking on a global scale about the deep structure of the earth, the nature of the atmosphere and the providential meaning of disasters.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, major collaborative projects of information collection emerged, with the ultimate goal of discovering the natural laws governing storms and epidemics. At the same time, the interaction of European expeditionaries to Peru with creole savants drove new ideas about the function of hazards within interconnected environments. In 1755, when a major earthquake devastated parts of the Iberian peninsula, disaster researchers responded by trying to integrate the catastrophe into ideas derived from experiences in South America. The massive informational surveys that appeared in the wake of the disaster represented the culmination of earlier trends: they were collaborative enterprises that aimed to compile large quantities of qualitative and quantitative data in systematic ways. At the same time, they signalled the division of natural and moral disaster intepretation into distinct discursive registers. Rather than declining, religious disaster discussion increased. However, scholars increasingly looked for new ways to articulate moral ideas about catastrophes that fitted within the changed epistemic environment of the mid-eighteenth century.
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