Browse Items (6 total)

Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel's thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment…

In this article, Alberola argues that while the first formal reflections on the physical nature of disasters appeared in the philosophical and scientific works of the Classical era, it was in the eighteenth century that these environmental ideas took…

This text surveys the British Caribbean from 1624 through the calamitous hurricane season of 1780. Mulcahy examines the various natural hazards that the region was prone to, including food shortages and disease, but focuses his attention on…

To date, the most complete, well-researched, and historically sound study on the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake – considered one of the most transformative "natural" disasters in history. Explores the urban, social, and political landscape of Lisbon (and…

Miller links the French Revolution and the violence of the Terror to eighteenth-century understandings of the natural world (for example, earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains) by examining the rhetoric and writings of the revolutionaries themselves.…

Edited collection of six articles that explore eighteenth-century catastrophes around the globe. Studies consider questions of risk, vulnerability, resilience, colonialism, and the human role in creating "disasters."