All human societies face dangers. Yet as Nicolai Hannig makes clear, the ways in which societies make sense of and cope with those dangers are historically contingent. He argues that our conception of Naturgefahren (natural dangers)—earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanos—as extraordinary events demanding large-scale protection, or even prevention, is distinctly modern.
Hannig explores the history of human engagement with natural dangers in German-speaking central Europe (especially Germany and Switzerland) from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. He shows that people went from understanding natural dangers as a normal part of existence to treating them as extraordinary events that had to be protected against or even prevented. Hannig argues that this shift reflected a seismic remaking of central Europeans’ relationships and attitudes toward nature. Nature, he argues, became something to be dominated and conquered. Indeed, successful domination became a marker of civilizational progress. He casts this new understanding of nature as part and parcel of modernization—inextricably connected to industrialization, urbanization, modern technology, science, politics, and culture. Indeed, he argues that the centralization of modern states was driven, at least in part, by new demands that governments provide large-scale protection to their citizens. Delivering that protection granted states new legitimacy while expanding their social and territorial authority and bureaucratic infrastructure.
By the nineteenth century, prevention was the name of the game—an agenda driven by actors ranging from poets and philosophers to politicians, engineers, and insurance agents. Hannig dismisses claims that modernity made risk a private concern, pointing to large-scale state projects such as dikes, river reclamation, building codes, and urban planning inspired by a new protectionist ethos that permeated central European societies with the goal to protect against damage from storms, earthquakes, and flooding. State projects and regulations were interwoven with scientific, intellectual, and business efforts. Hannig shows that demands for protection against natural dangers sparked the emergence of newly defined research disciplines in seismology and meteorology, among others. Those disciplines were shaped by investments, interests, and agendas of states and of a rapidly expanding insurance industry, as natural dangers became something to be assessed and mitigated. Further, researchers captured the public imagination and shaped public discourse about the relationship of modern states and societies to nature and natural dangers.
Hannig shows that the story continued in the twentieth century—and the scope and implications of the concept of protection continued to expand. Research into natural dangers broadened into the social sciences to assess how societies could develop resilience to withstand not only physical, but social and economic damage when prevention was not possible. Further, he argues that intervention expanded in scope in the twentieth century as individuals, insurers, and states began to explore ways to prevent natural dangers rather than simply protecting people from their consequences. This sparked political conflicts. Central Europeans agreed on the need for collective protections, but often disagreed on what those protections should be.
Hannig makes clear that the modern fixation on natural dangers went hand in hand with capitalism. He describes various kinds of “catastrophe commerce” (239): tourism at disaster sites, postcards of natural disasters, and films and books that used stories of natural disasters as entertainment. Floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions were nothing new, but they became a presence in daily life through newspapers, films, postcards, and advertising. Yet these are just side notes to Hannig's main story: the starring role of the insurance industry in making prevention of natural dangers a leitmotif of modern life. Insurance companies expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century, especially from the 1880s on, and played a crucial role in early efforts to minimize risk on a large scale. They sponsored research, promoted the idea of protection, and lobbied for state interventions as part of their business strategy. Their efforts not only provided a model for state research and public insurance initiatives, but also resulted in state insurance mandates for the insurance sector to cash in on. Further, insurance companies made natural dangers a global issue. Insurers felt the impact, quite literally in some cases, of earthquakes in San Francisco and Ljubljana long before central European governments did, and they brought those experiences and interests back to central Europe.
Hannig's study is the product of his habilitation and has all the detail and heft of such studies. Some arguments are not as novel as the book claims—David Blackbourn and others have described the drive of modernizing states to “conquer” nature from the eighteenth century on. At the same time, Hannig makes a compelling case that risk—and its mitigation—plays a central role in modernity. What Ulrich Beck calls the risk society did not appear until the late twentieth century, but has roots reaching back to at least the eighteenth century. Hannig tells a central European story firmly grounded in a broader European and global context and connects sometimes disparate threads—state formation, industrial capitalism, insurance, nature protection—into a single, sweeping story. As a result, this book offers insights for scholars with a variety of thematic and geographic interests.
