Disaster, state and Science: Historical narratives of extreme weather in East Asia and the Pacific

Abstract

This curated special issue asks how history can be used as a lens into disaster and disaster management. It takes as its premise the idea that approaches from different disciplines - including the humanities and social sciences – can offer new perspectives on understanding disaster, managing disaster and disaster risk. The concept is not new, historically focussed studies have long provided meat for hazard investigations and modelling, especially those focused on geological or hydrological time-series analyses; multi-hazard interactions and identifying historical underliers for contemporary risk. It has become increasingly common, for example, to include historians in collaborative efforts to better understand disasters (e.g. Wasson, 2020; Martin, 2019), to provide a critical engagement with sources and methods for understanding the contemporary socio-cultural and governance frameworks underpinning the scale and dynamics of particular historical events, or to explore historical triggers that have acted to strengthen or weaken systems of risk or resilience. Likewise, historical archival sources have been used to extend hydrological or climatic records further into the past (Brázdil et al., 2018; Kjeldson, 2014; Glaser et al., 2004). Within the field of history, disaster history – frequently linked to environmental history – has emerged in recent years to shed new perspectives on the experience of disaster in our past.