While environmental history is a relatively new area of research, in recent years the number of valuable studies in this field has significantly increased. With much work focused on particular periods or territories currently happening, such as a newly European Research Council-funded grant on early modern South Western Europe, guided by Domenico Cecere of the University of Naples, or Monica Azzolini's research on social responses to disasters in early modern Italy, theoretical as well as comparative studies on natural disasters remain extremely limited. The volume edited by Gerrit Schenk of the Universities of Heidelberg and Darmstadt seeks to fill the gap by presenting the first attempt to explore the phenomenon of natural-disaster experiences in global perspective and, subsequently, providing a theoretical framework for further research on the subject.

The goal determines the volume's structure. With a global history of disasters in mind, it is divided into five major parts. Despite consisting of two essays only (by the editor, Gerrit Schenk, and Greg Bankoff), Part 1 outlines the basis for the sociocultural and scientific history of natural disasters, focuses on the current state of the art and examines how the key terms and theoretical concepts usually associated with the topic in question developed over the centuries. Given the general focus of the volume, its main body is unsurprisingly structured thematically and not chronologically, with respective parts dealing with the materiality of disasters (Part 2), a search for their reasons (Part 3), and social responses to calamities of different types – earthquakes and fires (Part 4) and floods (Part 5). In the end, this provides the reader with an extremely broad picture of how various natural catastrophes were perceived and interpreted in different epochs and different cultures – something that may simultaneously be seen as a true advantage and important contribution of the volume as well as its problem. To begin with, the reasons for the proposed sequence of research parts remain unclear; moreover, since the three insightful parts on social and material aspects of disasters are somewhat interconnected by the research's perspective, for the sake of the volume's integrity it might have been a good solution to keep them unseparated. Similarly, Part 3, devoted to the quest for natural-philosophical (mostly astrological) and scientific explanations of disasters, would have been better off at the end of the volume, thus enabling it to be demonstrated how ambiguous and complex interpretive approaches to calamities in various cultural areas were, and, more importantly, avoiding breaking the chain of the ‘material’ and ‘social’ research parts.

The same can be said about individual contributions. All of them, written by leading experts in respective fields, are of high quality and true interdisciplinary character. Unlike numerous contributions, which every scholar has come across in their academic life, that refer to the word ‘interdisciplinary’ as if this were something almost compulsory in a decent academic paper, but without really getting its proper sense, by combining the results of natural and earth sciences, statistical analysis, and social, economic and political history, each contribution is a thorough and innovative study. This, in turn, makes the volume an exciting read to everyone interested in the perception of natural disasters throughout world history, from ancient Egypt and the medieval Islamic world to modern Switzerland or twentieth-century Nepal. At the same time, the volume's major goal, again, leads to a situation whereby, within each respective research part, the papers remain rather unconnected and generally present still insightful but separated case studies. To take one example, Part 3 collects essays on astrology as a valid way to explain the origin of disasters in ancient Egypt, the medieval Islamic world and India, although the functions and uses of prediction practices in the mentioned areas and cultures seem to be significantly different. Moreover, both astrological interpretations in other regions, such as medieval and Renaissance Europe, and alternative approaches to the problem of causation are left in the shadows.

Overall, the present volume is a fresh and valuable contribution to the growing field of environmental studies, with a strong theoretical framework established in the introductory essays and an impressive list of individual contributions, which are expected to cover experiences of natural disaster in time and space. As noted above, due to the ambitious attempt to get to the level of a global history of disasters, the book as a whole lacks consistency and therefore constitutes a number of mostly separated essays. However, combining the volume's theoretical approach with more structurally tightened papers might have resulted in an ideal, in every respect, edited volume on natural disasters – something for which the volume has opened the door wide, and which remains the task for future generations of environmental scholars.