For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.

Recent historical studies of the political ramifications of earthquakes have largely remained isolated from the history of science (with the exception of Geschwind Reference Geschwind2001 and Clancey Reference Clancey2006a). One goal of this issue is therefore to consider earthquakes as crises not only of political order but also of epistemic order. The peculiarities of earthquakes as objects of scientific knowledge have repeatedly undermined hierarchies of knowledge and knowers. Such events appear to be precisely what the concepts of the exact sciences are incapable of grasping: “catastrophe cannot be comprehended exactly” (Voss Reference Voss2006, 13; emphasis in the original). On the other hand, natural catastrophes are widely seen by historians and economists as “the salt of the modernization process” (Mauch Reference Mauch2009, 7). Earthquakes can thus be used to probe strengths and weaknesses in emerging intellectual hierarchies and to explore the complex relationships between knowledge and fear, expertise and common sense.

From its ancient beginnings, seismology has had a moral imperative to confront terror with reason. In various ancient traditions, the highest aim of natural knowledge was to release man from fear. The Roman poet Seneca, responding to the earthquake at Campania in 62 CE, reflected that seismic disasters could plunge humans into a uniquely boundless form of fear: “For what can seem safe enough to anyone if the world itself is shaken and its most substantial parts collapse? If the one thing in the cosmos which is immovable, and fixed so as to support everything that rests on it, starts to sway, and if the earth loses its characteristic feature of stability, where will our fears eventually subside?” (Seneca Reference Seneca2005, 112). Unlike fires or floods, earthquakes left their victims no place to hide. “What consolation – I do not say help – can you have when fear has lost its way of escape?” For the ancient stoic, the proper response to such terror was rational explanation. Seneca turned to the theories of Greek philosophers that explained earthquakes in terms of underground water and trapped air. In other words, he sought to move from the local circumstances of the disaster to the global phenomena it illustrated. He accomplished this by envisioning a cosmos in which earthquakes could be understood as a local imbalance within the universal whole – or, in his bodily analogy, as a stress in one part of the cosmic body. In order to “protect against fear of earthquakes,” as one classicist puts it, Seneca “normalized” them “by setting them in the context of ‘the all’” (Williams Reference Williams2006, 146). For Seneca, a rational explanation of earthquakes was meant not to obscure the human toll, but to make the suffering of survivors more bearable.

At the same time, the moral charge to explain earthquakes has at times been subversive of scientific authority. Survivors demand explanation immediately, sometimes to the benefit of theological interpretations and at the expense of rationalistic ones. The historical relationship between scientific and religious explanations of earthquakes is thus intimate and complex. In a medieval and Renaissance framework, earthquakes were to be interpreted either as punishment for sinners or reminders to the faithful. It was theologically essential that earthquakes, as portents, be recognized as deviations from nature's normal course (Daston and Park Reference Daston and Park2001). In the seventeenth century, the promoters of empirical science conceived the ambition of assimilating storms, earthquakes, and other disasters to a framework of natural law. On the principle that disasters were part of God's original design, natural philosophers took on the task of elucidating the function of natural catastrophes in the context of creation as a whole. Hence some seventeenth-century natural philosophers posited that earthquakes were one means by which the earth excreted noxious fumes and fluids, like a living body. Others credited earthquakes with the formation of mountains and continents (Oeser Reference Oeser2001). These early modern naturalists believed that by studying the workings of nature, they would discover “new testimony of the divine Wisdom” and so would “tempests, volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes, begin to lose their horror” (Mulcahy Reference Mulcahy2006, 58).

This providential view of earthquakes famously met its test on the morning of November 1, 1755, when an earthquake, fire, and tsunami swept away one quarter of the population of the magnificent city of Lisbon. The Lisbon earthquake has come to stand for the onset of a secular, rational, statist modernity, though its precise ramifications are still a matter of debate (e.g. Braun and Radner Reference Braun and Radner2005). Certainly, the disaster was an incentive to naturalistic inquiry. Earthquakes increasingly became an object of empirical investigation and theoretical speculation. The Calabrian earthquakes of 1783 in particular drew a host of empirical surveys, including early instrumental measurements and some of the first realistic illustrations of earthquake damage (Kozák and Čermák Reference Kozák and Čermák2010; Keller Reference Keller1998; Dewey and Byerly Reference Dewey and Byerly1969). Yet contemporary philosophy tends to make a broader claim: that, after Lisbon, natural disasters were removed from the purview of moral philosophy and set squarely in a framework of technical analysis, prediction, and control (e.g. Robinson Reference Robinson and Sternberg1990, 22–23).

This discontinuity thesis ignores, first, the fragility of early seismology. A systematic, observational science of seismology did not develop until the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, as Monika Gisler has emphasized, theological explanations continued to blend with naturalistic ones. In the Swiss Protestant context of the late eighteenth century, renowned naturalists sought physical theories compatible with a theological interpretation of earthquakes (Gisler Reference Gisler2007; cf. McCook Reference McCook, Buchenau and Johnson2009). Indeed, the assumption that piety has traditionally inspired passivity in the face of natural disasters appears unfounded (Mauelshagen Reference Mauelshagen and Mauch2009). This is one lesson of Orihara and Clancey's essay in this issue on Japanese responses to the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Seismology flourished in Japan in the Meiji era as part of the nation's push to participate in and compete with Western modernity. Despite or perhaps because of the triumph of seismological expertise over “popular superstitions” in the Meiji era, the 1923 destruction of a major city opened the door to alternative authorities. The very prominence of Japanese seismologists and engineers made them particularly vulnerable to censure in the wake of the destruction (Clancey Reference Clancey2006a, 228). Not cosmopolitan scientists but right-wing nationalists and millenarian Buddhists won the most fervent allegiance from survivors. Common to the nationalists and millenarians was the insistence that the earthquake was not part of the normal course of nature. Instead it represented “the threat posed by outside powers beyond Japan's control: in the first instance Heaven and in the other, the hostile foreign world.” This construction of the earthquake as an event intrinsically beyond scientific and national control was, the authors show, formative for subsequent Japanese politics.

Thus seismology has stood as a symbol alternately of the vitality and the vulnerability of Western-style modernity. Throughout the history of European imperialism, earthquakes repeatedly undermined the claim that colonization would spread enlightenment and technological progress. Earthquakes mocked the self-confidence of European colonists in Asia and the New World by leveling their stone houses, while leaving native structures unscathed (Clancey Reference Clancey2006a; Montessus de Ballore Reference Montessus de Ballore1904). Europeans never tired of repeating Darwin's bon mot that “Earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any country” (Darwin Reference Darwin, Browne and Neve1989, 232). Darwin's dark vision of an England in the throes of seismic tremors, reduced to bankruptcy and prey to “the hand of violence and rapine,” caught the imagination of a British public anxious for the future of its empire. As Paul White explores in his essay here, Darwin had been primed by his readings of Humboldt and Tschudi to appreciate the fortitude of South American natives in the face of seismic power, a fortitude to which Europeans could only aspire. Witnessing his first earthquake in Chile, he had apparently been struck by a vision of imperial decline – not in the course of centuries but in a matter of seconds. “Who can say how soon such will happen?” he mused in his journal. What might an Englishman conclude from such experiences? The need for better engineering? Or for greater humility in the face of nature's powers? Earthquakes thus had the potential to upend the hierarchies of “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “savage.”

The threat that earthquakes posed to European self-confidence was not only a function of physical devastation. It also stemmed from the methods of research that Europeans invented in their attempts at the intellectual mastery of seismic forces. There were, first, no clear limits to the kind of observations that might be relevant to earthquake research. According to theories widely accepted in the nineteenth century, earthquakes might be triggered by volcanoes, barometric fluctuations, atmospheric electricity, geomagnetism, humidity, or the positions of celestial bodies. Equally, studies of the course and impact of earthquakes required a wide variety of data, from the geological to the zoological and psychological. Geographically as well, earthquakes presented no clear limits. Speculation was rife over the apparent coincidence of earthquakes across vast distances and the subterranean channels that might account for such teleconnections. This uncertainty about what constituted seismology's evidence brought the science into precarious contact with such “pseudosciences” as astrology and spiritualism. In Victorian Britain, for instance, seismologists joined forces with the Society for Psychic Research to investigate the case of a “seismic ghost” (Anon. 1897). The fascination that such phenomena held throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is suggestive of the Romantics’ fascination with the mineral world: Romanticism “counters the demystification performed by Enlightenment science and philosophy with a remystification of rock,” giving a “voice and a face to the earth's material” (Heringman Reference Heringman2004, 61).

Moreover, until reliable seismographs became widely available in the 1920s, the study of earthquakes relied of necessity on human senses. “It will be obvious that no single person can, from his own observations, estimate the area agitated by an earthquake, though much may be accomplished by the combined observations of many” (De la Beche Reference De la Beche1836, 142). “Likely in no other field,” wrote another late nineteenth-century geologist, “is the researcher so completely dependent on the help of the non-geologist, and nowhere is the observation of each individual of such high value as with earthquakes. . .Only through the cooperation of all can a satisfying result be delivered” (Neumayr Reference Neumayr1887, 305). In the 1870s, the collection of eyewitness testimony was given a powerful stimulus by a new theory of earthquakes. Eduard Suess showed in 1873 that intense seismic events in Lower Austria could be mapped along a single line; he concluded that these earthquakes resulted not from forces of uplift but from “fractures or faults or some other discontinuity in the earth's crust” (Strehlau Reference Strehlau2006). With the work of Suess and his Swiss colleague Albert Heim, the empirical study of earthquakes took on new meaning as evidence for geology's new global “tectonics,” the study of horizontal stresses in the earth's crust and the mountains and basins they produced (Şengör Reference Şengör2003; Westermann Reference Westermann2010). As I show in my essay for the issue, decades worth of eyewitness testimony indicated that the capacity to observe an earthquake in progress bore an ambiguous relationship to scientific training. Often the best observers were to be found among women, children, and the lower classes, not to mention those of “nervous sensibility.” The purest state of objectivity in the face of raw seismic power seemed to result not from deliberate cultivation but from a pre-conscious, animalistic response to sheer terror. In this way, earthquakes called into question the efficacy of “scientific” habits of observation relative to pure instinct (cf. Daston Reference Daston2008b; Vetter Reference Vetter2011).

Consider, for instance, William James’ reaction upon awakening to tremors on the Stanford campus just before dawn on April 18, 1906. “My first consciousness was one of gleeful recognition of the nature of the movement. ‘By Jove,’ I said to myself, ‘here's B'ssold earthquake, after all!’ And then, as it went crescendo, ‘And a jolly good one it is, too!’ I said.” James testified to the earthquake enthusiasm of the Humboldtian age. He had trained in the tradition of Humboldt and Darwin as a naturalist on Louis Agassiz's Brazil expedition, and he was undoubtedly familiar with their rapt accounts of their own first earthquakes. As it happened, he had been sent off to the West Coast by a friend with the wish that he might experience “a touch of earthquake.” This wish was fulfilled just three months after his arrival, and in the following weeks James penned his analysis of the earthquake's “mental effects.” He insisted that his state of mind had

He had the sense that the quake was a “demonic power,” “an individualized being,” a “living agent,” which he likened to “earlier mythologic versions of such catastrophes” (James Reference James and James1911, 209–214).

James’ narrative then turned to his observations in San Francisco later that day and in the weeks that followed. Where others told tales of crowds gone “mad with terror” and of “bacchanalian orgies” (quoted in Palm and Carroll Reference Palm and Carroll1998, 14), James stressed the remarkably sober, cooperative behavior of the urban populace. He did not ignore the theft and vagabondage that ensued, but wrote them off as “petty.” More important to him was a certain Darwinian process at work: borrowing H. G. Wells’ eugenic terms, James noted that social “inerts” had left the city, leaving only “efficients” behind. “Discipline and order were practically perfect.” James insisted that this ability to organize in an emergency was not merely “American” and “Californian” but also deeply “human.” Cooperation was a firmly rooted feature of the human response to catastrophe: “one's private miseries were merged in the vast general sum of privation and in the all-absorbing practical problem of general recuperation.” In James’ pointed assessment, the experience proved “how artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us” (James Reference James and James1911, 214; cf. Richards Reference Richards1987, 409–450).

James’ essay directs our attention to a mode of experiencing disaster that seems unfamiliar in the age of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): the earthquake as liberation, catharsis, and utopia (Solnit Reference Solnit2009). For historians of science, the significance of James’ essay lies in its evocation of the power of an earthquake to topple our most basic assumptions about the character of “scientific” observation.

Much would change in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake, as accurate seismographs began to proliferate. While seismoscopes had been used since ancient times in China, modern European efforts to build them began in earnest in Italy in the late eighteenth century. An eighteenth-century seismoscope consisted of a hanging pendulum attached to a stylus that could make a mark when set in oscillation. Instruments capable in principle of clearly measuring the displacement of the ground during a tremor were not introduced until the 1840s. The inverted-pendulum seismoscopes installed during an earthquake swarm in Comrie, Scotland, in the 1840s were state of the art. The problem was that they did not work. In one year, residents of Comrie counted sixty shocks, while the seismoscopes only recorded three. More useful instruments were developed by British engineers in Japan in the 1880s. These “seismographs” were capable of tracing the development of earthquake waves over time. They recorded pendulum movements on a revolving drum attached to a clockwork mechanism, producing a curve from which the waves’ period and amplitude could be measured. Such traces became all the more interesting in 1889, when a German astronomer discovered by accident that his observatory's pendulums in Potsdam had recorded a strong earthquake near Tokyo, picking up waves that had travelled from a spot 5,500 miles away on the earth's surface. The realization that quakes could be mechanically recorded at such a distance inspired many new seismographic inventions at the end of the nineteenth century (Dewey and Byerly Reference Dewey and Byerly1969; Howell Reference Howell1990). Earth scientists became determined to turn their discipline into a more quantitative, objective science, modeled on physics. They transformed what counted as “evidence” of the earth's history. Out went data filtered by human bodies, in came the “hard” evidence of seismographs and accelerometers. This was the moment when scientists began to distinguish the “new seismology” from the “old.” Among the achievements of the new seismology was the development of mathematical methods for using instrumental traces of the passage of seismic waves as clues to the internal structure of the earth. The seismograph became a telescope trained on the earth's hidden depths, where it revealed a core of iron buried under a mantle of rock (Brush Reference Brush1980). “Macroseismology,” based on sensible phenomena, largely gave way to “microseismology,” based on instrumental records. With the onset of the Cold War, seismology's status swelled, fed by defense funding for the detection of nuclear tests. Scientists learned to recognize the distinctive seismographic traces left by “nuclear earthquakes” (Barth Reference Barth2003). Seismology's next “revolution” came in the 1960s with the acceptance of plate tectonic theory, the “new geology” (Oreskes Reference Oreskes1999). Plate tectonics overthrew the tenacious belief that the positions of the continents and oceans were permanently fixed. In principle, earthquakes thus took on a new significance as evidence that the movement of the continental plates was still in progress (Wegener Reference Wegener1920, 20, 37). Yet on the global scale of the new plate tectonics, details of local seismicity tended to fade from scientists’ attention. Simultaneously, the globalization of news in the early twentieth century made reports of local tremors ever less likely to find their way into print. Working knowledge of the geography of seismic hazard was fast disappearing.

More recently, however, scientists have again begun to appreciate what they can learn about seismic hazard from the experiences of ordinary people. Macroseismology and historical seismology have been revived since the 1980s in conjunction with interdisciplinary studies of disasters. In this vein, Conevery Valencius' paper traces the radical shifts in the significance attributed to vernacular accounts of the massive New Madrid earthquakes of 1812. These accounts, often published in newspapers in the form of letters, originally constituted a “form of conversation”; they were “generally agreed to be intelligible only when many individual accounts from many different places could be collected and compared.” They also reflected a human relationship to the land characteristic of this period in the American West (Valencius Reference Valencius2002). Missouri settlers imagined the earth as a living body, and their descriptions of the tremors were stories of the land modelled on narratives of sickness and health. For much of the twentieth century, these accounts were of no interest to seismologists. They lacked the objectivity of instrumental data, and New Madrid itself lay so far from the borders of tectonic plates that it had fallen off seismology's radar. Valencius’ story of how these accounts went from the dustbins of history to the center of seismological investigation is a surprising one. The most surprising part is the way that seismologists have trained themselves to read these documents. Indeed, the field of historical seismology has created a rare interface between the sciences and humanities – overturning, in yet another way, earlier convictions about the nature of geoscientific evidence.

Hence the peculiarly anxious position of seismology as a modern science. Empirical seismology emerged in the late eighteenth century marked by this array of epistemic oddities – an atmosphere of fear and insecurity, an uneasy coexistence with theology, ambiguous implications for progressive ideologies, an enduringly phenomenological methodology, and a dependence on untrained observers. These conditions in turn gave rise to a peculiar politics of seismological knowledge.

Seismology's epistemological fluidity opened a door, for instance, to East Asian contributions to the field at a time when Asia was still perceived as backwards in Western eyes (Clancey Reference Clancey2006a; Fan Reference Fan2007). Thanks to this entrée, Japan in the 1880s and China in the 1970s were each able to take center stage on the international scientific scene. These cases are explored in the essays below by Orihara and Clancey and by Fan. In both cases, seismology's ill-defined boundaries allowed Asian scientists an unusual latitude to define for themselves the meanings and values attached to “traditional” and “modern,” “indigenous” and “foreign” (Fan Reference Fan2007, 533). Both Japanese and Chinese seismology were able to meld aspects of folk-knowledge (such as the predictive use of animals) with approaches legitimated by the international scientific community. For these reasons, seismology's histories in China and Japan constitute rich sites for investigating transnational circulations of scientific knowledge.

The history of seismology has also been decisively shaped by the contributions of untrained observers. Eighteenth-century earthquakes formed a topic of conversation across various classes of society, as attested by surviving sermons and newspapers. As Monika Gisler has argued, at the close of the eighteenth century this inclusive conversation was beginning to break down. A science of seismology was emerging in which earthquakes appeared counter-intuitively as the effects of mysterious electrical forces. Subsequently, seismology was increasingly the esoteric subject of expert knowledge (Gisler unpublished). Yet by the 1870s, the demands of empirical inquiry were redirecting seismology's attention towards the public itself. The methodological imperative to multiply observations of every earthquake drove seismology toward a unique form of public outreach. My own essay for this issue describes Switzerland's pioneering effort in the 1870s to organize ordinary citizens into an observational network. Designed both to advance geophysical science and to devise practical measures to prevent earthquake damage, the network depended on the training of a diverse population to observe and report on factors such as the time, duration, and direction of shock. Analogously, Fa-ti Fan's contribution analyzes the macroseismological network developed in China during the Cultural Revolution. In this case, the data sought were those suspected to be of use for earthquake prediction, including well-water variations, telluric currents, and animal behavior. Seismology's cultivation of amateurs thus made it ideologically useful to very different political regimes.

Paradoxically, both republican Switzerland and Maoist China seem to be good candidates for today's increasingly popular term, “citizen science” (Irwin Reference Irwin1995; Charvolin et al. Reference Charvolin, Micoud and Nyhart2007). As Fan points out, citizen science is an inherently political concept, an outgrowth of the “ideology, institutions, and functions of a state.” Both the Swiss in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese in the 1960s and ‘70s used seismological networks to inculcate scientific habits and a sense of national unity. At a deeper level, both states fostered a scientific epistemology that prioritized mass participation. What does this unlikely juxtaposition of direct democracy and totalitarianism tell us about the potentials of citizen science? Is it merely technocracy in a democratic guise? Or does it in fact have a (necessarily limited) potential to challenge the rule of experts? Where, in these two cases, did power really lie? Here we can draw at least a tentative contrast. In China, seismology was indeed informed by folk knowledge, yet it remained, according to Fan, “mostly top-down despite its claim of the mass line.” In Switzerland, seismology was tainted by paternalism and class bias, but nonetheless launched a genuine dialogue between experts and laypeople about seismic risk. What are the conditions of possibility for such an exchange?

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the politics of seismological knowledge is the science's intimate relationship to the emotion of fear. Under what conditions might fear productively motivate scientific research, and when might it be paralyzing? These questions are of no small relevance today, as research agendas are shaped by threats ranging from political terrorism to mega technological disasters and environmental catastrophes, as well as by the imperatives of the insurance industry. Many current debates turn on the alleged tendencies of the public to over- or under-estimate risk: the problems of “anxiety,” on one hand, and “apathy,” on the other. Lorraine Daston has recently lamented the unwillingness of contemporary science and politics to acknowledge that no policy of risk management will ever banish human fear entirely. Why, she asks, should science policy aim to suppress fear? Far better to confront it in a rational manner. Daston thus calls for a “debate about the philosophy of fear, traditionally the most unphilosophical of the passions” (Daston Reference Daston2008a).

The authors represented in this issue are hardly the first to pose the question of the effect of fear on the conduct of science. In Victorian Britain, for instance, it was widely believed that frequent earthquakes rendered a country inhospitable to natural science. In one of the most popular Victorian works of history, Henry Thomas Buckle bluntly claimed that human reason could not withstand repeated natural disasters:

Buckle's claims were designed to prove that natural conditions in Britain had destined it to become the apex of human civilization. In nineteenth-century America, by contrast, environmental arguments ran in the opposite direction. Americans typically viewed catastrophes (natural and otherwise) as crucibles of modernity. In a Social Darwinian vein, Americans expected disasters to produce a more perfect species of survivor (Rozario Reference Rozario2007; Biel Reference Biel2001). It is not surprising, then, to find an American scientist arguing that science too thrives on disaster. As the meteorologist Horace Byers once noted, reflecting on his contributions to the rise of computerized weather forecasting in mid-twentieth-century America, “It is an unfortunate characteristic of meteorology, that its great forward strides depend on disasters” (Harper Reference Harper2008, 7). Byers had in mind the invention of computerized weather forecasting for aviation purposes in the crucible of World War Two. Still, his observation applies equally well to the emergence of the first telegraphic weather service in Britain a century earlier, a product of the 1859 storm that wrecked 343 British ships (Anderson Reference Anderson2005, 110). The flourishing of Japanese seismology in the wake of the Nobi earthquake of 1891 is another case in point. As Clancey and Orihara put it in their essay in this issue, “modern science itself seems to operate comfortably in the realm of emergency.”

Paul White's essay indicates the possibility of transforming fear into an acceptable and productive scientific attitude. White shows how Darwin accomplished this by means of successive revisions of his impressions of the earthquake at Concepción in 1835. Darwin himself would go on to give nineteenth-century science a remarkable account of fear, one that emptied this emotion of any moral value, indeed of any human quality at all. For Darwin, fear was of interest exclusively for what it revealed as an evolutionary link between men and animals. He treated fear as a physiological state subject to scientific observation, even self-observation – testifying, for instance, to the contraction of his own platysma during a shudder. Fear was to be explained physiologically and through the evolutionary principles of habit, association, and inheritance. It thus became a morally neutral state and one in principle subject to conditioning (Darwin Reference Darwin1979; White Reference White2009). Fear became instrumentalized.

This was a lesson of political significance: it suggested the role of fear in the civilizing process and in the subjugation of citizens to the state (Briese Reference Briese1998). From this perspective, any science of disaster is part of a public apparatus for managing and manipulating fear. Fan's case of Communist China is a telling example. Seismology served Mao's regime explicitly as a form of “national defense,” a system of surveillance that disciplined nature and the human population simultaneously. Indeed, Jean Baudrillard has asserted that any state capable of predicting and controlling catastrophes, whether earthquakes or terrorism, would be so coercive that its citizens would prefer a catastrophe (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1991).

Clancey and Orihara's essay can likewise be read as an inquiry into the politics of fear. They build on recent interest across the academy in the concept of the state of emergency and the political work this concept has done since the interwar period (e.g. Agamben Reference Agamben and Attell2005; Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman1997). The authors make the novel observation that emergency in its early twentieth-century origins designated not merely a political but a natural state. The Japanese concept of emergency (hijōji) originally identified Japan as a land destined by nature to endure disasters, but to emerge from them with renewed strength. Emergency corresponded to a “language of environmental determinism revitalized by disaster.” This is a crucial insight into the novelty of the politics of “emergency” in the interwar period. Emergency broke with earlier formulations of the politics of fear (such as the sublime) in that it constituted a “new politics of landscape,” a historically specific environmental imaginary. It identified, the authors argue, not a terrain of human weakness but an “actionable space.” Significantly, however, in post-Kanto Japan, the management of fear fell not to science but to fascist factions and millenarian cults.

While each study in this issue focuses on a different context, what raises them above the status of microhistories is their common contribution to the emergence of the globe itself as an object of empirical inquiry. As Andrea Westermann neatly puts it, the earth's seismicity was “a material substrate for the experience of globality” (Westermann Reference Westermann2010; cf. Dörries Reference Dörries, Schröder and Höhler2005, Reference Dörries2009). By studying seismology, a science of the globe, in a multitude of national contexts, we stand to learn a great deal about the process of scientific globalization – how local knowledge has been scaled up and global theories scaled down. Valencius, for instance, reveals the unexpected “sense of global interconnection” that earthquakes brought out in the rural American West of the early nineteenth century. Yet we also find here clear reminders of the barriers to the globalization of the earth sciences. Seismology developed in ways that were finely adapted to regional contexts – for instance in the language used to describe tremors and in the architecture to which damage assessments were keyed. Even the Richter scale, now the symbol of an objective, universal description of an earthquake, was originally intended only for use in Southern California (Richter Reference Richter1935).Footnote ¹

Methodologically, the topic of earthquakes brings the history of science into productive contact with the concerns of other subfields. First, earthquakes can be said to erupt on the common ground between the history of science and environmental history. Valencius’ paper shows how fertile a space this is. As she demonstrates, talking about earthquakes in the nineteenth-century American West meant asking in the broadest terms about the land and its relationship to its inhabitants. That relationship was very much in flux at the time, transformed in part by urbanization, new transport networks, and the industrialization of agriculture. Seismology, as the science of a volatile earth, seems to have been of special interest to populations conscious of such changes in their ties to the land. Nineteenth-century naturalists themselves indicated that seismology entailed a new environmental awareness, namely a recognition of the earth's instability. As the Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler announced in a popular article of the 1880s, “The notion that the ground is naturally steadfast is an error – an error which arises from the incapacity of our senses to appreciate any but the most palpable and, at the same time, most exceptional of its movements” (Shaler Reference Shaler1887, 259). Thanks to empirical seismology, humanity was learning that its foundations were far shakier than suspected, a discovery that Shaler compared to that of the heliocentric system: a fundamental shift in man's sense of his place in the cosmos. For Shaler and his contemporaries, this discovery forced the question of whether humans ought to adapt to such an unreliable environment through modest accommodations or by brute force engineering (Hones Reference Hones and Biel2001). Through the methods of environmental history, earthquakes can illuminate evolving relationships between scientific ambitions and ecological conditions.

Earthquakes also bridge the gulf between the history of science and disaster studies. The latter field takes for granted the non-existence of “natural” catastrophes. The damage wrought by an earthquake always depends on complex interactions between environmental factors and the social, political, and economic determinants of vulnerability. In this light, earthquakes can serve to reveal pre-existing weaknesses or, in Charles Walker's felicitous phrase, “social fissures” in the stricken state (Walker Reference Walker2008, 190). On the other hand, earthquakes often clear the stage for projects of centralization and modernization (Walker Reference Walker2008; Buchenau and Johnson Reference Buchenau and Johnson2009). In this sense, earthquakes can be analyzed as punctiform events from which significant social change radiates. Stuart McCook, for instance, has recently offered a revisionist interpretation of the 1812 Caracas earthquake, which was quickly followed by the collapse of Venezuela's first republic (McCook Reference McCook, Buchenau and Johnson2009). Historians have traditionally assumed that the earthquake discredited the revolutionary government because it was interpreted as divine retribution for the country's revolution against Spanish colonial rule. McCook shows that this thesis is little more than a reflection of the elites’ own bias against the masses and their “superstitions.” Instead, he stresses the material effects of the earthquake, which crippled the republic and gave the royalists a crucial military advantage. At the same time, however, he uses the complex and varied responses to the earthquake to illuminate long-term trends of religious thought and social relations that transcended Venezuela's revolutionary breaks.

McCook's analysis is thus a fine example of the integration of what might be seen as two contrasting templates for historical narratives of earthquakes. As Greg Clancey has suggested, one possibility is a process-oriented view of earthquakes, embedding them in long-term narratives about ecosystems and political cultures. Another approach instead takes a point-like view of earthquakes as singular events with unpredictable ramifications (Clancey Reference Clancey2006b). Both perspectives, the processual and the event-like, are needed to reveal the full implications of earthquakes for the history of modern science.