Charles F. Walker and Stuart B. Schwartz (eds.), Natural Disasters in Early Modern Latin America, Oxford: Oxford Bibliographies, 2021.

Since the 1970s, the study of “natural disasters” has generated extensive literatures in a number of scientific and social scientific fields as well as in cultural studies and the humanities. The field is by nature interdisciplinary, as environmental historians build from and dialogue with the sciences, while microhistory owes a great deal to anthropology and literary analysis. One achievement is the discovery of a variety of new sources, ranging from data-sets and other quantitative material to first-hand accounts. Large-scale disasters raise questions about causes, comparative vulnerabilities, and the reactions by state and society. Not surprisingly, contemporary disasters foster research on historical catastrophes. Massive earthquakes such as those that struck Mexico in 1986 or Haiti in 2010 prompted renewed attention to seismology, while droughts and floods turned attention to climate change. Much of the scholarship reviewed here contributes to debates about vulnerability, the environment, and society in contemporary Latin America. These works also participate in the recurrent debate about whether disasters are “natural” or man-made. Virtually every scholar stakes a place somewhere in the middle, stressing and exploring the relationship between natural hazards and human behavior. Included are only a highly selective sampling of works that may be useful to researchers interested in the Early Modern era and particularly in Latin America, as well as a small number of theoretically and methodologically influential works on Europe and global history. Nonetheless, the focus is on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. The selections incorporate older work, both classics and lesser-known publications, and a strong selection of more contemporary scholarship in this rapidly growing field.