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From antiquity until the present day, on every continent, human beings have made a Faustian bargain with the risk of periodic devastation by earthquake. Today around half of the world's largest cities – as many as 60 – lie in areas of major seismic activity. Each earthquake-struck society offers its own particular lesson; and yet, taken together, such earth-shattering events have important shared consequences for the world.
Earth-Shattering Events seeks to understand exactly how human agency and great earthquakes have interacted, not only in the short term but also in the long perspective of history. For over the long term, the impact of a great earthquake depends not only on the chance factors of its epicentre, magnitude and timing, but also on human factors: the political, economic, social, intellectual, religious and cultural resources specific to a region's history. While physical devastation has in some times and places led to permanent decline and collapse, elsewhere earthquakes have presented opportunities for renewal, the cities they destroy proving to be extraordinarily resilient. After its wholesale destruction by an earthquake and fire in 1906, San Francisco went on to flourish, giving birth in the 1950s to the high-tech industrial area on the San Andreas fault now known as Silicon Valley.
Introduction: Earthquakes and History
1. Earthquakes Before Seismology
2. The Year of Earthquakes: London, 1750
3. The Wrath of God: Lisbon, 1755
4. The Birth of Nations: Caracas, 1812
5. Seismology Begins: Naples, 1857
6. Elastic Rebound: San Francisco, 1906
7. Holocaust in Japan: Tokyo and Yokohama, 1923
8. Birth Pang of a New China: Tangshan, 1976
9. Grief and Growth in the Land of Gandhi: Gujarat, 2001
10. War and Peace by Tsunami: The Indian Ocean, 2004
11. Meltdown and After: Fukushima, 2011
Conclusion: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization
Andrew Robinson has written more than 25 books on the arts and sciences. They include Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, India: A Short History and Earthshock, which won the Association of Earth Science Editors Outstanding Publication Award, plus Earth-Shattering Events. A regular contributor to such magazines as Current World Archaeology, History Today, The Lancet, Nature and Science, he has also been literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement and a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge.
"Robinson has a talent for evoking chaos and, unavoidably, his brain-melting descriptions have a disaster-movie quality – it's hard to tear your eye away from the page "
– Daily Telegraph
"An enlightening read [that] places earthquakes into proper historical perspective. Robinson captures the reader's attention [and] the chronological organization of Earth-Shattering Events allows the reader to easily follow the evolution of our understanding of earthquakes"
– Science
"Individually, these case studies make vivid reading, and collectively they tell a fascinating story about how seismology developed as a science"
– Physics World
"A truly welcome, and refreshing, study that puts earthquake impact on history into a proper perspective"
– Amos Nur, author of Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God
