Conceptions of risk and uncertainty are traditionally applied to moments of environmental and economic crisis, both real and imagined. This new HWO series seeks to understand how ordinary people calculated perceived and real risks and uncertainties in daily life. How have differences of race, class, gender and sexuality shaped experiences of risk and uncertainty throughout history? And what can a historical understanding of risk and uncertainty in the past offer us in the present?
Tag: disaster history
Problems of Possession: The Colonial History of Eco-Tourism in the Virgin Islands
How have US projects to preserve ‘paradise’ in the Virgin Islands marginalised native Afro-Caribbean people? Jessica S. Samuels examines a cutting-edge ecotourism venture in the 1950s that reveals the colonial nature of American conservation
Deluge and disaster: the politics of risk
As Britain is wracked by another winter of flooding, Elly Robson looks at how deluge in seventeenth-century Yorkshire led to a contentious politics of risk.