Earth-Shattering Events

A groundbreaking survey of the cultural, political and social impacts of major earthquakes of the modern era.

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 sixty - lie in areas of major seismic activity. This book 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 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. The political and cultural reverberations that have played out in the aftermath of earthquake disasters have sometimes brought profound change.

Andrew Robinson has written more than 25 books, including The Scientists, India: A Short History and Cracking the Egyptian Code. A former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, he is a regular book reviewer for newspapers, magazines and journals.