- IAKH, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Cities have always been identified as volatile environments. The urban concentration of people and materials that created so many opportunities also generated new risks of its own: from fast-spreading fires and epidemics to pollution and... more
Cities have always been identified as volatile environments. The urban concentration of people and materials that created so many opportunities also generated new risks of its own: from fast-spreading fires and epidemics to pollution and the dependence on imports and exports. At the same time, cities have proven to be extraordinarily resilient. Between 1100 and 1800 only 42 cities worldwide were not rebuilt after catastrophes or destruction. After 1800 this striking resilience of urban life has become a near universal fact (Vale/Campanella 2005: 3). Consequently, urban-environmental historians have investigated the dualism of risk and resilience extensively. This paper explores the research field and sketches future perspectives for scholarly study.
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Diese Studie untersucht den Umgang mit exotischen Objekten in Museen des 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts und fragt nach ihrer wissenschafts- und kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung. Ermöglichten die amerikanischen, afrikanischen und... more
Diese Studie untersucht den Umgang mit exotischen Objekten in Museen des 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts und fragt nach ihrer wissenschafts- und kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung. Ermöglichten die amerikanischen, afrikanischen und asiatischen Stücke den Betrachtern einen direkten, unvoreingenommenen Blick in entlegene Regionen? Beförderten sie die Ablösung des traditionellen 'Buchwissens' durch ein empirisches 'Erfahrungswissen'? Welche Rolle spielten sie für den 'kolonialen Blick' der Europäer und für die Wissenschaftliche Revolution des 17. Jahrhunderts? Mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der Sammlungspraxis untersucht Dominik Collet die Akteure im Umfeld dreier Sammlungen: der herzoglichen Kunstkammer in Gotha, des Museums von William Courten in London und des Repositorys der Londoner Royal Society.
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The projected rise of extreme climate events has sparked fresh interest in how past societies handled similar challenges. However, while historical experiences of famine, migration, and ‘collapse’ act as silent referents to the current... more
The projected rise of extreme climate events has sparked fresh interest in how past societies handled similar challenges. However, while historical experiences of famine, migration, and ‘collapse’ act as silent referents to the current debate, few of these imaginaries are actually based on empirical studies. This book explores the European climate anomaly of the 1770s to study the dynamic interplay of environmental and social factors in ‘close-up’. It develops a dedicated socionatural approach to capture the entanglement of climate and culture and introduces a small-scale, high-resolution design. Methodologically it suggests a concept of socioecological vulnerability to study the way past societies have ‘socialized’ climate anomalies.
The decade at the centre of the book marks a spike of the Little Ice Age. During the anomaly of the 1770s a persistent cold/wet-complex struck European societies already weakened by social disparity, political fragility and economic transformation. The disastrous combination of climatic and cultural factors resulted in a ‘twinned catastrophe’. It escalated a string of poor harvests into a severe famine that impacted all of Europe and – through the spread of epidemics and epizootics – claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The book uses a series of carefully situated case-studies to trace the human-environment-interactions of the crisis period through various societal fields. These close-ups illustrate how the socionatural extreme encouraged and legitimised mass-migration, antisemitism and virulent proto-nationalism. At the same time they reveal how the crisis fostered political reform, new scientific fields and early humanitarianism.
The book captures a fragile socioecological setting. It reconstructs the biophysical impacts by connecting the various ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of society’, and places them within the Little Ice Age framework (Ch. 1+2). It then ties these inputs to the increasingly vulnerable socioecological arrangements of Europe’s historical ‘grain societies’ at the end of the Ancient Regime. Ch. 3 looks at the way the crisis was perceived. It charts how in the ‘laboratory’ situation of the crises, competing religious, natural or social interpretations informed and prefigured the physical responses available. Ch. 4 studies the wealth of contemporary practices. Case-studies at local level reveal how the crisis encouraged new forms of self-help and strategic migration. At regional level it initiated empowering interactions between sovereigns and subjects that initiated forms of ‘state-building-by-catastrophe’. In the wider realm of politics the famine legitimised power politics such as the Partition of Poland, while in the fields of science new groups of experts used the extreme weather to establish novel disciplinary fields (from public medicine and agronomy to meteorology). Ch. 5 analyses how the affected societies coped long-term. It studies material culture to reveal the highly selective way extreme socionatural events were memorised or forgotten, and argues that these processes framed the societal capacities for ecological adaptation.
The socionatural scope of the book not only challenges the various forms of social and climatic determinism. It also connects historical developments previously explored only in national/political settings – linking the protests of the Steelboys in Ireland with the absolutist coup in Sweden and the school reforms in Saxony. The socionatural close-up of the book reveals both the plurality of and the limitations to human responses. It suggests that more dynamic connections of climate and culture are both necessary and feasible.
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Am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts durchlebte Europa, im Zuge einer extremen Klimaanomalie der Kleinen Eiszeit eine der schwersten Hungerkrisen seiner Geschichte. Das fatale Zusammenspiel von Klima und Kultur machte sie zur »doppelten« Katastrophe. Ihre Auswirkungen erfassten den gesamten Kontinent und kosteten hunderttausende Menschen das Leben. Die Krise beförderte neben Ausgrenzung, Auswanderung und Antisemitismus aber auch politische Reformen, Humanitarismus und neue Wissenschaften. Das Buch zeigt am Beispiel dieses Ereignisses, wie frühere Gesellschaften Witterungsextreme bewältigten und wie vielfältig Klimaimpulse »sozialisiert« werden konnten. Dominik Collet plädiert für einen integrativen, sozionaturalen Zugang zur Geschichte. Es erzählt eine Verflechtungsgeschichte von Mensch und Umwelt, in der kurzfristige Ereignisse und langfristige, sozioökologische Strukturen eng miteinander verkoppelt sind. Daher offenbart der Blick auf die Hungersnot schlaglichtartig grundlegende ökonomische und ökologische Problemlagen der Gesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts. In diesem Umfeld erweisen sich vermeintliche Naturkatastrophen immer auch als Kulturkatastrophen. Die Studie stellt deterministische Zugänge in Frage und zeigt, dass eine dynamische Perspektive auf das Zusammenwirken von Klima und Kultur ebenso notwendig wie praktikabel ist. Sie regt dazu an, die Natur nicht länger als Gegenteil, sondern als Teil der Geschichte zu begreifen.
The decade at the centre of the book marks a spike of the Little Ice Age. During the anomaly of the 1770s a persistent cold/wet-complex struck European societies already weakened by social disparity, political fragility and economic transformation. The disastrous combination of climatic and cultural factors resulted in a ‘twinned catastrophe’. It escalated a string of poor harvests into a severe famine that impacted all of Europe and – through the spread of epidemics and epizootics – claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The book uses a series of carefully situated case-studies to trace the human-environment-interactions of the crisis period through various societal fields. These close-ups illustrate how the socionatural extreme encouraged and legitimised mass-migration, antisemitism and virulent proto-nationalism. At the same time they reveal how the crisis fostered political reform, new scientific fields and early humanitarianism.
The book captures a fragile socioecological setting. It reconstructs the biophysical impacts by connecting the various ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of society’, and places them within the Little Ice Age framework (Ch. 1+2). It then ties these inputs to the increasingly vulnerable socioecological arrangements of Europe’s historical ‘grain societies’ at the end of the Ancient Regime. Ch. 3 looks at the way the crisis was perceived. It charts how in the ‘laboratory’ situation of the crises, competing religious, natural or social interpretations informed and prefigured the physical responses available. Ch. 4 studies the wealth of contemporary practices. Case-studies at local level reveal how the crisis encouraged new forms of self-help and strategic migration. At regional level it initiated empowering interactions between sovereigns and subjects that initiated forms of ‘state-building-by-catastrophe’. In the wider realm of politics the famine legitimised power politics such as the Partition of Poland, while in the fields of science new groups of experts used the extreme weather to establish novel disciplinary fields (from public medicine and agronomy to meteorology). Ch. 5 analyses how the affected societies coped long-term. It studies material culture to reveal the highly selective way extreme socionatural events were memorised or forgotten, and argues that these processes framed the societal capacities for ecological adaptation.
The socionatural scope of the book not only challenges the various forms of social and climatic determinism. It also connects historical developments previously explored only in national/political settings – linking the protests of the Steelboys in Ireland with the absolutist coup in Sweden and the school reforms in Saxony. The socionatural close-up of the book reveals both the plurality of and the limitations to human responses. It suggests that more dynamic connections of climate and culture are both necessary and feasible.
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Am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts durchlebte Europa, im Zuge einer extremen Klimaanomalie der Kleinen Eiszeit eine der schwersten Hungerkrisen seiner Geschichte. Das fatale Zusammenspiel von Klima und Kultur machte sie zur »doppelten« Katastrophe. Ihre Auswirkungen erfassten den gesamten Kontinent und kosteten hunderttausende Menschen das Leben. Die Krise beförderte neben Ausgrenzung, Auswanderung und Antisemitismus aber auch politische Reformen, Humanitarismus und neue Wissenschaften. Das Buch zeigt am Beispiel dieses Ereignisses, wie frühere Gesellschaften Witterungsextreme bewältigten und wie vielfältig Klimaimpulse »sozialisiert« werden konnten. Dominik Collet plädiert für einen integrativen, sozionaturalen Zugang zur Geschichte. Es erzählt eine Verflechtungsgeschichte von Mensch und Umwelt, in der kurzfristige Ereignisse und langfristige, sozioökologische Strukturen eng miteinander verkoppelt sind. Daher offenbart der Blick auf die Hungersnot schlaglichtartig grundlegende ökonomische und ökologische Problemlagen der Gesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts. In diesem Umfeld erweisen sich vermeintliche Naturkatastrophen immer auch als Kulturkatastrophen. Die Studie stellt deterministische Zugänge in Frage und zeigt, dass eine dynamische Perspektive auf das Zusammenwirken von Klima und Kultur ebenso notwendig wie praktikabel ist. Sie regt dazu an, die Natur nicht länger als Gegenteil, sondern als Teil der Geschichte zu begreifen.
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... 254 5. But what Knowledge is it? William Courten, Virtuoso . ... Schlie羦ich gilt mein ganz perso盯licher Dank meinen Eltern, die mir jeder-zeit den notwendigen Ru牢khalt, Zuversicht und Selbstvertrauen gegeben ha-ben sowie Claudia... more
... 254 5. But what Knowledge is it? William Courten, Virtuoso . ... Schlie羦ich gilt mein ganz perso盯licher Dank meinen Eltern, die mir jeder-zeit den notwendigen Ru牢khalt, Zuversicht und Selbstvertrauen gegeben ha-ben sowie Claudia Steinka皂per, der diese Arbeit und ich ...
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Academic collections – spanning the arts, sciences, and medicine – are a prominent feature of many major universities. But the history of these collections, and the cultures that have cultivated them, has been strangely neglected. This... more
Academic collections – spanning the arts, sciences, and medicine – are a prominent feature of many major universities. But the history of these collections, and the cultures that have cultivated them, has been strangely neglected. This interdisciplinary volume explores aspects of the history of academic collections as a university of things – represented by research, representation, application, and commodification. A group of international authors examines the nature of objects as a resource for the history of science and culture, in ways that have helped shape the research university of today.
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Neuzeit. Die Welt in der Stube: Begegnungen mit Auβereuropa in Kunstkammern der Frühen Neuzeit. (Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanckInstituts für Geschichte, 232.) by Dominik Collet Review by: By Anke te Heesen Isis, Vol. 101, No. 1 (March... more
Neuzeit. Die Welt in der Stube: Begegnungen mit Auβereuropa in Kunstkammern der Frühen Neuzeit. (Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanckInstituts für Geschichte, 232.) by Dominik Collet Review by: By Anke te Heesen Isis, Vol. 101, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 217-218 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653875 . Accessed: 21/10/2013 12:36
Keynote lecture at the conference "Nature and the Natural in the Eighteenth Century" organized by the Norwegian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 February 2021. RECORDED LECTURE:... more
Keynote lecture at the conference "Nature and the Natural in the Eighteenth Century" organized by the Norwegian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 February 2021. RECORDED LECTURE: https://septentrio.uit.no/media/Collet_zoom_0.mp4 The lecture is in English. Abstract (in German): Der zweite Keynote ist Dominik Collet. Er ist Klima- und Umwelthistoriker und hat zu mehreren Gesellschaftsaspekten des 18. Jahrhunderts sowie zum Verhältnis von Naturresourcen, Wetterverhältnissen, Kulturpflanzen, öffentlicher Gesundheit und Bevölkerungsentwicklung geforscht. Professor Collet ist Mitglied der Oslo School of Environmental Histories an der Universität Oslo. In seinem letzten Buch über eine bisher wenig beachtete Hungersnot, die Anfang der 1770er Jahre grosse Teile Europas traf, analysiert er die Auswirkungen von drei Jahren mit Ernteausfall auf die sozialen Verhältnisse in verschiedenen Regionen, darunter Skandinavien. Collet bewegt sich dabei von metereologischen Daten, Dendr...
Famines have re-entered public consciousness. While most research focuses on modern and future crises, the past offers a rich and largely untapped archive of societies that have already faced similar challenges. However, current research... more
Famines have re-entered public consciousness. While most research focuses on modern and future crises, the past offers a rich and largely untapped archive of societies that have already faced similar challenges. However, current research is characterized by antagonisms of the natural sciences and the humanities. In this paper we argue for an integration of the ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of man’. We survey emerging interdisciplinary research designs (vulnerability studies, social ecology, disaster studies) that facilitate such an approach and contend that due to their unique scope, famines constitute an excellent ‘boundary object’ to study socionatural entanglements. Examining the famines of the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300–1800) can therefore overcome socially or environmentally determinist models of human-environment interaction. As a result, the research approach presented here, can advance our understanding of how past societies dealt with natural challenges and improve the...
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Die Forschernachwuchsgruppe untersucht die Verflechtung und das Ineinandergreifen von Umwelt und Gesellschaft. Im Zentrum stehen dabei die fruhneuzeitlichen Nahrungskrisen. Die Gruppe ist interdisziplinar ausgerichtet und verknupft... more
Die Forschernachwuchsgruppe untersucht die Verflechtung und das Ineinandergreifen von Umwelt und Gesellschaft. Im Zentrum stehen dabei die fruhneuzeitlichen Nahrungskrisen. Die Gruppe ist interdisziplinar ausgerichtet und verknupft Ansatze der Umweltgeschichte, der Palaoklimatologie, der Sozialen Okologie und der postcolonial studies. Nachwuchsgruppe: Umwelt und Gesellschaft. Handeln in Hungerkrisen der Fruhen Neuzeit