A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk: Imagining the Future (Earthscan Risk in Society) - Hardcover

Mairal, Gaspar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 036736185X ISBN 13: 9780367361853

Publisher: Routledge, 2020

Synopsis

This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources.

Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of "managing the future" by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law and navigation in Medieval Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, to Columbus' arrival to the Indies and the Spanish exploration and colonization in the Americas. It considers the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance, the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk - time, knowledge, relationship and probability - and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical time frame.

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management.

About this title

About the Author

Gaspar Mairal is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 036736185X
• ISBN 13: 9780367361853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256