Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization

From antiquity until the present day, on every continent, human beings have made a Faustian bargain with nature, exploring and altering the world at 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. Earth-Shattering Events seeks to understand exactly how human agency and great earthquakes have interacted, not only in the short term but throughout history. While physical devastation has occasionally led communities to permanent decline and collapse, earthquakes have also presented opportunities for renewal, the cities they destroy proving to be extraordinarily resilient. In each of the book’s thirteen chapters, Andrew Robinson explores both the positive and negative ramifications of these natural disasters. After its destruction by an earthquake and fire in 1906, San Francisco went on to