Eleonora Rohland Libri

In 1861 the Swiss town of Glarus was destroyed by fire. The conflagration was the direct spur for the creation of Swiss Re, which has now become one of the world's largest re-insurers. Today, the company has left the struggles of its founding years far behind. The book focuses on these 'birth pains' and follows the development of the company up to one of its largest loss cases: the earthquake and fire of San Francisco in 1906. For a long time, the success of Swiss Re depended on the fortunes of its largest branch, fire reinsurance. This study shows how the company handled the changing risk of fire and focuses, in particular, on climate as a factor that was capable of outplaying the company's geographical distribution of reinsured units. It is rooted in business as well as in environmental history, thus contributing to a field which may be called environmental business history.

Hurricanes have been a constant in the history of New Orleans. Since before its settlement as a French colony in the eighteenth century, the land entwined between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River has been lashed by powerful Gulf storms. Time and again, these hurricanes have wrought immeasurable loss and devastation, spurring reinvention and ingenuity on the part of inhabitants. Changes in the Air offers a rich and thoroughly researched history of how hurricanes have shaped and reshaped New Orleans from the colonial era to the present day, focusing on how its residents have adapted to a uniquely unpredictable and destructive environment across more than three centuries.

El objetivo de Historia entrelazada y el medio ambiente es introducir factores climáticos y otros factores ambientales en el debate poscolonial sobre la desigualdad en las relaciones de poder entre la metrópoli y sus colonias. El tratamiento de ambos, medio ambiente e imperio, así como las relaciones (coloniales) desiguales de poder, hasta ahora se han producido en gran medida en campos separados, la historia del medio ambiente y los estudios poscoloniales. El libro trata de unir las dos vertientes y combina la perspectiva conceptual de la historia entrelazada y las prácticas de comparación a fin de destacar los aspectos tanto materiales como construidos (o discursivos) del medio ambiente como factor de formación de relaciones (coloniales) desiguales de poder. Se realizan dos casos prácticos a través de esta óptica conceptual. El primero ofrece una nueva perspectiva sobre el primer contacto de Cristóbal Colón con los arahuacos en La Española en 1492, y el segundo cuestiona cómo el clima se convirtió en un argumento para esclavizar africanos y desplazarlos a las plantaciones de azúcar en el Caribe.