Environmental Hazards, Natural Disasters, Economic Loss, and Mortality in Mamluk Syria (MSR III, 1999)

The role of natural disasters and environmental disruptions has received considerable attention among historians of various cultures and regions over the past twenty-five years. Beginning with J. D. F. Shrewsbury's A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles and William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and continuing most recently with William Jordan's study, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century and Carol Benedict's Bubonic Plague in NineteenthCentury China, scholars have examined the historical significance of such phenomena as severe weather, droughts, pest influxes, epizootics and, more importantly, famines, epidemics, earthquakes, and fires. In addition to studies of this type, the examination of such phenomena in an historical context reflects the influence of a body of literature devoted to the classification, description, and assessment of catastrophes in recent times, perhaps best exemplified in the work of Gilbert White, R. W. Kates, and John Whittow, and also presented systematically in the journal Disasters. Aside from the plague studies of Michael Dols and Lawrence Conrad and the books and articles of Charles Melville, scholars of Near Eastern and Islamic