Wickedness, inhumanity and savagery in disasters in the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world

• In Event: Dealing with Disaster 1: New Approaches to Catastrophes in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Most early modern Christians believed that calamities, as God's most effective pedagogical tools, provided lessons to bring wayward sinners back into a unified Christian flock and to usher that flock along a path of doctrinally sound spiritual improvement. Viewed from this perspective, disasters were preliminaries to the creation of a particular brand of utopia: the pure Christian society. Reading accounts of disaster for wickedness gives us, by contrast, an insight into what contemporaries believed to be the most threatening foe to the creation of this utopia: the forces of human disruption. By the late seventeenth century, early modern European and colonial observers had become increasingly concerned with the disturbing behaviour of disaster opportunists, arsonists, looters and profiteers, many of whom committed the double infraction of ignoring God's great lesson and of infringing upon property rights. In an effort to come to terms with this egregious behaviour, some writers turned to various strands of spiritual psychology underpinned by concepts of inhuman savagery and wildness. These derived in part from lurid reports of the post-catastrophic behaviour of non-Christians − particularly Muslims and the indigenous populations of the Americas. In doing so, they actively engaged in the endless process of fixing and re-fixing the boundary-stones that demarcated the human and non-human or 'natural' spheres. However, by acknowledging the possibility of a wild interior they created the troubling prospect of a disordered, untamed wilderness at the heart of the civitas itself, which might at any moment slip the reins of reason and unleash havoc.

Author

• Louis D Gerdelan, Harvard University