Bøker av Benjamin Reilly

Disasters in World History surveys the development of disaster studies as a discipline as well as the historical case studies and theories used by historians to understand disasters.Disasters, here defined as the complex interaction between natural hazards and specific human vulnerabilities, have frequently left a mark on human history. Cataclysms have toppled dynasties, fueled massacres, and shaped the culture of societies frequently affected by natural hazards. This volume fosters understanding of such events by considering both social science theory and the natural science concepts relevant to disaster studies. In addition, the text makes heavy use of an emerging psychological theory relevant to disaster studies, the behavioral immune system, which helps to explain why xenophobic behavior and even violence often erupt in the aftermath of disasters. Later chapters consider specific examples of disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, climate change (including modern anthropogenic climate change or global warming), and tropical cyclones. This book is an accessible resource ideal for undergraduates and instructors in world history, environmental history, and disaster studies courses.

Natural disasters have played an integral role in human history. Pandemic diseases have affected multiple generations and massive famines have killed or impoverished millions. This book examines the relationship between humanity and the natural environment through the lens of natural disasters, where the interaction comes into sharpest focus.

Examines how Rome's allure to European visitors and its resident malaria species impacted the historical development of Europe. The book covers the environmental and biological factors at play and focuses on two of the periods when malaria potentially had the greatest impact on the continent.

In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil.This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East-an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.

Democracy is inherently difficult in societies divided along deep ethnic cleavages. Elections in such societies will often encourage 'centrifugal' politics which reward extremist ethnic appeals, zero-sum political behaviour and ethnic conflict, and which consequently often lead to the breakdown of democracy. Reilly examines the potential of 'electoral engineering' as a mechanism of conflict management in divided societies. He focuses on the little-known experience of a number of divided societies which have used preferential, vote-pooling electoral systems - such as Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Fiji. Examination of these cases shows that electoral systems which encourage bargaining between rival political actors, which promote the development of broad-based, aggregative political parties and which present campaigning politicians with incentives to attract votes from a range of ethnic groups can, under certain conditions, encourage the development of moderate, accommodatory political competition in divided societies.