Greg Bankoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 606451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Greg Bankoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Greg |
| FAMILY NAME | Bankoff |
| SIGNATURE | BANKOFF G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hull |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5493-0057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 468 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Countryside aflame
Fire has shaped human evolution, social organisation, and technological development, yet modern fire science remains anchored in categories derived largely from Western experience: wildland fires, the wildland–urban interface, and urban conflagrations. These frameworks obscure a fourth, largely overlooked regime – village fire – rural settlements that lack the structural protections, materials, and services characteristic of urban areas. In the P…
Urban fire in an early American colonial metropolis
Unsafe harbours
Vessels of every kind, from ocean-going liners and steamers to sailing ships and local craft, plied the waters of the Philippine archipelago in the late nineteenth century, providing the only means of timely and cost-effective travel to destinations within, between and beyond the islands. Yet the vulnerability of this maritime world to typhoons remains little studied, even though ships at anchor were often as exposed to cyclonic winds as those at…
Colonial policy, ecological transformations, and agricultural “improvement”
Burgeoning global trade and colonial policies promoted transformations in land use and agriculture throughout tropical regions in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, but the local and regional ecological consequences of landscape changes are still being identified and analysed. The Philippine Archipelago, which experienced successive colonial regimes across more than 7100 islands, exemplifies the multiplicity of ecological outcomes produced by these t…
Wartime drainage and water level management in the East Riding of Yorkshire 1939–1945
The warming city
Rising temperatures are mainly associated with wildfires, but the incidence of fire may also increase in the urban context. Yet, fire in Delhi, India, as elsewhere in the towns and cities of the Global South, remains largely invisible, despite the nearly 11 million people each year who are burnt severely enough to require medical attention. This paper focuses on whether summer temperatures in Delhi are rising and whether higher temperatures and l…
A Singularly Uneventful Year
While 1880 is remembered in the Philippines for a great earthquake that struck Manila and 1882 for a highly destructive typhoon that caused untold damage, the everyday disasters that happen all too often across the archipelago are soon forgotten. The interest is in the ‘big’ event, and historiography rarely focuses on less spectacular occurrences. 1881 was one such year when ‘nothing really much’ happened. And yet, a closer examination of the arc…
Talking about volcanoes
Volcanoes are talked about as if they are one and the same thing. If they are differentiated, they are referred to as active or inactive, and classified according to their structure and composition. Volcanoes, however, do not mean the same thing to all people. Mount Mayon in Albay province, Philippines, is a case in point. Through interviews with a volcanologist, an engineer, a politician, a historian, and a local resident, this paper explores wh…
The Charmed Circle
Of Time and Timing
This article applies a path-dependency approach to better understand the potentialities and limitations of non-main rivers in England. Using the River Hull Valley of the East Riding as an example, the study explores the underlying historical dynamics at work throughout the greater internal drainage board (IDB) network in terms of infrastructural and institutional lock-in that makes any substantial alteration to the system prohibitively difficult …
Fire risk reduction on the margins of an urbanizing world
Purpose Globally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon. Design/methodology/approach Our analysis draws on primary sources, secondary literature, statistical data and qualitativ…
Under the Volcano
Rich volcanic soils have long attracted human settlements, which have traded the risk of eruption against the benefits of higher agricultural yields. Yet little research has been done on how societies have normalised the risks and adapted to living in proximity to volcanoes, or how those modifications, in turn, might have influenced the effects of eruptions and their consequent hazards. In short, people have co-evolved with volcanoes to create 'c…
Archaeological and historical insights into the ecological impacts of pre-colonial and colonial introductions into the Philippine Archipelago
The tropical forests of the Philippine Archipelago are some of the most threatened in the 21st century. Among the most prominent threats are the introduction of new plant and animal species, as well as new forms of land management (e.g. plantations), that have accompanied industrial expansion. Such threats have a potentially long-term history and prehistory in the Philippines, not just as a consequence of Spanish colonial administration and land-…
The neglected country(side)
While increasing resilience to earthquakes in the global South has become a major research and policy goal, the focus has largely been on rapidly expanding urban areas. Rural areas are often neglected despite the fact that rural residents make up a significant proportion of the population exposed to earthquakes in many low and middle-income countries. Central Asia is a case in point. Drawing on empirical research undertaken in the Central Asian R…
What happened to the Second World? Earthquakes and postsocialism in Kazakhstan
There is an assumption that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Second World ceased to exist. Yet the demise of the Communist bloc as a geopolitical reality did not mean that it stopped exerting a defining influence over how people think and behave. This article examines how the postsocialist state in Kazakhstan deals with potential crises such as earthquakes and the extent to which the Soviet legacy still shapes intellectual debates…
From nomadic communitarianism to civil socialism
This article explores the environmental, historical and cultural factors that influence civic engagement among rural communities in contemporary Kazakhstan. It traces how forms of nomadic communitarianism as a response to the vicissitudes of life on the open Steppe merged with the imposed collectivism of Soviet society in such a manner that the two were able to coexist together in both policy and practice. Drawing on fieldwork among a number of v…
Remaking the world in our own image
A warming climate and less predictable weather patterns, as well as an expanding urban infrastructure susceptible to geophysical hazards, make the world an increasingly dangerous place, even for those living in high-income countries. It is an opportune moment, therefore, from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, to review the terms and concepts that have been employed regularly over the past 50 years to assess risk …
Blame, responsibility and agency
The notion of ‘disaster justice’, that is that governments have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable seems premised on a particular conception of the state that conforms to a Western liberal democratic model. Indeed, the failure of the state to protect its own is regarded not only as an injustice but as ‘a breach of democracy’s fundamental obligation to its citizens’. The state is seen as having a mandatory duty to shield people from physic…
Malaria, Water Management, and Identity in the English Lowlands
Much of the eastern seaboard of England lying between East Yorkshire and the Pevensey Levels in Kent constitutes an English Lowlands, a distinctive region characterized by large areas of marsh and fen, and a subculture borne out of the vicissitudes and travails of living with the constant risk of flood and storm surge. But this was a landscape where dangers lurked not only in the unstable ground but also in the air, where it was considered that t…
Aeolian Empires
Historiography has paid insufficient attention to the influence of winds and currents. The rise of Western European states to global dominance and world empires from the sixteenth century is usually characterised as maritime but should more fittingly be described as Aeolian or 'wind-driven'. This article examines the role winds and currents played in influencing the outline, structure and nature of Western European seaborne empires. It incorporat…
Hazardousness of Place
© Ateneo de Manila University. The historiography of the Philippines has been largely bounded by the nation-state, which has defined how its past has been conceived and to whom its peoples are mainly compared. A more transnational environmental history, however, seeks to situate the archipelago within the context of the daily threats that its peoples have to face. This article focuses on the hazardous nature of living in the islands and explores …
Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World
Bushfire does not usually figure on lists of natural hazards in Madagascar, despite being damaging hazard on the island. This chapter argues that the lack of attention to fire comes from the fact that fire is multivalent, ambiguous, and flexible, being simultaneously an occasional 'hazard' for thatch-roof huts or crop fields, a 'useful tool' that farmers and pastoralists use to manage vegetation, and a major transformational force, or 'change age…
Cultures and Disasters
Introduction The Editors 1 The Culture of (De-)Constructing Disasters. 1.1 Framing Disasters in the 'Global Village': Cultures of Rationality in Risk, Security, and News Kenneth Hewitt 1.2 Conversations in Catastrophe: Neoliberalism and the cultural construction of disaster risk Anthony Oliver-Smith 1.3 Design by Disasters: Seismic Architecture and Cultural Adaptation to Earthquakes Greg Bankoff 1.4 'Learning from History'? Chances, Problems and …
Wind, Water, and Risk
The peoples who inhabit the states that lie in the direct paths of typhoons in the Western North Pacific share a common history of repeated dislocation, destruction, and death that delimits a zone of comparative enquiry and historiographical interest. The track left by typhoons across ocean and land perfectly outline the dimensions of a more transnational historical region encompassing the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and th…
‘For the good of the barrio’ Community associations and the state in the rural Philippines 1935-1965
The decolonization of countries in Asia and Africa is one of the momentous events in the twentieth century. But did the shift to independence indeed affect the lives of the people in such a dramatic way as the political events suggest? The authors in this volume look beyond the political interpretations of decolonization and address the issue of social and economic reorientations which were necessitated or caused by the end of colonial rule. The …
Rendering the World Unsafe
Disasters seem destined to be major issues of academic enquiry in the new century if for no other reason than that they are inseparably linked to questions of environmental conservation, resource depletion and migration patterns in an increasingly globalised world. Unfortunately, inadequate attention has been directed at considering the historical roots of the discursive framework within which hazard is generally presented, and how that might ref…
Constructing Vulnerability
Flooding is not a recent hazard in the Philippines but one that has occurred throughout the recorded history of the archipelago. On the one hand, it is related to a wider global ecological crisis to do with climatic change and rising sea levels but on the other hand, it is also the effect of more localised human activities. A whole range of socio-economic factors such as land use practices, living standards and policy responses are increasingly i…
Remaking the world in our own image
A warming climate and less predictable weather patterns, as well as an expanding urban infrastructure susceptible to geophysical hazards, make the world an increasingly dangerous place, even for those living in high-income countries. It is an opportune moment, therefore, from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, to review the terms and concepts that have been employed regularly over the past 50 years to assess risk …
The politics of risk in the Philippines
It is now generally appreciated that what constitutes vulnerability to one person is not necessarily perceived as such by the next. Different actors 'see' disasters as different types of events and as a result they prepare for, manage and record them in very different ways. This paper explores what different perceptions of vulnerability mean in terms of the understanding and practices of two significant sets of actors and stakeholders involved in…
One island too many
In search of ‘lost’ knowledge and outsourced expertise in flood risk management
This paper examines the parallel discourses of ‘lost’ local flood expertise and the growing use of commercial consultancies to outsource aspects of flood risk work. We critically examine the various claims and counter‐claims about lost, local and external expertise in flood management, focusing on the aftermath of the 2007 floods in East Yorkshire, England. Drawing on interviews with consultants, drainage engineers and others, we caution against …
Dangers to going it alone
Robert Putnam's influential article ‘Bowling alone: America's declining social capital’ puts forward a number of possible factors to explain the decline of civil society in the USA. Many of these same forces are also at work in America's erstwhile colony in Asia, the Philippines, where almost the opposite outcome is true if one can measure such things as social capital by the activity of formal and informal associations and networks devoted to mu…
A history of poverty
Historians have generally been reticent in attributing any special role to natural disasters in shaping the evolution of human societies, yet there is a fundamental relationship between the history and structure of societies and its vulnerability to these events. This paper explores the relationship between environment and poverty in one such society particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, the Philippines. It argues that the extremes of wea…
The 'English Lowlands' and the North Sea Basin System
The history of much of England is written in water. Water has not only shaped England's prosperity and external relations but it has also been a significant factor in fashioning its internal fabric. In particular, large areas of the eastern coastline and its hinterland are close to or even below sea-level and represent an 'English Lowlands' comparable in many respects to the more aptly named region on the opposite mainland. Indeed, the Netherland…
In the Eye of the Storm
The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when unde…
Regions of Risk
Terrorism is a word that everyone across the globe has become familiar with in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001. The rhetoric about these events, however, is more than mere commentary seeking to understand the cause of or apportion blame for such attacks and forms part of a much wider western discourse invoked to describe unfamiliar cultures and landscapes. In fact, terrorism is only the most recent in a long line of dangerous conditio…
"Lahat para sa lahat" (everything to everybody)
Purpose Effective leadership at the grassroots level can make a crucial difference to disaster risk reduction (DRR) at the local level. Guidance, however, is often not provided through the visible structures of local government but through alternative means of articulating power that is no less real and frequently more effective than more formal agencies. The purpose of this paper is to present a biography of one such community leader and his inf…
Social impact of the 2004 Manawatu floods and the 'hollowing out' of rural New Zealand
The Manawatu floods of 2004 have had significant, long-lasting social consequences. This paper draws on findings from a series of detailed surveys of 39 farm households directly affected by the floods and 17 individuals directly involved in managing the flood recovery programme. The nature of the impact on rural families highlights how the 'hollowing out' of rural New Zealand has changed the capacity of rural communities to respond to natural haz…
Big Fish in Small Ponds
The basic administrative unit in the Spanish Philippines was thepuebloor municipal township. The pueblo encompassed both settled and unsettled districts within its geographical boundaries. The town centre Known as thepoblaciónwas the largest single residential zone within the municipality but was surrounded by smaller satellite communities. Beyond these areas of settlement were the sparsely populated regions of swamp, forest, plain or mountain. S…
Storm over San Isidro
Using a detailed archival account of a typhoon-induced flood, this paper examines Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) as practised in a late nineteenth century provincial town in the Philippines. Culture is an important determinant when considering DRR for any community as the roots of its present-day resilience as well as the causes of its vulnerabilities may lie in its history. The flood of 1887 and the account of the actions taken by the community i…
Aeolian Empires
Historiography has paid insufficient attention to the influence of winds and currents. The rise of Western European states to global dominance and world empires from the sixteenth century is usually characterised as maritime but should more fittingly be described as Aeolian or 'wind-driven'. This article examines the role winds and currents played in influencing the outline, structure and nature of Western European seaborne empires. It incorporat…
Post-Colonial National Identity in the Philippines
Presenting a fresh understanding of the construction of post-colonial national identity in the new context of globalisation, this text looks at the dilemmas of the requirements to compete in the global economy and the political demands of human rights and cultural differences. The authors are concerned with the ways in which a modern state attempts to mould the identities of its citizens and the ways in which the myriad of identities in a multiet…
Archaeological and historical insights into the ecological impacts of pre-colonial and colonial introductions into the Philippine Archipelago
The tropical forests of the Philippine Archipelago are some of the most threatened in the 21st century. Among the most prominent threats are the introduction of new plant and animal species, as well as new forms of land management (e.g. plantations), that have accompanied industrial expansion. Such threats have a potentially long-term history and prehistory in the Philippines, not just as a consequence of Spanish colonial administration and land-…
Breaking New Ground? Gifford Pinchot and the Birth of 'Empire Forestry' in the Philippines, 1900-1905
Professional forest management in the Philippines is largely attributed to the ideas and endeavours of American foresters such as Gifford Pinchot, George Ahern and Henry Graves who were instrumental in establishing the Insular Bureau of Forestry in 1900 and in passing the forestry laws of 1904 and 1905. These men, however, did not so much transfer American forest management directly to the archipelago let alone blindly implement empire forestry p…
A Question of Breeding
The horse of these islands has arrived at such a state of degeneration," concludes a report to the Governor-general of the Philippines in 1883, "that it is useless to think of its rejuvenation, it being much easier and more convenient to create a new breed with the importation of mares and Stallions from Spain" (Raza de Caballeria de Filipinas 1883). The debate over the colonial government's attempt to improve equine bloodlines through a selected…
A Month in the Life of José Salud, Forester in the Spanish Philippines, July 1882
The discovery of a monthly work schedule for José Salud, a district forester on the island of Panay, provides us with an unique insight into the operations and workings of the Inspección general de Montes, the Spanish colonial forestry service in the Philippines. The records of this agency were mainly lost in fire and war but the fortuitous preservation of a personal report for July 1882 provides us with a tantalising glimpse into the operations …
Fire and Quake in the Construction of Old Manila
Manila, was one of the grandest early modern European cities in Asia, yet it was destroyed by fire and earthquake on numerous occasions. Over successive reconstructions, it evolved a style of architecture and urban planning that reconciled alien notions about space and place to local environmental realities. The city that materialised over the ensuing centuries was neither wholly European nor Asian, but a rich fusion of the two whose form and sub…
These Brothers of Ours
Journal Article ‘These Brothers of Ours’: Poblete's Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903–1905 Get access Greg Bankoff Greg Bankoff University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Issue 4, Summer 2005, Pages 1047–1072, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2005.0045 Published: 01 July 2005
Selective memory and collective forgetting. Historiography and the Philippine centennial of 1898
Societies in Conflict
This paper examines the origin and evolutionary role of microalgae, the phenomenon of harmful dinoflagellate blooms commonly referred to as red tides, their history in the Philippines since a regular annual occurrence in 1983, and the loss of livelihood, morbidity and even death caused through the human consumption of seafood contaminated by such toxins
The nineteenth century in Philippine historiography
(1989). The nineteenth century in Philippine historiography: a question of methodology and approach. Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 1-7
Murdoch University
Redefining Criminality
“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and econo…
Big Fish in Small Ponds
The basic administrative unit in the Spanish Philippines was thepuebloor municipal township. The pueblo encompassed both settled and unsettled districts within its geographical boundaries. The town centre Known as thepoblaciónwas the largest single residential zone within the municipality but was surrounded by smaller satellite communities. Beyond these areas of settlement were the sparsely populated regions of swamp, forest, plain or mountain. S…
Legacy of the past, promise of the future
The Philippines faces an uncertain future in the 1990s unsure which path offers the best solution to the country's manifold economic, social, political, and environmental problems. On the one hand, the legacy of the past demands that the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) be fully implemented and that ownership of the country's agricultural lands be more equitably vested in the hands of those who cultivate the soil. On the other hand, t…
Bandits, Banditry and Landscapes of Crime in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines
With few exceptions, commentators agree that bandits were a major socio-economic phenomenon of the nineteenth-century Philippines. Historians and contemporary observers are united in lamenting the deplorable state to which the countryside was reduced by their depredations. Bandits infested the roads and rivers, ravaged fields and farms, sacked towns, pillaged churches and set light to houses in an orgy of murder, robbery and rapine in which there…
Societies in Conflict
This paper examines the origin and evolutionary role of microalgae, the phenomenon of harmful dinoflagellate blooms commonly referred to as red tides, their history in the Philippines since a regular annual occurrence in 1983, and the loss of livelihood, morbidity and even death caused through the human consumption of seafood contaminated by such toxins
A history of poverty
Historians have generally been reticent in attributing any special role to natural disasters in shaping the evolution of human societies, yet there is a fundamental relationship between the history and structure of societies and its vulnerability to these events. This paper explores the relationship between environment and poverty in one such society particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, the Philippines. It argues that the extremes of wea…
Devils, Familiars and Spaniards
Journal Article Devils, Familiars and Spaniards: Spheres of Power and the Supernatural in the World of Seberina Candelaria and Her Village in Early 19th Century Philippines Get access Greg Bankoff Greg Bankoff The University of Auckland, Department of HistoryPrivate Bag 92019 Auckland, New Zealand Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 33, Issue 1, Fall 1999, Pages 37–55, https:/…
Paper Landscapes
Peter Boomgaard, Introducing environmental histories of Harold Brookfield, Land degradation in the Indonesian region, interpreted as landscape history Anthony Reid, Inside-out: colonial displacement of Sumatra's David Henley, Carrying capacity, climatic variation and the problem of low population growth among Indonesian swidden farmers: Evidence from North Sulawesi Han Knapen, Epidemics, drought and other uncertainties in Southeast Borneo during …
Rendering the World Unsafe
Disasters seem destined to be major issues of academic enquiry in the new century if for no other reason than that they are inseparably linked to questions of environmental conservation, resource depletion and migration patterns in an increasingly globalised world. Unfortunately, inadequate attention has been directed at considering the historical roots of the discursive framework within which hazard is generally presented, and how that might ref…
A Question of Breeding
The horse of these islands has arrived at such a state of degeneration," concludes a report to the Governor-general of the Philippines in 1883, "that it is useless to think of its rejuvenation, it being much easier and more convenient to create a new breed with the importation of mares and Stallions from Spain" (Raza de Caballeria de Filipinas 1883). The debate over the colonial government's attempt to improve equine bloodlines through a selected…
Selective memory and collective forgetting. Historiography and the Philippine centennial of 1898
A Tale of Two Wars
As the impact of September u continues to ripple through American society, its after shocks are not only determining the future but also reshaping the past. Not since the Vietnam War have external affairs so influenced the direction of U.S. historiog raphy. Whereas that debacle generated crit ical introspection, however, the operations in Afghanistan appear to have restored confidence in the efficacy of foreign mili tary intervention. This is the…
Post-Colonial National Identity in the Philippines
Presenting a fresh understanding of the construction of post-colonial national identity in the new context of globalisation, this text looks at the dilemmas of the requirements to compete in the global economy and the political demands of human rights and cultural differences. The authors are concerned with the ways in which a modern state attempts to mould the identities of its citizens and the ways in which the myriad of identities in a multiet…
Cultures of Disaster
In this fascinating and comprehensive study, Greg Bankoff traces the history of natural hazards in the Philippines from the records kept by the Spanish colonisers to the 'Calamitous Nineties', and assesses the effectiveness of the relief mechanisms that have evolved to cope with these occurrences. He also examines the correlation between this history of natural disasters and the social hierarchy within Filipino society. The constant threat of dis…
Regions of Risk
Terrorism is a word that everyone across the globe has become familiar with in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001. The rhetoric about these events, however, is more than mere commentary seeking to understand the cause of or apportion blame for such attacks and forms part of a much wider western discourse invoked to describe unfamiliar cultures and landscapes. In fact, terrorism is only the most recent in a long line of dangerous conditio…
Constructing Vulnerability
Flooding is not a recent hazard in the Philippines but one that has occurred throughout the recorded history of the archipelago. On the one hand, it is related to a wider global ecological crisis to do with climatic change and rising sea levels but on the other hand, it is also the effect of more localised human activities. A whole range of socio-economic factors such as land use practices, living standards and policy responses are increasingly i…
In the Eye of the Storm
The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when unde…
Bestia incognita
Animals and their histories outside of Europe and its off-shoot settler societies are effectively unknown except as far they constitute a source of exotic species with which to stock the cages of western zoos or to provide hapless victims to the rifles of imperial sportsmen. This paper is an attempt to redress this situation through an examination of the horse in the Philippines around the turn of the twentieth century. The horse's experience is …
Wants, Wages, And Workers
A need for workers posed a dilemma for the new U.S. administration in the Philippines anxious to demonstrate its progressive intentions and distance itself from the compulsion that had characterized public works during the previous regime. Instead, it turned to the market to nd both an ideologically acceptable and a practically realizable solution. Commencing with an investigation of extrafamilial work relations during the Spanish period, this ar…
These Brothers of Ours
Journal Article ‘These Brothers of Ours’: Poblete's Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903–1905 Get access Greg Bankoff Greg Bankoff University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Issue 4, Summer 2005, Pages 1047–1072, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2005.0045 Published: 01 July 2005
Winds of Colonisation
This paper examines the relationship between prevailing weather systems and colonialism in the context of Spanish possessions in the Pacific from Magellan till the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that any historical appreciation of Hispanic colonialism and culture would be incomplete without due consideration of the role meteorological phenomena played, both at the macro-level in terms of the form and extent of empire and at the more mic…
Fire and Quake in the Construction of Old Manila
Manila, was one of the grandest early modern European cities in Asia, yet it was destroyed by fire and earthquake on numerous occasions. Over successive reconstructions, it evolved a style of architecture and urban planning that reconciled alien notions about space and place to local environmental realities. The city that materialised over the ensuing centuries was neither wholly European nor Asian, but a rich fusion of the two whose form and sub…
One island too many
Geography (41 works) · History (39 works) · Political science (38 works) · Archaeology (36 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Philippine History and Culture (30 works) · History (28 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Ecology (18 works)