Prometheus Tamed : Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 To 1900.

Half Title -- Series Information -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Figures and Tables -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- Chapter 2 Spaces, Value, Presentism: Premodern Insurance: -- 1 The Commercial Communication System around 1400 -- 2 Insurance as an Accounting Trick between the World of Nature and the World of Values -- 3 Premiums of Presentism: Hidden Forces within the History of Law -- 4 International Trade Law and Insurance as an Achievement of the Moderni -- 5 Summary -- Chapter 3 The Danger between Nature and Culture: The Quotidian Threat of Urban Fires in the Premodern Era: -- 1 The "Reality" of the Danger: Fire Cycles, Fire Frequencies -- 1.1 The "Fire Gap" -- 1.2 8,200 Fires in Germany and Austria -- 1.3 Trends in Fire Frequencies According to Fire Insurance Statistics -- 1.4 War and Fire Trends -- 1.5 Climate and Fire Trends -- 1.6 The Fire Ecology of Hamburg -- 1.7 Summary -- 2 The Perception of Danger -- 2.1 The Theology of Divine Punishment and the Fire Events of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Security Losses, Security Gains -- 2.2 Visualization and Affect -- 2.2.1 The Modernity of City Fire Images and Their Dutch Provenance -- 2.2.2 A Discrepancy: Mythological/Biblical City Fire Paintings vs. the Low Number/Quality of Paintings of "Real" City Fires -- 2.2.3 Early Modern Image Theory and Disaster Images -- 2.2.4 Temporalization, Eventfulness and Affect Control -- 2.2.5 Threat Perception, Security Requirements, and Emotionalization -- 2.3 Ground Zeros: Visualization and Time Horizons -- 3 Developmental Trends of "Real-Assecuration": Fire Policey, Construction -- 3.1 The Security Regimes between the Late Middle Ages and the Enlightenment and between the City and the Territories -- 3.1.1 Cologne: An Important Medieval Imperial City282 -- 3.1.2 The German Center of Security Innovations: Hamburg.

3.1.3 The State's "Images" of the City Collective: An Approach to Disaster Memory and to Learning from Disaster (e.g., Prussia) -- 3.2 Panaceas: from "Local Knowledge" to Science and Back Again to Popular Enlightenment -- 4 Summary -- Chapter 4 The Epochal Threshold of the Security Regimes 1680-1700 -- 1 Laboratories of Innovation: Hamburg and Berlin-1680-1700 -- 1.1 London: Nicholas Barbon -- 1.1.1 Protostatistics, Protoprobabilistic Reasoning, and the Conflict between State and Private Economies -- 1.1.2 Nicholas Barbon: Building Speculator and Growth Theorist -- 1.1.3 Insurance Innovation and the "Financial Revolution" -- 1.2 Hamburg and Leibniz -- 1.2.1 The Hamburg General Fire Fund: Innovation without an Inventor -- 1.2.2 Transformation into an Element of Economic Provisioning: Leibniz -- 1.2.2.1 Before Leibniz: The Rulership Contract and Disaster Insurance around 1600 -- 1.2.2.2 Leibniz and the Territorial Institutionalization of Insurance -- 1.2.2.3 "Real-Assecuration": The Founding of the Berlin Academy and Fire Association -- 1.3 Summary: The Power of Analogies -- 2 Religious Culture and "Insurance" -- 2.1 Max Weber, the Protestant Ethic, Calvin(ism), and Economics -- 2.2 A Historiographical Gap: Insuring and Religious Denominations -- 2.3 Insurance History and Protestantism: The Search for Evidence -- Chapter 5 The Emergence of the Normal Secure Society -- 1 Insurance and Social Structures -- 1.1 Collective Solidarity: from Risk Communities to Cosmopolitan Aid in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries -- 1.2 Insurance as Emerging from Notions of Social Contract and Moral Duty -- 2 State and Society in the Code of Numbers -- 3 Time Instead of Space: Sustainability and Insurance -- Chapter 6 The Globalization of Safety Regimes: The Return of Space -- 1 Hamburg -- 2 Istanbul -- 3 Bombay/Calcutta -- 4 China -- 5 USA/New York.

6 Comparative Analysis -- Chapter 7 Conclusion -- Appendix 1 Academic Legal Treatises and Dissertations on the Assecuratio (in Chronological Order) -- Appendix 2 Chronological List of Cameralist Fire Insurance Foundations in Germany -- Appendix 3 Cameralist Treatises of Brandkassen and Insurances -- Afterword -- Sources and Literature -- Unpublished Sources -- Published Primary Sources -- Published Secondary Sources -- Index Locorum -- Index Nominum -- Index Rerum.

Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.