Central European History | 2021
Beyond the Barricades: Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, 1848–1858. By Anna Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. v + 223. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0198833826.
Abstract
individuals, insurers, and states began to explore ways to prevent natural dangers rather than simply protecting people from their consequences. This sparked political conflicts. Central Europeans agreed on the need for collective protections, but often disagreed on what those protections should be. Hannig makes clear that the modern fixation on natural dangers went hand in hand with capitalism. He describes various kinds of “catastrophe commerce” (239): tourism at disaster sites, postcards of natural disasters, and films and books that used stories of natural disasters as entertainment. Floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions were nothing new, but they became a presence in daily life through newspapers, films, postcards, and advertising. Yet these are just side notes to Hannig’s main story: the starring role of the insurance industry in making prevention of natural dangers a leitmotif of modern life. Insurance companies expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century, especially from the 1880s on, and played a crucial role in early efforts to minimize risk on a large scale. They sponsored research, promoted the idea of protection, and lobbied for state interventions as part of their business strategy. Their efforts not only provided a model for state research and public insurance initiatives, but also resulted in state insurance mandates for the insurance sector to cash in on. Further, insurance companies made natural dangers a global issue. Insurers felt the impact, quite literally in some cases, of earthquakes in San Francisco and Ljubljana long before central European governments did, and they brought those experiences and interests back to central Europe. Hannig’s study is the product of his habilitation and has all the detail and heft of such studies. Some arguments are not as novel as the book claims—David Blackbourn and others have described the drive of modernizing states to “conquer” nature from the eighteenth century on. At the same time, Hannig makes a compelling case that risk—and its mitigation—plays a central role in modernity. What Ulrich Beck calls the risk society did not appear until the late twentieth century, but has roots reaching back to at least the eighteenth century. Hannig tells a central European story firmly grounded in a broader European and global context and connects sometimes disparate threads—state formation, industrial capitalism, insurance, nature protection—into a single, sweeping story. As a result, this book offers insights for scholars with a variety of thematic and geographic interests.