Chapter 1 provides a brief history of nuclear weapons and introduces readers to the broad contours and main characteristics of the First and Second Nuclear Ages. It begins by discussing Einstein’s role in developing, and eventually opposing, nuclear weapons, before then outlining significant developments in the First and Second Nuclear Ages by drawing upon the statements of world leaders, policy documents, international treaties, secondary literature, and artefacts of popular culture such as the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove and the TV series 24. Whilst mainly providing an introductory historical overview for readers who may be unacquainted with the history of nuclear weapons, the argument of the first chapter is that the nuclear exterminism that E. P. Thompson warned of in the early 1980s was gradually tempered by the development of arms control agreements and the consolidation of a norm around the non-use of nuclear weapons.`
This chapter explores how the factors that made the colonies vulnerable to natural hazards intersected with conceptions of race and the perceived ‘natural’ order of colonial society to shape British responses to disaster in the era of slavery. It argues that, above all, the British response to disaster prioritised the restoration of the region’s racial hierarchy and its extractive industry. To achieve this, colonial officials resorted to coercion and tactics informed by Britain’s approach to domestic poor relief, and on occasion they also resorted to violence. The chapter shows that, in the post-abolition era when planters felt increasingly caught between African-Caribbeans fighting for their freedom and hostile politics in Britain, more than ever they sought to use disaster as a crisis they could exploit to shore up the crumbling certainties of Caribbean life.
The conclusion briefly goes beyond 1907 to examine British responses to a hurricane in British Honduras (Belize) in 1931. It shows how a marked change was beginning to emerge in the twentieth century; colonised people were beginning to construct their own formalised responses to disaster. What is more, complaints with British response were beginning to feed through into anti-colonial demands. Beyond this, the conclusion looks to the future. It argues that reparations for the ecological damage done to the Caribbean during colonialism are due because the vulnerability-inducing conditions discussed at length in this book are still rendering it vulnerable in the present day.
This chapter is divided into two halves. The first looks at how British colonial society evolved in the Caribbean, from a number of settler colonies with tenuous footholds on a scattering of islands into one of the main wealth producers of the British Empire by the middle of the eighteenth century. It looks at how the plantations and slave labour came to be the central pillars around which these colonies were organised. The second half of the chapter looks at how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this emergent and deeply unequal society encountered disaster. Specifically, it looks at how these threats were conceived of and prepared for by colonists and enslaved who already faced a multiplicity of other deadly hazards. By comparing British responses to the Jamaican earthquake of 1692 and the ‘Great Hurricane’ of 1780, this chapter argues that even though they were geographically separated from the European enlightenment, those in control of the Caribbean, connected as it was to the Empire, began to see its hazards less providentially and more scientifically, albeit much more slowly than those in Europe. Where prayer had been the primary response to what were considered visitations of God’s wrath, disasters, interrupting trade and conflict as they regularly did, increasingly became seen as events in which individuals and on occasion, the state, could intervene and mitigate.
This chapter looks at how British responses to disaster adapted both to the post-emancipation era and the unprecedented change that it brought with it. It argues that responses to disaster still retained their overwhelming focus on the restoration of order and productive industry, but shows that, if anything, the racial rhetoric deployed in this process displayed a marked intensification from the era of slavery. Crises created moments in which African-Caribbean people could truly test the boundaries of their freedom, and in which white elites, smarting from the loss of power occasioned by emancipation, were more concerned than ever about controlling and policing those limits. Simultaneously, as the nineteenth century progressed, it reflected a growing colonial preoccupation with managing the growth of the African-Caribbean population. The language and methods of British domestic poor relief were increasingly deployed in the Caribbean, both shaping and, crucially, limiting the distribution of relief.
This chapter establishes the temporal and geographical context for the book. It sets out how the book intends to study disaster from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective and how that sets it apart from the existing, sparse literature in this area. Beyond this, the introduction also gives an overview not just of the archival material used for the book but the use of an ‘against-the-grain’ approach to interpreting it.
Negotiating relief and freedom is an investigation of short- and long-term responses to disaster in the British Caribbean colonies during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. It explores how colonial environmental degradation expanded the impacts of natural phenomena such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and made the inhabitants of these colonies more vulnerable to such disasters. Both the edicts of the colonial officers on the ground and those arriving from Parliament drove the response to these events in a direction that initially prioritised the restoration of colonial control and ‘fiscal prudence’ ahead of the relief of the suffering. When attention shifted to relief, it quickly became a complex negotiation between the wealthy, white few who sought to recoup all their losses and a Parliament whose influence was waning and who were increasingly distrusted. All the while, both parties, fearing a contestation of their power, contended with having to provide some relief to the African-Caribbean population. There they sought to balance a desire to avoid conflict with reigning in the idea that the state could provide charity. As a result, heavily conditional aid and restrictions on freedom became hallmarks of this third aspect to the process of negotiation relief. That this pattern played out continuously in the long nineteenth century is a reminder that in the Caribbean the transition from slavery to waged labour was not a clean one. Times of crisis brought racial and social tensions to the fore and freedoms once granted were often quickly curtailed.
This chapter explores the impact British colonialism had on the Caribbean environment. It argues that both the model of intensive plantation agriculture and the haphazard urban settlements that came to characterise British Caribbean society rendered the islands more vulnerable to the acute hazards considered in this book. It shows that these vulnerabilities, deforestation, the lack of self-sufficiency and the fragile inadequate construction of most Caribbean property, to name just a few, are not only something historians can observe with hindsight, but were readily raised by those who visited and lived in the Caribbean. Consequently, this chapter explores why these apparent vulnerabilities were never addressed and the societies engineered with so little resilience. It argues that, broadly speaking, because the British never saw the region as a place for permanent, developed white settlement they never deemed it worthwhile to invest the time, effort and capital there to build resilience.
The final chapter examines the long-term aspects of British responses to disaster. Specifically, it examines the relationship that planters and the colonial officials in the Caribbean had with the Colonial Office and Parliament. Notoriously indebted and working to increasingly shrinking margins as the nineteenth century progressed, Parliament was the primary port of call for planters looking to secure financial aid to rebuild disaster-stricken colonies. Yet, as this chapter shows, securing aid was never straightforward. Parliament was reticent to spend large sums of money on island colonies that over the course of the nineteenth century appeared to be diminishing not just in profitability but in their general importance to the Empire at large. By examining transatlantic correspondence and parliamentary debates, this chapter shows that those same perceptions of the Caribbean environment outlined in the first chapter, and the racial conceptions of order integral to the British responses outlined in the third and fourth chapters, played a large role in shaping and ultimately circumscribing the financial aid provided by Parliament. As the century came to its end, this chapter shows that Britain’s declining influence in the Caribbean, along with increased media scrutiny, brought the geopolitics of disaster and the optics of British responses into a new harsh light.
The past twenty years have seen significant changes in the design and perception of retail stores. While claims about the ‘death’ of bricks-and-mortar stores were exaggerated, the rise of online shopping has resulted in store closures and anxiety about retail’s future viability. Defying this trend, Aesop, an Australian-based luxury skincare company, expanded from a single store in 2007 to over 230 stores around the world by the end of 2020. Aesop’s curious success was due – at least partially – to its design of a distinctive retail experience. Despite differences in individual stores and references to local culture, materials and history, each is ground in a distinctive Aesop ethos that identifies it as part of the global brand. Focusing particularly on Aesop’s Melbourne stores, this chapter analyses the company’s retail interiors within the context of two recent directions in design practice: experience and sensory design. The first, prompted by Pine and Gilmore’s influential work on the ‘experience economy’, describes how brands have employed designers to integrate product, graphic, interior and website design in order to create compelling, coherent experiences. The second describes architecture’s ‘phenomenological turn’, advocated by practitioner-theorists such as Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa, whose works have prompted a renewed emphasis on design for the senses. The Aesop store – a carefully curated, immersive space designed by combining sensual inputs and eliminating distractions – occupies the intersection of these two directions, making it a compelling case study of sensual experience design in the digital era.