Early Modern Ground Zeros: Big City Fires in Central Europe
Central Europe was characterized by a high number of small cities. In over 1,900 of those places possessing city statutes at least one major fire happened in premodern times or even the city burnt down completely. A newly established database reveals important insights into the rhythms of those city fires as a serial phenomenon of German History. Destruction by fire was a constant threat in the burghers’ everyday life, comparable only to the threat of floods and plagues. Perception and anticipation of that threat changed over time. The main seat of innovation after 1650 were not the old big Imperial Cities but port and residential cities importing know-how from Western Europe (especially from Amsterdam) and the networks of medium-sized cities organized by territorial states like Prussia, Saxony or Wurttemberg. Rebuilding routines and Cameralist fire insurance plans organized those cities into new collective bodies. State formation was acting through the reiterated rétablissment of the city network and by combining them into one body of more economic value. Territorially organized fire insurance programs can be regarded as the first institutions that produced statistical knowledge about natural hazards, precursors of the big present data producing reinsurers. The paper concentrates on that important transition from the perception and management of the fire threat in single cities to the state backed gathering of urban networks into a risk collective. It addresses also the methodological questions how the theoretical discussion of risk sociology can be applied, transferred (or not) to those Early Modern phenomena.