“The dangers which plague this country”: Empire and Disaster in the North Pacific, 1700-1995

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the history of colonialism and empire building interacted with frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in the North Pacific. Through archival sources and new translations of Russian scholarship, it narrates how natural disasters did and did not interact with programs of conquest, colonization, settlement, and urban planning. Through the stories of major natural disasters in Kamchatka, Kodiak, Anchorage, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin, this dissertation proposes that colonial projects in the North Pacific appear to have possessed a resilience to natural disasters based on their roles within the larger colonial and imperial projects of the Russian Empire and its successor states, as well as the United States. Conversely, these same projects appeared to be uniquely vulnerable to other aspects of the North Pacific environment, such as the incompatibility of the climate with export-oriented agriculture. The dissertation concludes with an argument for the importance of the region’s fundamentally colonial history in shaping the contemporary disaster regimes in the North Pacific as well as twentieth century seismology.2027-04-2