Zwierlein, Cornel. Der gezähmte Prometheus: Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne. Umwelt und Gesselschaft, edited by Christof Mauch, Helmuth Trischler, and Frank Uekötter, vol. 3. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co, 2011.
In the pre-modern era, city-wide fires posed one of the greatest imaginable catastrophes: they turned cities into ashes, and served as warnings of the limits of humans controlling nature. Fire insurance, an invention of the seventeenth century, was a precursor to contemporary insurance giants and one of the earliest forms of institutionalized disaster surveillance. This volume traces the extent, character and perception of large fire catastrophes, as well as the development of insurance from its beginnings in fifteenth century Germany and England to the globalization of the nineteenth century and the new metropoles in Turkey, India and the USA. (Text adapted from Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and the Rachel Carson Center)
Read the introduction here.