A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk

Imagining the Future

Gaspar Mairal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Versicherung

This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources.

Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of "managing the future" by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law and navigation in Medieval Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, to Columbus' arrival to the Indies and the Spanish exploration and colonization in the Americas. It considers the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance, the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk - time, knowledge, relationship and probability - and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical time frame.

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management.

1 The Mediterranean origin of risk

Diving into the historical origins of risk is hard work that leads to unexpected spaces and prior times to what I presumed at first. I have had to go to the sands of the Arabian Desert to find people who travelled across long distances and put their fortune in the hands of God. They were using categories of time to confront the future, theirs and their properties. They did not use divination but a religious belief that rationalized the uncertainty. They called rizq to the fruit, both spiritual and material, of their trust in God and this concept was crucial for the expansion of the Arabs, first in the deserts and then in their voyages across the Indian and Mediterranean Seas.

This is the first historical context in which a valid notion to identify the genesis of the modern concept of risk can be found. Doing so, two fundamental considerations for the production of a historical-narrative theory of risk arise and they will be widely discussed throughout the pages of this book. First, we should acknowledge that risk, in this original version as rizq, was part of a community’s religious beliefs whose source was a written narrative and an oral tradition. The Koran contains a large number of references to the rizq and provides this term with a large semantic field. Now I only intend to highlight how this original notion, which I attribute to the risk, would not be mathematical – the first rudimentary notion of a mathematical probability did not appear until the sixteenth century – but narrative, thus already being a part in the grand story of the Islam foundation, the Koran. A second consideration derives for the first one since the nature of this original notion of rizq can be related both to the good and to the bad. Moreover, it refers to the future. So, the risk would be another version of time creation except that this time is not past but future. The first notion of risk emerged to provide a background of knowledge to cope with the uncertainty of future and as an alternative to divination and oracles. The ability of a religious belief to rationalize human experiences has been often underestimated in the history of science forgetting that all our scientific knowledge was at first religion. Emile Durkheim already mentioned this historical fact in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life:

For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.¹

In the following chapters, I will track stories and expressions that refer explicitly or implicitly to the risk. This persecution of risk has led me to trace a path that proceeding across the deserts of the Middle East, comes to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to take account of the trade flows that resulted in navigation in the Mare Nostrum under the influence exerted in the Middle Age by the Arab-Islamic civilization on Southern Europe. The first transoceanic voyage that led Columbus to the Americas in 1492 was in terms of the use of the techniques of navigation and the geographical knowledge, a continuation of the Mediterranean sailing and of the fifteenth century experiences of Portuguese and Castilian navigators in the Atlantic Ocean. The risk was already there.

Etymology of “risk”: Latin or Arabic?

The English word risk also exists in all the European languages with a similar meaning. From Spanish riesgo, French risque, Italian rischio, Portuguese risco, Catalan risc, so it makes the most important languages derived from Latin or to the German Risiko, for the Germanic ones with great Latin lexical influence or the Greek rhizikon, which derives also from Latin. All these variations indicate a common origin, but we could not argue that one of them is the source of all others. Nevertheless, we have to arrive to a Latin word risicum for identifying an original word. This term was used in Italian thirteenth century maritime documents. So, the Latin language, but a notarial Latin that coexisted with Romance, was the first European language to use the notion of risk. However, this notarial term, risicum, came from a non-European language which was in close contact with Southern Europe, the Arabic. The expression “ad meum risicum” appears in a 1248 Genoese document that commends a ship cargo. This circumstance shows us a singular course to find the source of the risk: the sea and the navigation transporting goods. The risk is, we might say, a Mediterranean creation

Some of the books written on risk with a theoretical perspective point out that the origin of this word should be found in the Latin voice resecare, which means “cut”. Luhmann also states that the etymology of risk is however obscure. “The etymology of the word is unknown. Some suspect it to be Arabic in origin”, writes Luhmann, who then recognizes that “there are no comprehensive studies on the etymology and conceptual history of the word”.² Joan Coromines,³ who is always an authorized voice in the field of etymology, was the most prominent defender of the Latin origin for this term and he established its relationship with the Latin verb resecare. The Spanish word risco⁴ would clearly come from this voice, which shows also a semantic continuity with this Latin verb that means “cut”. However, the Spanish riesgo, as well as the various versions of this term in other European languages, could not be a Latin voice. Some leading philologists, most of them Arabists, do not coincide with Coromines’ affirmation and they mention the Arabic language as the origin of the voice risk or riesgo in Spanish. The most interesting point is that following their explanations, one notices that they not only argue reasonably about the etymology of this term but also on the origin of the concept and that means going further than Coromines. For example, Federico Corriente who is the author of a very well-known Arabic-Spanish dictionary, dissents Coromines arguing the following:

Risk: it deserves more consideration based on the Arabic etymology/rizq phonetically because the /i/ on the closed syllable often/e/... and semantically because this voice refers to everything that is provided by the Providence which can be good or bad for the orthodox Muslim....⁵

I have found other references in a great work published by Mikel de Epalza, a Spanish arabist, Origines du concept de risque: de l’ Islam a l’Occident, a paper presented in 1988 at the international conference Le Risque et the Crise that was held in Amiens (France) and whose results were later published.⁶ I will take several Epalza’s suggestions about the risk and its etymology and semantics into consideration. Corriente’s and Epalza’s proposals have allowed me to open some research lines which with some result are present in this book.

The meaning of the Arabic rizq, already mentioned by Corriente in terms of “what is provided by the Providence which can be good or bad for the Orthodox Muslim”, has a semantic denseness which connects very well with our modern understanding of risk as a contingency. This semantics gives etymological credibility to the Arabic origin that I am postulating, for in a sense the rizq would mean something quite similar to what we call risk today. Certainly, that there are significant differences which, however, can be understood quite well in the context of a genealogy of the concept of risk as we will see further on.

Mikel de Epalza locates the Arabic rizq in the Koran and asserts that about 120 verses with words derived from the root r-z-q can be found there. On this lexical basis Epalza interprets the texts to draw a large semantic field. First of all, and according to its initial Koranic sense rizq is a provision or gift from God.

Rizq is a gift that God – its Supreme source – gives to men, who are its specific addressees.

It is both a fruit of heaven and Earth, a production of earth and heaven, which God produces or brings out (akhraja) or down the heaven (anzala).⁷

Later on, Epalza writes that rizq relates with chance as it is the good luck or baraka given by the grace of God.

The rizq of God involves in addition a spiritual blessing (baraka), because of the material nature of rizq.⁸

The rizq has always been a central concept in Islamic theology and is a key reference in many “hadices” or comments to the sacred Islamic texts. It is usually translated as the set of provisions for sustenance that are received by someone who is subjected to the will of God. They are goods that God gives and are received without having offered anything in return. The rizq comes from God, who gives it to the believer when he possesses five spiritual, ritual and behavioural conditions: taqwa or fear of God, namaz or the five daily prayers, istighfaar or remorse, tawakkul or trust in God and infaaq fiabilillah or good deed. These are some examples taken from the Koran in which the term rizq has been translated as a “provision” or “sustenance”:

Is there any creator other than Allah

who provides for you from the sky and the earth?

[Q Fatir 35:3]

Indeed it is Allah who is the All-provider,

Powerful, All-strong.

[Q Tur 51:58]

There is no animal on earth, but that its sustenance lies with Allah.

[Q Hud 11:6]⁹

Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), the great poet and philosopher from Murcia, whom this hikam or epigram is usually attributed, puts the term rizq in relation with that of tawakkul or trust in God:

I’ve seen glory (‘izz) in asceticism (zuhd)

Wealth (ghina) in poverty (faqr)

Happiness (qanāKato) in moderation (war’)

Relief (faraj) in patience

The provision (rizq) in happy trust (tawakkul)

The truth (ḥaqq) in sincerity (ṣidq))

Religion (dīn) in a conscious fear (taqwa)¹⁰

The rizq was both material and spiritual, something which did not fit well with a Christian¹¹ theology which tended to separate both things. Epalza also mentions this material condition of rizq because the “travel by land and sea” is one of the main contexts in which the Koran locates the rizq.

(Rizq) is at the same time spiritual, because of its divine origin – in many Koranic verses God gives his rizq and forgiveness at the same time, – and material because of its manifestations: eating, drinking and trading, assistance in marriage and in travel by land and by sea.¹²

From the beginning of the Islamic expansion after the preaching of Muhammad, the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Mediterranean origin of risk
• 2 The conquest of the ocean
• 3 When risk navigated to the Americas: the great adventure of Christopher Columbus
• 4 When risk set foot in the Americas
• 5 From narrative to the probability calculus
• 6 Daniel Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year
• 7 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, or the first modern catastrophe
• 8 Conclusion: risk in its historical context
• Index