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.
En este libro se traza el desarrollo conceptual del riesgo desde su origen en la teología islámica, en las travesías marítimas en el Mediterráneo y Atlántico, en la conquista y colonización de América, en el surgimiento en el siglo XVI de la primera noción de probabilidad aritmética, en el relato de la peste de Londres de 1665 y en el terremoto de Lisboa de 1755. A partir de una investigación histórica se pretende mostrar que el riesgo posee cuatro propiedades: que es tiempo futuro, que posee una base de conocimiento, que se trata de la relación entre dos entes y que siempre es una probabilidad. En último término se trata de demostrar que el riesgo, más que una percepción, es una narración.