From Sparta to Nicaragua, disasters alter political history | csmonitor.com

Here's a brief list of volcanic and earthquake-realted political effects.

• An earthquake in 464 BC that destroyed much of the city of Sparta, and a slave revolt soon afterward ("social upheavals often follow geological ones," says Zeilinga de Boer) significantly weakened the militaristic city-state in its rivalry with Athens. The quake "triggered Sparta's decline," he argues.

• An earthquake and tidal wave that killed 40,000 people in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 - the most catastrophic in European history - prompted the French philosopher Voltaire and others to question the dominant philosophy of optimism on which the ancien régime was founded. The earthquake contributed to the intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

• The manner in which Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza - along with his relatives and cronies - stole much of the international aid sent to rebuild the shattered capital, Managua, after a 1972 earthquake, fueled the sputtering Sandinista revolution that triumphed in 1979.

• In 1902, it was almost certain that the Central American canal linking the Atlantic with the Pacific would be built in Nicaragua. Work had already begun.

But that year, the Montagne Pelée volcano erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing 30,000 people. Panamanian lobbyists immediately sent each member of the US Congress one of the recently issued Nicaraguan postage stamps depicting the country's scenic volcanoes.

Congress voted for a Panamanian route for the canal.

One wonders what the potential effects of the recent earthquake-Tsunami might be ...

From Sparta to Nicaragua, disasters alter political history | csmonitor.com