This chapter steps back to examine the changing perception of Dutch decline across the first half of the eighteenth century. Anxieties about Dutch decline did not emerge fully formed in 1672, nor any other date; rather, they developed over time. This chapter argues that natural disasters reveal the expanding influence of proto-national decline narratives, highlight the increasing influence of economic perspectives on decline, and uncover a distinctive rural decline paradigm. The chapter also considers what this era of decline can teach us about disasters more broadly. Disasters were events and processes that manifested at the intersection of natural and cultural change. They produced differential consequences for Dutch society across scale, just as they do today. These conditions influenced Dutch perception of disaster and affected their response. The Golden Age past was key to learning from these disasters – whether as a model to emulate or a baseline to measure progress. Dutch “decline” and the natural disasters that punctuated it served as social and cultural tools that resolved in the long term. Eighteenth-century environmental histories of disaster offer insights about the role of culture and perception, progress, and agency in an era of increasing risk.

During the ‘Disaster Year’ (Rampjaar) of 1672, the French, the English, and their allies attacked and nearly toppled the Dutch Republic. To many observers and later historians, the Rampjaar signaled the end of the Golden Age. This chapter introduces the Dutch Republic and proposes several ways that an environmental history of disasters enriches our understanding of the development and meaning of decline. It explores these interventions through a deep reading of the print ‘Miserable Cries of the Sorrowful Netherlands’ (Ellenden Klacht Van het Bedroefde Nederlandt). This image visually merges the political and military disasters of 1672 with the floods and windstorms that followed. It condenses time, works across scale, and frames the collective environmental, cultural, social, and economic consequences of the Rampjaar as a breach with the past. Ellenden Klacht reads like a founding document of the Dutch decline narrative, but it also contains visual clues that point to alternative interpretations. It argues that disasters, especially natural disasters, were traumatic and they challenged the moral, economic, and political standing of the Dutch Republic. At the same time, disasters could yield opportunities for adaptation, recovery, and growth.

In late fall 1730, a coastal flood hit the Dutch island Walcheren. Inside the broken wooden revetments strewn across its beaches, dike authorities noticed peculiar, tiny holes. These holes contained shipworms (Teredo navalis), a marine mollusk that bored into the wooden infrastructure that protected coastal dikes. This discovery prompted the most significant redevelopment and rebuilding of coastal flood defenses in the early-modern period. This chapter investigates the origins, interpretation, and response to the ‘shipworm epidemic’ of the 1730s. It argues that the perception of shipworm novelty influenced this dramatic change. In contrast to epizootics or coastal floods, the cultural memory of disaster presented no ready solutions for shipworms. Shipworms’ perceived novelty catalyzed new natural historical investigations of the species as well as innovative new dike designs. Shipworms also produced new connections to decline. Pietist ministers and enlightened spectatorial journalists united in their condemnation of the moral decay of the Dutch Republic by linking shipworms to an ongoing wave of sodomy trials. The biological novelty of the shipworms translated to an unprecedented period of persecution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, river flooding seemed to be increasingly numerous and severe. To later observers, the 1740–41 river floods, which affected numerous parts of the Rhine–Meuse River System, were an important inflection point. This chapter evaluates the origins, interpretations, and consequences of the 1740–41 river floods. Victims interpreted these floods in the context of recent years of dearth and disaster. The historically bitter winter of 1739–40 had catalyzed a disaster cascade in the hardest-hit areas of the riverlands that amplified the impacts of inundation and expanded its consequences. At the same time, Dutch surveyors and hydraulic engineers, ministers, and state authorities promoted a discourse of increasing moral and geographic risk of inundation. In contrast to the Christmas Flood, where technocrats grounded dike innovations in the cultural memory of prior inundations, river floods forced observers to consider problematic futures. Surveyors and cartographers mapped flood risk in the Dutch riverlands and warned of potential consequences should the state ignore their new river management strategies. The floods of 1740–41 and narratives of increasing risk added to distress and anxiety about decline, but they also prompted the first proto-national flood relief efforts and increased emphasis on the systemic, interprovincial nature of Dutch river challenges.

The Netherlands emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) a weakened state, and anxieties about the decline of Republic expanded as a result. That same year, an outbreak of cattle plague emerged in the Republic. Originating in the eastern European steppes, this panzootic spread slowly across Europe following networks of war and trade. Centuries of landscape transformation in the Netherlands set the stage for this disaster, and weather associated with a changing climate conditioned its severity. The disease killed hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Republic, impacting Dutch urban and rural livelihoods. Between 1713 and 1720, state authorities, moralists, and farmers struggled to understand and manage the disease. This chapter investigates the social and environmental origins of cattle plague, as well as cultural and state response. State authorities based their strategies in environmentalist and contagionist theories of diseases transmission that varied across scale. Its impacts were far from uniform, but moralists framed cattle plague as a problem that affected the entire country, which reinforced narratives of Dutch decline. This chapter argues that causal stories explaining the origins and meaning of the disease both reinforced pessimistic decline narratives and prompted a universalist approach to medical responses.

The return of rinderpest to the Netherlands in 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth-century era of disaster. Hardly a generation removed from the first outbreak, cattle plague returned to the Republic with far greater intensity. It lasted over twice as long and resulted in over a million cattle deaths. Chapter 6 compares the second outbreak of cattle plague to the first, assessing changing response. Like the first outbreak, cattle plague emerged in the context of conflict and extreme weather. Unlike the previous episode, it interacted with an ongoing disaster cascade that amplified and prolonged its consequences. Popular and state response showed remarkable continuity. Rinderpest was not novel, and prior experience proved beneficial as provinces tapped the cultural memory of the previous outbreak. Provincial decrees quickly reinstituted bans on cattle importation, enacted quarantines, and issued certificates of health. Pamphlet literature again highlighted the human tragedy of the animal disease and bemoaned its moral implications. The extensive scope and duration of this outbreak attracted new attention from an international network of medical practitioners. Its increased severity prompted novel medical responses, including the first inoculation trials. These trials reveal the diffusion of declensionist fears into the economic and social program of the Dutch Enlightenment.

The Christmas Flood of 1717 was likely the deadliest coastal flood in North Sea history. The storm impacted the entire southern coast of the North Sea basin, but the majority of its more than 13,000 victims lived in marginalized communities in the northern Netherlands and coastal Germany. This chapter investigates the origins, impact, and response to the Christmas Flood on the province of Groningen. The Netherlands had a long history of coping with coastal flooding, and moralists, state officials, and dike authorities exploited the cultural memory of previous floods to advocate solutions. The city of Groningen and its rural hinterlands wielded the past to divergent ends in their efforts to reframe financial responsibility for reconstruction. Provincial technocrats balanced tradition with the rhetoric of improvement to build support for new and improved seawalls. Moralists emphasized the unprecedented severity of the flood to scale up its significance and embed it in broader decline narratives. It argues that the Christmas Flood revealed the diverse ways that the past could be wielded to promote and resist change following natural disasters.

There has been much speculation about how much Grotius knew about Asian law and maritime trading customs, and at what stage in his early career he familiarized himself with them. This chapter divides Grotius’ early career (before 1618) into four stages, each corresponding to a phase in his intellectual growth on the subject of Asia at large. First, defending the Santa Catarina incident which saw him drafting De Jure Praedae (and with it implicitly Mare Liberum) before 1606/7; second, defending the VOC’s interests in the lead up to the Treaty of Antwerp and the Twelve Years Truce 1606/7-1609; third, acting as the intermediary for VOC admiral Cornelis Matelieff (Cornelis Corneliszoon Matelieff) 1608-1612/3, and participation in the Anglo-Dutch fisheries and colonies conferences of 1613 (London) and 1615 (The Hague). It is argued that in his various capacities in government and as advisor to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Grotius broadened his knowledge about Asia in different ways, and through his services to the state and company helped lay the intellectual and foundations for what has been sometimes dubbed the First Dutch Empire (c.1605-1795).

This chapter tracks Grotius’ career as an official serving the province of Holland and the city of Rotterdam up to his arrest in the late summer of 1618. After an introduction on his work as a lawyer in The Hague, his service as advocate-fiscal (public prosecutor) of the Court of Holland (1607-1613) and as pensionary of Rotterdam (1613-1618) is described against the background of the emerging religious conflicts within the Dutch Republic. A special section is devoted to Grotius’ diplomatic activities, especially his membership of a Dutch mission to London in the spring of 1613, where he tried to win king James’ support for the ecclesiastical politics of the States of Holland.

Chapter 8 details the on-going importance of the politics of alliance before and after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In the Empire, the organization of alliances shifted in the second half of the seventeenth century, as the principles of corporate alliance migrated into princely military leagues like the 1658 Rhenish Alliance and large-scale associations among Imperial Circles. Despite their different structures, both the military alliances and Circle Associations adopted the rhetoric of earlier leagues and mirrored their goals. Related processes played out in the United Provinces, where the decades after Westphalia witnessed a running debate over what form the Dutch state should take. At the heart of this conflict sat competing ideas about the Union of Utrecht. The Union served as a focal point for all kinds of proposals about the Dutch Republic’s operation. One of the few things that each side agreed on was the Union’s centrality. Accordingly, the development of the Dutch state during this period was inseparable from struggles over the Union’s meaning. By examining Westphalia’s legacy in both the Empire and United Provinces, this chapter traces the lasting influence of the politics of alliance on northern Europe’s political systems into the late seventeenth century and beyond.

Chapter 5 investigates the League of Landsberg’s failed attempt to admit new Protestant and Catholic territories in the early 1570s, including the Low Countries. The League’s proposed expansion presented an opportunity to create a lasting peace in the Empire by forging new ties among competing territories. At multiple points, however, both Catholics and Protestants rejected this possibility, as neither party wished to cede primary authority in the alliance. Even as the League continued to resolve neighborly disputes, support for its exercise of shared sovereignty eroded. Related processes operated in the Low Countries during the 1570s, where civil war spawned competing alliances: the Union of Arras and the Union of Utrecht. Including members that supported a variety of religious policies, the Union of Utrecht tried to solve the problem of religious diversity by devolving authority over religion to provincial governments. Such a solution meant that much of the United Provinces’ subsequent political development depended on how different provincial authorities interpreted the meaning of the Union’s treaty of alliance. This dynamic remained at the heart of the Dutch Republic and its exercise of shared sovereignty throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Chapter 4 links analyses of social property relations to scholarship on the social origins of the diplomatic corps and the aristocratisation of ambassadors from the late-seventeenth century. It presents the debates in diplomatic theory and history regarding the social origins or functions of actors regarded as necessary or ideal to fulfil diplomatic duties. The chapter argues that the aristocratisation of ambassadors led by France and Castile can be understood as a jurisdictional strategy of collaboration between noble classes and sovereigns to sustain an 'old regime' Europe. The typology of jurisdictional accumulation can be used to contrast French and Castilian strategies of ambassadorial recruitment as transplants of authority, with English and Dutch counterpart strategies as transports. Transplants mark the former’s more embodied and organic reliance on the prestige of the person of the ambassador, whereas the latter favoured the potential utility and political requirements of their more merchant-based imperial agents in shaping the social diversity of their ambassadorial corps, and therefore can be identified through the more functional concept of transports.

Chapter 3 focuses on the social property relations of each case building on the Political Marxist tradition and by engaging with international legal history. This chapter presents the major institutions, actors, and jurisdictional disputes that provide bases to understand, first, the local specificities of the Castilian kingdom and its American colonies, emphasising the broader Iberian fragmented assemblage and the role of theologians in the particular politico-religious form of empire linked to principles of morality and law. In France, the focus is on Louis XIV and his ministers trying to contain the various jurisdictional regimes and conceptions of space, as well as legal actors and orders. The role of England’s social property relations is discussed in relation to the common law and to enclosures in primitive accumulation and the transition to capitalism. Finally, the Dutch Republic highlights the problem of transition and the specific jurisdictional context of its confederation, as well as the role of merchants and magistrates in shaping its politics. The chapter describes practices that could be considered as extensions rather than transports or transplants of authority.

Chapter 5 concerns the practices of Dutch, French, and English consuls in the Mediterranean and illustrates jurisdictional collaboration and conflict between sovereigns, merchants, trading companies, and regional institutions. It discusses the range of consuls' jurisdictional functions, the policies and strategies developed, such as the restrictive regulations increasingly put in place for the French service and its unique model of salaried and commissioned consuls, as well as the different practices found in Christian and non-Christian parts of the Mediterranean. Through a selection of archive material regarding events in the French embassy in Constantinople from the 1660s to 1680s, the analysis reveals a more interdependent relation between ambassadors and consuls in shaping extraterritorial and jurisdictional spaces. Focusing on class differences and social origins emphasises the role of consular diplomacy, its connection to the aristocratisation of ambassadorial diplomacy, and the development of different forms of early modern mercantilism. French consular practices are better categorised as transplants of authority, in contrast to the less jurisdictionally autonomous role of English and Dutch consular attempts to transport their sovereign’s authority.

In the first chapter of Part I the authors discuss the rise and decline of the two Dutch monopoly companies, and how they, formally and informally, operated in the Dutch Republic, Asia and the Atlantic. The histories of these two companies are very different. The Dutch West India Company, operating in the Atlantic, was always threatened by competitors such as private traders, Dutch merchants who used foreign companies to get around the monopoly, and French and English competitors. The Dutch East India Company, the largest enterprise in the world, employing at the height of its existence about 40,000 personnel, went bankrupt not because of the competition from other trading houses in the Netherlands, but because the directors of the Company were aware which products brought in profits and which did not, but had no idea about the total financial results. In order to increase its turnover, the Company switched from the trade in spices to that of Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain, which necessitated larger ships and more personnel, resulting in lower profit rates. This chapter ends with a discussion of the shrinking naval and military capacity of the Dutch Empire in comparison with its main European rivals.

Writing on the religious culture of the early modern Dutch Republic, the eminent historian Johan Huizinga once observed, “The foreigner who wishes to understand our history begins with the assumption that the Republic was indisputably a Calvinist state and a Calvinist land.” To this Huizinga, a Groninger with Mennonite antecedents, wryly rejoined, “We Dutch know better.”1 Indeed, although in the popular imagination Calvinism and the Netherlands are virtually synonymous, the actual history of this relationship is, of course, far more complicated. In the Netherlandish context John Calvin, or rather the religious movement his ideas helped to inspire, had to compete with a wide variety of other equally zealous and committed groups intent on religious reform. Although Calvinism would “win” the Reformation in the Netherlands by becoming the only publicly sanctioned religion of the independent Dutch state, it would also have to coexist with a wide variety of religious movements and sects throughout its history. The Dutch Republic was not Calvinist, but Calvinist and pluralist.