Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age

An environmental history of natural disasters during the eighteenth-century decline of the Dutch Republic.

Adam Sundberg (Author)

9781108831246, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 January 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.69 kg

'Adam Sundberg demonstrates the enormous potential of historical disaster studies by using disasters as a lens to explore broader social, cultural, and environmental changes at the end of the Dutch Golden Age. Compellingly argued and vividly written, the book demonstrates that disasters were formative to Dutch identities.' Lotte Jensen, Radboud University Nijmegen

By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg demonstrates that these disasters emerged out of longstanding changes in environment and society. They were also fundamental to the Dutch experience and understanding of eighteenth-century decline. Disasters provoked widespread suffering, but they also opened opportunities to retool management strategies, expand the scale of response, and to reconsider the ultimate meaning of catastrophe. This book reveals a dynamic and often resilient picture of a society coping with calamity at odds with historical assessments of eighteenth-century stagnation.

Introduction
1. Rampjaar reconsidered
2. 'Disasters in the year of peace': The first cattle plague, 1713–1720
3. 'The fattened land turned to salted ground': The Christmas flood of 1717 in Groningen
4. A plague from the sea: The shipworm epidemic, 1730-1735
5.'Increasingly numerous and higher floods': The river floods of 1740–41
6. 'From a love of humanity and comfort for the fatherland': The second cattle plague, 1744–1764
7. The twin faces of calamity: Lessons of decline and disaster.

Subject Areas: Social impact of environmental issues [RNT], Natural disasters [RNR], European history [HBJD]