Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Sundberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
Scale Of Response ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Dutch Experience

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.

Contraction

2018 ◽  
pp. 224-249
Author(s):  
Wim Klooster ◽  
Gert Oostindie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
The Republic ◽  
At Home

In the decades on either side of 1800, the geopolitical weakness of the Dutch Republic was exposed, resulting in its collapse at home and significant contraction of its empire. This long and at times revolutionary intermezzo led to the dissolution of the WIC the loss of the Dutch broker function, and – imposed by Britain – the abolition of the slave trade. Antislavery thought had been conspicuously weak in the Republic since the early days of colonization, and virtually absent in its colonies, and publications on the Dutch colonies served to initiate its European readership in the ways money could be and was being made there. At the end of the Napoleonic period, Britain did not return the Guiana colonies it had occupied (Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo), completing a de facto takeover that had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century by British planters and merchants.

Godliness in a Golden Age: The Church and Wealth in Eighteenth-century Geneva

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 333-346
Author(s):  
Linda Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Church

In the eighteenth century two things about Geneva were clear to all observers: the city’s astonishing prosperity, and its Calvinism. It is not necessary to suppose that the second caused the first (although many contemporaries thought it did) to read in the republic and such conspicuous expatriates as Necker clear evidence that God rewarded hard work and virtuous living. All Europe knew of the scale and importance of the international Protestant banking connection to which Genevans contributed so much.

scholarly journals THE REPUBLIC OF THE REFUGEES: EARLY MODERN MIGRATIONS AND THE DUTCH EXPERIENCE

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEERT H. JANSSEN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Literature ◽  
Dutch Experience

ABSTRACTThis essay surveys the wave of new literature on early modern migration and assesses its impact on the Dutch golden age. From the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands developed into an international hub of religious refugees, displaced minorities, and labour migrants. While migration to the Dutch Republic has often been studied in socio-economic terms, recent historiography has turned the focus of attention to its many cultural resonances. More specifically, it has been noted that the arrival of thousands of newcomers generated the construction of new patriotic narratives and cultural codes in Dutch society. The experience of civil war and forced migration during the Dutch revolt had already fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it shaped and justified Dutch interventions abroad.

Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic

2018 ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Frederick Naerebout
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Contemporary Poetics

This chapter deals with the writing, publishing, and staging of epic drama in the Dutch Republic. In the flourishing cultural climate of the Republic epic poetry was much loved, but ‘epic drama’, as such, is not a category recognized in either modern or contemporary poetics, and thus it is necessary to establish what would have counted as ‘epic’ at this time. The subset constructed here consists of drama based on what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources consider epic poetry, classical and newly composed, but also drama that takes other subject matter (biblical or historical) and dramatizes this in an ‘epic’ manner. This is illustrated by an analysis of the play Gysbreght van Aemstel (1638) by Joost van den Vondel, which treats subject matter taken from Amsterdam’s medieval history in a Virgilian manner: a new epic drama befitting the Dutch Republic’s new Rome.

scholarly journals Marxism and the ‘Dutch Miracle’: The Dutch Republic and the Transition-Debate

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pepijn Brandon
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Capitalist Country ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Current State ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

AbstractThe Dutch Republic holds a marginal position in the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, despite its significance in the early stage of the development of global capitalism. While the positions of those Marxists who did consider the Dutch case range from seeing it as the first capitalist country to rejecting it as an essentially non-capitalist commercial society, all involved basically accept an image of Dutch development as being driven by commerce rather than real advances in the sphere of production. Their shared interpretation of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, however, rests on an interpretation of Dutch economic history that does not match the current state of historical knowledge. Rereading the debate on the Dutch trajectory towards capitalism in the light of recent economic historiography seriously challenges established views, and questions both major strands in the transition-debate.

When Mother Earth Rises Up

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 271-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sacchi ◽  
Paolo Riva ◽  
Marco Brambilla
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Disaster Victims ◽  
Willingness To Help ◽  
Mother Earth

Anthropomorphization is the tendency to ascribe humanlike features and mental states, such as free will and consciousness, to nonhuman beings or inanimate agents. Two studies investigated the consequences of the anthropomorphization of nature on people’s willingness to help victims of natural disasters. Study 1 (N = 96) showed that the humanization of nature correlated negatively with willingness to help natural disaster victims. Study 2 (N = 52) tested for causality, showing that the anthropomorphization of nature reduced participants’ intentions to help the victims. Overall, our findings suggest that humanizing nature undermines the tendency to support victims of natural disasters.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

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