Abstract

"'Dutchification', Co-creation, and England's Intoxicant Economy, c. 1550–1750"

Phil Withington, University of Sheffield (p.withington@sheffield.ac.uk)

The 200 years after 1550 saw the emergence of an English intoxicant economy, whereby comestibles with psychoactive and potentially addictive qualities were commercialized and commodified to an unprecedented degree. Foreign crops and products like hops and hopped beer became indigenized by English farmers and brewers; restricted or luxurious commodities like distilled spirits, sugar and cocoa became popularly available; the domestic and colonial production of crops like barley, malt, and tobacco became big business; and Asian exotica like opium, coffee, and tea became dietary staples. While these developments occurred across much of Europe, the specific economies of different provinces, countries, and trans-national regions were crucial in dictating the pace and form they took; likewise, the way Europeans extended globally – through privateering, colonialism, plantation, and commerce – to procure or produce goods and develop new markets.

This paper argues that an important factor in the English experience of what has been styled a ‘psychoactive revolution’ was a peculiarly intense, mutable, and often conflictual relationship with the Dutch. This relationship has attracted important studies over the last few decades, Charles Wilson arguing the English served a kind of economic ‘apprenticeship’ to their Low Country neighbours during the long seventeenth century and David Ormrod suggesting that England’s first commercial empire was the inadvertent progeny of Dutch economic hegemony across the North and Baltic Sea region. Building on these insights, this paper contends that in important respects England’s intoxicant economy was the product of ‘Dutchification’, whereby Dutch mariners, merchants, farmers, manufacturers, and engineers had a catalytic impact on how the English made and trafficked intoxicants. In so doing, it also suggests that the Anglo-Dutch relationship is a nice example of ‘co-creation’ not simply as the interaction of different parties engaged in an economic enterprise, but as a recursive and formative historical process.