Papers presented by Anna-Luna Post since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Public Interest and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drainage Projects"

Abstract:

The history of Dutch drainage, which experienced a significant surge in the first half of the seventeenth century, is often portrayed as a straightforward success story of premodern human intervention in nature. Historians focusing on drainage emphasize the relative absence of conflict in Dutch drainage and argue that the willingness of investors to take financial and technological risks benefited the public interest by rendering the Dutch economy and its landscape more sustainable. These analyses closely echo the rhetoric of wealthy, aspiring investors, who, in their patent requests, claimed to combine the pursuits of private and public interests. This paper examines, firstly, the investors’ claims: what precisely constituted the public interest to them, and how did they propose to serve it? I show here that investors presented undrained Dutch lakes as untapped resource landscapes that, once reclaimed, would bring economic prosperity and social stability to the Republic as a whole. Proponents of drainage further argued that both the desire for profit and the desire to impose order on ‘boisterous’ nature were virtuous and typical characteristics of the Dutch. In doing so they laid the groundwork for a way of viewing the natural world that strongly influenced later capitalist modes of thinking, and fostered a positive self-image that both elevated the Dutch above other people and legitimized their extensive interventions in the landscape, at home and abroad. Secondly, the paper argues that by highlighting the benefits of drainage and adopting the investors’ viewpoint, historians have downplayed contemporary resistance to landscape intervention. This resistance centered on concerns about the consequences of such interventions, economic and political apprehensions, and recent experiences with investors’ faling to deliveron their promises of benefits for all. Ignoring these frustrations largely preserves the image of the Dutch as uniquely capable of undertaking large-scale projects without provoking significant conflicts. This paper seeks to reconsider these claims by taking the responses from opponents of drainage into account.