Book contents
- Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
- Studies in Environment and History
- Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Rampjaar Reconsidered
- 2 “Disasters in the Year of Peace”
- 3 “The Fattened Land Turned to Salted Ground”
- 4 A Plague from the Sea
- 5 “Increasingly Numerous and Higher Floods”
- 6 “From a Love of Humanity and Comfort for the Fatherland”
- 7 The Twin Faces of Calamity
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - “Disasters in the Year of Peace”
The First Cattle Plague, 1713–1720
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2022
- Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
- Studies in Environment and History
- Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Rampjaar Reconsidered
- 2 “Disasters in the Year of Peace”
- 3 “The Fattened Land Turned to Salted Ground”
- 4 A Plague from the Sea
- 5 “Increasingly Numerous and Higher Floods”
- 6 “From a Love of Humanity and Comfort for the Fatherland”
- 7 The Twin Faces of Calamity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age , pp. 51 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022