This chapter steps back to examine the changing perception of Dutch decline across the first half of the eighteenth century. Anxieties about Dutch decline did not emerge fully formed in 1672, nor any other date; rather, they developed over time. This chapter argues that natural disasters reveal the expanding influence of proto-national decline narratives, highlight the increasing influence of economic perspectives on decline, and uncover a distinctive rural decline paradigm. The chapter also considers what this era of decline can teach us about disasters more broadly. Disasters were events and processes that manifested at the intersection of natural and cultural change. They produced differential consequences for Dutch society across scale, just as they do today. These conditions influenced Dutch perception of disaster and affected their response. The Golden Age past was key to learning from these disasters – whether as a model to emulate or a baseline to measure progress. Dutch “decline” and the natural disasters that punctuated it served as social and cultural tools that resolved in the long term. Eighteenth-century environmental histories of disaster offer insights about the role of culture and perception, progress, and agency in an era of increasing risk.

During the ‘Disaster Year’ (Rampjaar) of 1672, the French, the English, and their allies attacked and nearly toppled the Dutch Republic. To many observers and later historians, the Rampjaar signaled the end of the Golden Age. This chapter introduces the Dutch Republic and proposes several ways that an environmental history of disasters enriches our understanding of the development and meaning of decline. It explores these interventions through a deep reading of the print ‘Miserable Cries of the Sorrowful Netherlands’ (Ellenden Klacht Van het Bedroefde Nederlandt). This image visually merges the political and military disasters of 1672 with the floods and windstorms that followed. It condenses time, works across scale, and frames the collective environmental, cultural, social, and economic consequences of the Rampjaar as a breach with the past. Ellenden Klacht reads like a founding document of the Dutch decline narrative, but it also contains visual clues that point to alternative interpretations. It argues that disasters, especially natural disasters, were traumatic and they challenged the moral, economic, and political standing of the Dutch Republic. At the same time, disasters could yield opportunities for adaptation, recovery, and growth.

In late fall 1730, a coastal flood hit the Dutch island Walcheren. Inside the broken wooden revetments strewn across its beaches, dike authorities noticed peculiar, tiny holes. These holes contained shipworms (Teredo navalis), a marine mollusk that bored into the wooden infrastructure that protected coastal dikes. This discovery prompted the most significant redevelopment and rebuilding of coastal flood defenses in the early-modern period. This chapter investigates the origins, interpretation, and response to the ‘shipworm epidemic’ of the 1730s. It argues that the perception of shipworm novelty influenced this dramatic change. In contrast to epizootics or coastal floods, the cultural memory of disaster presented no ready solutions for shipworms. Shipworms’ perceived novelty catalyzed new natural historical investigations of the species as well as innovative new dike designs. Shipworms also produced new connections to decline. Pietist ministers and enlightened spectatorial journalists united in their condemnation of the moral decay of the Dutch Republic by linking shipworms to an ongoing wave of sodomy trials. The biological novelty of the shipworms translated to an unprecedented period of persecution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, river flooding seemed to be increasingly numerous and severe. To later observers, the 1740–41 river floods, which affected numerous parts of the Rhine–Meuse River System, were an important inflection point. This chapter evaluates the origins, interpretations, and consequences of the 1740–41 river floods. Victims interpreted these floods in the context of recent years of dearth and disaster. The historically bitter winter of 1739–40 had catalyzed a disaster cascade in the hardest-hit areas of the riverlands that amplified the impacts of inundation and expanded its consequences. At the same time, Dutch surveyors and hydraulic engineers, ministers, and state authorities promoted a discourse of increasing moral and geographic risk of inundation. In contrast to the Christmas Flood, where technocrats grounded dike innovations in the cultural memory of prior inundations, river floods forced observers to consider problematic futures. Surveyors and cartographers mapped flood risk in the Dutch riverlands and warned of potential consequences should the state ignore their new river management strategies. The floods of 1740–41 and narratives of increasing risk added to distress and anxiety about decline, but they also prompted the first proto-national flood relief efforts and increased emphasis on the systemic, interprovincial nature of Dutch river challenges.

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.

The return of rinderpest to the Netherlands in 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth-century era of disaster. Hardly a generation removed from the first outbreak, cattle plague returned to the Republic with far greater intensity. It lasted over twice as long and resulted in over a million cattle deaths. Chapter 6 compares the second outbreak of cattle plague to the first, assessing changing response. Like the first outbreak, cattle plague emerged in the context of conflict and extreme weather. Unlike the previous episode, it interacted with an ongoing disaster cascade that amplified and prolonged its consequences. Popular and state response showed remarkable continuity. Rinderpest was not novel, and prior experience proved beneficial as provinces tapped the cultural memory of the previous outbreak. Provincial decrees quickly reinstituted bans on cattle importation, enacted quarantines, and issued certificates of health. Pamphlet literature again highlighted the human tragedy of the animal disease and bemoaned its moral implications. The extensive scope and duration of this outbreak attracted new attention from an international network of medical practitioners. Its increased severity prompted novel medical responses, including the first inoculation trials. These trials reveal the diffusion of declensionist fears into the economic and social program of the Dutch Enlightenment.

The Christmas Flood of 1717 was likely the deadliest coastal flood in North Sea history. The storm impacted the entire southern coast of the North Sea basin, but the majority of its more than 13,000 victims lived in marginalized communities in the northern Netherlands and coastal Germany. This chapter investigates the origins, impact, and response to the Christmas Flood on the province of Groningen. The Netherlands had a long history of coping with coastal flooding, and moralists, state officials, and dike authorities exploited the cultural memory of previous floods to advocate solutions. The city of Groningen and its rural hinterlands wielded the past to divergent ends in their efforts to reframe financial responsibility for reconstruction. Provincial technocrats balanced tradition with the rhetoric of improvement to build support for new and improved seawalls. Moralists emphasized the unprecedented severity of the flood to scale up its significance and embed it in broader decline narratives. It argues that the Christmas Flood revealed the diverse ways that the past could be wielded to promote and resist change following natural disasters.