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.

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 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.