The cases of the Maria Theresa and the America were designed, by Hardwicke, Holderness, and Newcastle, to instil confidence in the Dutch government that the Court of Prize Appeal would safeguard the Dutch neutral rights that had been agreed throughout the first part of the war. They were also designed to instil confidence in British privateers and naval captains and ensure that French colonial trade carried in neutral ships could still largely be stopped and condemned as legal prize. This chapter focuses on the two appellate cases and the legal arguments presented. These are then tied to the legal and strategic maritime thinking of Lord Hardwicke and his creation of the Rule of the War of 1756. This rule became the bedrock for how Britain would understand and negotiate neutral rights over the course of the next major European maritime wars. The basic premise of the rule was that trade that was prohibited to a neutral during times of peace would be considered by the British prize court system to be prohibited in times of war. The chapter, through an analysis of Dutch cases in the Court of Prize Appeal, examines how and why Hardwicke developed this rule.

The Conclusion delves into the strategic and legal legacies of the Seven Years’ War. It ties the Seven Years’ War and the unresolved tensions around maritime neutrality to the outbreak of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Spanish hostilities during the American War of Independence. It does so by examining the peace treaty of 1763 wherein no new significant arrangements were made about neutral rights between the Spanish and the British. The argument is made that the ambiguity of existing treaties left both governments room to continue negotiations whilst the Rule of the War of 1756 would provide an understanding of how British prize courts would treat neutral ships in future conflicts. The chapter examines the legacy of the Court of Prize Appeal and the thinking behind the rule. It discusses how the court and the rule were used in subsequent conflicts through the Napoleonic Wars and the role that individual judges took in making the rule a critical or underplayed element of British maritime strategic thinking. The rule loomed large in British maritime law for many wars after Hardwicke created it and it is, perhaps, one of the best illustrations of the link between law, sea power, and strategic thinking.

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

This chapter lays out the monetary, financial, and political environment in Amsterdam in the mid-eighteenth century — the high tide of the Bank. The main types of monetary assets within Amsterdam are described, along with the channels by which one monetary asset could be exchanged for another. This chapter also discusses major players in the Amsterdam money markets and their connections to the Bank. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Bank’s relationship to the City of Amsterdam and fiscal aspects of this relationship.

To what extent did the Patriot Revolt of the 1780s and the Batavian Revolution of the 1790s break with the old regime? Recent decades have seen a wide range of responses to this question. This chapter aims to offer a synthesis that takes in multiple perspectives. It considers revolutionary ideas, the contentious repertoire of the Dutch Revolution, and the question which institutions, places, and people were affected by the revolution. I conclude that the revolution had a deep and lasting impact on the political life of Catholics, Jews, Brabanders, and rural dwellers, among other groups, because they were accepted, for the first time since Dutch independence, as full citizens. The higher degree of political participation and the introduction of public access to government entirely changed the dynamics of citizen-ruler interactions. New political practices were not there to stay, but their memory could not be banned from people’s minds. There were also many inhabitants of the Netherlands who largely remained outside the political domain. This could be because they were actively excluded, as was the case for Orangists, women, and those living in the colonies, but it could also be the result of a self-imposed stance of non-involvement.

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are often viewed as the “age of absolutism,” but customary privileges, legal variations, and the enormous expenses of nearly constant warfare imposed limits on absolute monarchs. Wars included regional wars, civil wars, dynastic wars, revolts, and Europe-wide conflicts, all fought with larger and more deadly standing armies and navies. Warfare shaped the internal political history of each state, which followed somewhat distinct patterns but also exhibited certain common themes: an expansion of centralized authority; the continued development of government bureaucracy; and the pursuit of territorial power and colonial wealth. France, Spain, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburgs, Brandenburg–Prussia, Sweden, Poland, and Russia all saw struggles between the nobles and the ruler, and warfare with one another. In the British Isles, disputes led to civil war and a temporary overthrow of the monarchy, while the Dutch Republic became amazingly prosperous through trade and toleration. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, rulers in many of these states, who saw themselves as “enlightened,” began programs of reforms designed to enhance their own power and military might, but also to improve the lives of their subjects.

This chapter examines the wars that broke out in the Netherlands, at least partly because of reformation, during the final third of the sixteenth century. Militant Reformed Protestantism established itself in the Low Countries, especially in the western provinces, by the early 1560s. In 1566, the “wonderyear,” political and religious protest erupted into the open, as nobles protested Habsburg religious policy and Reformed militants sacked churches in an iconoclastic fury. This in turn caused Philip II to install a military regime, led by the Duke of Alba, in order to suppress rebellion and heresy. In 1572 the rebels won territory in the north, and by 1580 gained control of the northwestern half of the region, where Reformed militants instituted a revolutionary reformation to root out Catholicism. Sectarianism in turn caused a breakdown of the rebel alliance, and by the mid-1580s the Habsburg had successfully retaken most of Flanders and Brabant. By 1590 a military stalemate had bifurcated the Netherlands, with the rebels in control of the seven northern provinces and the Habsburgs in control of the ten southern provinces. Each region would follow its own religious trajectory.

This chapter examines the most important religious consequence of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the splitting of the Low Countries into two confessional states: the Catholic Southern Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic. In the Southern Netherlands Catholic reformation would pick up speed, as church, state and laity worked together to re-catholicize the region and marginalize its small Protestant minority. This would prove in the long term to be a successful effort, and the Southern Netherlands became a bulwark of Baroque Catholicism. The Dutch Republic would be an officially Protestant state with one public church, the Dutch Reformed, but its population was multiconfessional. A regime of toleration was put in place that managed both the privileged church and the private confessions. Thus the legacy of reformation continued in both states, but under very different guises.

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.

There has been much speculation about how much Grotius knew about Asian law and maritime trading customs, and at what stage in his early career he familiarized himself with them. This chapter divides Grotius’ early career (before 1618) into four stages, each corresponding to a phase in his intellectual growth on the subject of Asia at large. First, defending the Santa Catarina incident which saw him drafting De Jure Praedae (and with it implicitly Mare Liberum) before 1606/7; second, defending the VOC’s interests in the lead up to the Treaty of Antwerp and the Twelve Years Truce 1606/7-1609; third, acting as the intermediary for VOC admiral Cornelis Matelieff (Cornelis Corneliszoon Matelieff) 1608-1612/3, and participation in the Anglo-Dutch fisheries and colonies conferences of 1613 (London) and 1615 (The Hague). It is argued that in his various capacities in government and as advisor to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Grotius broadened his knowledge about Asia in different ways, and through his services to the state and company helped lay the intellectual and foundations for what has been sometimes dubbed the First Dutch Empire (c.1605-1795).

This chapter tracks Grotius’ career as an official serving the province of Holland and the city of Rotterdam up to his arrest in the late summer of 1618. After an introduction on his work as a lawyer in The Hague, his service as advocate-fiscal (public prosecutor) of the Court of Holland (1607-1613) and as pensionary of Rotterdam (1613-1618) is described against the background of the emerging religious conflicts within the Dutch Republic. A special section is devoted to Grotius’ diplomatic activities, especially his membership of a Dutch mission to London in the spring of 1613, where he tried to win king James’ support for the ecclesiastical politics of the States of Holland.