ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Peat Cutting in the Diluvial Landscape of the Dutch Republic

• In Event: Minescapes 3: Religion as Knowledge Matrix between Earth Science and Resource Management

English Abstract

This paper examines the religious tropes in seventeenth-century Dutch accounts of peat, peat extraction, and the origins of boggy landscapes. Dutch peatlands were a source of fossil fuels, speculative assets for early capitalism, sites of far-reaching environmental transformation, and natural archives of a deep past. It is well-established that peatlands were central to the environment and economy of the Dutch provinces from the medieval period onward. Much less is known about the significance of peatlands for what one historian called the “Christianized diluvian culture” of the Republic. How did peat extraction affect knowledge production, ideas about environmental change, and the religious meaning of the Dutch landscape?
Using little-known learned works, archives, and material sources, this paper sets out to situate the resource history of peat within the deeply Protestant culture of the Dutch Republic. It draws on a variety of perspectives, including those of philosophers, projectors, antiquaries and peat cutters. In their view, peat held a central place in the history, present, and future of the land. They wrote about the origins of peat in great deluges of the deep past, proposing that it signaled both divine punishment and providential foresight. They debated whether peat was a renewable resource or not, and when it would run out. They also worried incessantly about the environmental repercussions of peat cutting. Conceived by contemporaries as a resource poised between the mineral and the organic, peat offers an unexpected perspective on the history of minescapes.

Author

• Mathijs Boom, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam