ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Witnessing with water: Water knowledge from Amsterdam notarial depositions in the long eighteenth century

• In Event: Water Knowledge and Water Experts I

English Abstract

Early modern Amsterdam was a brackish city, a complex techno-natural assemblage of flows of water, infrastructures, knowledge practices and power relations around water. Urban inhabitants needed to wield a certain everyday hydrological knowledge to assess the quality of the water they were drinking, used for cooking, cleaning or other (household) use. Thirsty industries needed to set up infrastructures to be provided with freshwater. The complex flows of salt, brackish and fresh water met and mixed in the urban environment in their different forms as seawater, river water, rainwater and ground water. They were captured, drawn, stored, pumped, poured, let in, drained and occasionally, thrown on a sleeping employee.
Waters’ everyday production was the results of a diverse coalition of water experts ranging from engineers, mud dredgers, laundresses, burgomasters, maids, plumbers, and sluice guards to fishermen, cesspit-diggers and cistern-cleaners. The list is not comprehensive and not in any particular order, but it suffices to say that many different people of different social standings, access to learned knowledge and gender had influence and interests in the Amsterdam waterscape. This paper turns to depositions on everyday conflicts in which water had a role to investigate and untangle the complex layers of this assemblage. It asks, broadly and experimentally: How can we use witness depositions to access diverse water knowledges, and how can these sources be used to broaden the agency of who was or was not a water expert? Starting with the disgruntled employee who just had a watery wake-up call and working our way through cesspit diggers, water sellers and buyers, an everyday life experience of water knowledge is hopefully reconstructed.

Author

• Bob Pierik, Vrije Universiteit Brussel