Failure to Drain: Expert Resistance and Environmental Thought in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Abstract

Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.