Adam Sundberg’s book Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age is well-timed: as the author points out, in an era of climate change and increasing environmental problems, studying earlier environmental disasters may help us better understand the predicaments we currently find ourselves in. The book is based on the author’s dissertation (2015), but includes two new chapters: a valuable addition as it broadens the scope of the analysis to disaster types not included in the dissertation. The text follows a chronological order, with each chapter discussing a consecutive disastrous episode. The first of these is the ‘disaster year’ 1672 and its aftermath, to which one of the two new chapters is devoted. This is followed by chapters on the first cattle plague (1713-1720), the Christmas flood in Groningen of 1717, the shipworm infestation of the years 1730-1735, extensive river flooding in 1740-1741 (also a new chapter), and the second cattle plague epidemic that spanned the years 1744-1764.

In more than one way, Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age offers a welcome contrast to Dagomar Degroot’s The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge 2018), which discusses the impact of the Little Ice Age on Dutch economic ascendancy in the Golden Age. Sundberg focuses on the eighteenth instead of the seventeenth century, on decline instead of growth, and on rural society and the agricultural economy rather than on the urban-based commercial and industrial sectors. Also, while Degroot emphasizes climate change as a causal agent, Sundberg foregrounds the complex interaction between human society and nature. He explains how floods, worms and cattle plague were not simply the result of ecological changes but also of long-standing characteristics of Dutch economy and society and the man-made transformations of the landscape that had accompanied it. Cattle plague, for instance, could spread rapidly because of the highly commercialized forms of cattle holding that had developed since the late Middle Ages: large herds and a busy cattle trade increased susceptibility. Yet the novelty of Sundberg’s contribution lies elsewhere: the book focuses on the perception of these disasters by contemporaries, who increasingly interpreted them as signs of decline, and shows how this interpretation in turn shaped their response to adversity. Cattle plague again provides an example. The fact that the disease affected such a powerful symbol of Dutch identity – cattle – exacerbated fear that earlier prosperity, prestige and virtue were waning and it was exactly this fear that lent urgency to the search for a solution.

The chapters on the eighteenth-century disasters are all thorough, detailed and highly readable studies, based on a wide range of primary sources, almost all of them qualitative in nature. Sundberg employs pamphlets, treatises, sermons, diaries, expert reports, chronicles and visual material such as maps and drawings to make his point. A general reflection on the representativity of these sources and a justification of their selection is unfortunately missing, but the author certainly contextualizes his sources skillfully and weaves them into a coherent narrative. Chapter 1, on the disaster year 1672, is perhaps less convincing than the other chapters. Its empirical foundation is rather narrow as it is largely based on the analysis of a single (although admittedly informative) primary source: the Ellenden klacht, an etching visualizing the nation’s misery and despair ensuing from war and floods. The discussion of the consequences of this event, however, does serve a useful function in the book. Large-scale and long-lasting damage not only eroded the financial resources of the rural population and thus increased its vulnerability to later shocks, but it also set in motion anxieties about decline that in the eighteenth century would develop into the dominant narrative.

Despite these anxieties, Sundberg concludes, societal response to the disasters of the eighteenth century was more dynamic and innovative than previously assumed. Here he establishes an interesting relation with Dutch Enlightenment, pointing to the increasing influence of medical science and especially engineering. The solution to the shipworm epidemic that posed a real threat to the wooden poles supporting sea dikes was ultimately found in a complete reconstruction of the coastline, replacing wooden poles by stone slopes, made possible by a close cooperation between authorities and experts. One wonders if the author does not overemphasize the ability of Dutch society to refashion itself in response to necessity. The reaction to river floods and cattle plague, after all, was far less effective and attempts to upscale disaster management from the local and provincial to the national level proved largely unsuccessful.

On one issue the book leaves its readers, or at least this reader, in some confusion, and it is a central issue: the relation of the disasters under discussion to the assumption of eighteenth-century decline that has long dominated Dutch historiography. In the introduction Sundberg refers to research by social and economic historians, and more recently also by cultural historians, that nuance the decline thesis. In fact, his conclusions about the richness and vitality of disaster response confirm and reinforce these revisionist interpretations. Yet at the same time decline is continuously at the heart of the argument, not just as a discourse of decay that gains currency over time but also as a description of actual developments marked by reduced international status, dwindling urban industries, a prolonged agricultural depression and hardship for the rural population. Sundberg does not explicitly discuss how these two apparently contradictory views are to be reconciled and that is pity, but it should be emphasized that this in no way detracts from the value of his study.