Nature's Evil

Holland remained a peat-dependent country for a very long period. The Dutch imported some English coal, but only blacksmiths needed it. Dry peat can spontaneously ignite, and such fires are very difficult to extinguish. In order to store peat, elaborate safety rules, which amounted to a ritual, had to be observed. Dutch cleanliness and punctuality, which amazed foreign travellers, were part of this routine. Ubiquitous and unremarked, the peat industry hardly produced any taxes; in fact, peat extraction was destroying the arable fields that did produce taxation, and the state was alarmed. But grain for the towns was imported on a large scale, and the Dutch state shifted to the revenue from long-distance trade with its colonies and the Baltic lands. This brought about those peaceful, productive relations between the state and society that historians still find impressive today. A diffused, labour-intensive resource that needed no capital investment, peat shaped many features of Dutch culture and politics.

In spring and early summer, for roughly three months of the year, peasants and fishermen cut peat, while the rest of the year they worked at other trades. Cheap fuel enabled the growth of industry, which was based almost entirely on the heat processing of local and imported raw materials. Breweries, factories producing salt, soap and bricks, workshops for pottery, porcelain and glass, bakeries, smokeries and other enterprises were all fuelled by peat. Using the cheap energy of peat, Amsterdam became a centre for refining English sugar. Linen from all over Germany was bleached in Harlem. Dutch peat did not produce a sufficient temperature to replace charcoal in the foundries, but the charcoal was produced using peat. However, peat was not suitable as a fuel for steam engines – or if there had been peat-fuelled versions they would have been very unwieldy.

Regardless of wars and floods, the price of Dutch land rose, and this inspired investors. In the middle of the seventeenth century they financed the draining of several lakes in the north of Holland; the area of arable land in these provinces increased by a quarter. The money investors put into this project exceeded the total capitalisation of the Dutch East India and the Dutch West India companies combined. Internal colonisation required more investment than external – and in this case brought a large return. 3 England and Holland competed for power over the North Sea and the world’s oceans. Despite her huge reserves of coal, England lagged behind for a long time: peat provided the Dutch economy with twice as many kilojoules per head of population as coal provided in England. Preoccupied with self-sufficiency in food supplies, British rulers prevented the export of grain and limited its consumption. The Netherlands, in contrast, bought large consignments of Baltic grain, paying for them with exports which included goods such as pottery, glass and alcohol, all of which needed energy for their production. Combining cheap energy with expensive labour and free trade was the Dutch road to modernity.

Under the Dutch influence, dykes, canals, locks, and windmills became typical of many countries in Central and Northern Europe. Dutch experts drained bogs in Scotland and all across East Anglia. The Norfolk Broads were artificially created by the extraction of peat. The Cambridgeshire fenlands were drained by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden; then 160,000 hectares of land – a territory a little smaller than the whole of Holland – were ‘improved’. The English bogs contained less peat that the Dutch ones, but no other fuel was available for brick factories. In the seventeenth century, land reclamation specialists – mostly Dutch experts – worked all over Europe, from Italy to Muscovy. Dutch emigrants drained the bogs in Prussia, as they did around the Calvinist port of La Rochelle in France. Later, Catholics also carried out this work; money from the papacy paid for the draining of the Pontine Marshes, not far from Rome. Peat bogs extended far upstream in European rivers. Pomerania, Silesia and Courland were mostly marshland; the deltas of the Oder and the Vistula, where flourishing cities now stand, were impassable. Nearly the whole bed of the Rhine was remade to improve navigation and extract peat. The work on the Rhine was massive and transnational – it lasted two centuries and was carried out mostly by Polish workers under the direction of Dutch masters.