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land and planting groves of trees. Ponds and meandering streams had also
to be introduced; rectilinear canals, fashionable in an earlier day, would
have been out of place.
Because of the area’s low water table, maintaining a refreshing flow of
water presented a challenge. Hope responded in typically Dutch fashion
with a wind-powered pumping station. When this proved insufficient, he
commissioned the construction of a steam engine to augment his windmill.
In 1781 John Hope became the owner of the first steam engine fully de-
signed and built in the Netherlands.3
The machine quickly became a local tourist attraction, and it is acknowl-
edged in histories of Dutch steam engines.4
But it has never been examined
as more than a minor historical fact—a curiosity perhaps, but not signifi-
cant enough to influence the general line of historical analysis. This is unfor-
tunate, because while historians usually tie the early history of steam engines
to mining, manufacturing, and the growth of urban water supply systems,
known arbiter of neoclassical taste in the early nineteenth century; see David Watkin,
The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (Lon-
don, 1982), 123–26.
3. For a bilingual overview of the history of steam engines in the Netherlands, see
Kornelis van der Pols and Jan Verbruggen, Stoombemaling in Nederland/Steam Drainage
in the Netherlands, 1770–1870 (Delft, 1996).
4. I will return to the question of how it was treated in contemporary sources. For
histories of early steam engines in the Netherlands, see Adrian Huet, Stoombemaling van
polders en boezems (The Hague, 1885); F. Muller, “De eerste stoom-machines van ons
land,” De Ingenieur 41 (1937): 11–22; Pols and Verbruggen.
FIG. 1 Map of the Netherlands, showing the location of Groenendaal.
3. ROBERTSK|KAn Arcadian Apparatus
253
they actually owed much of their development to the gardening interests of
inventors and their patrons.5
Further, Dutch interest in steam during the
eighteenth century was most intimately connected to the country’s preoccu-
pation with land reclamation and water management.
Discussions of eighteenth-century Dutch involvement with steam that
go beyond technical description tend to equate interest in steam with an
“industrial vision” tied to political affiliation.6
According to this view,
Dutch advocates of steam in the late eighteenth century were motivated by
a desire to reconstruct the Netherlands’ economy along industrial lines and
its politics along democratic lines. Opponents of the House of Orange—
known as Patriots—are thus painted as doubly progressive, seeking to
modernize the Netherlands by harnessing the power of steam and of the
people. But John Hope was no Patriot; he and his family supported the
House of Orange, and a number of them emigrated during revolutionary
times. Nor did Hope possess an “industrial vision.” Indeed, if we link this
phrase to the socioeconomic transformations that characterized the Indus-
trial Revolution, we cannot say that even Patriots were motivated by an
industrializing urge. They did want to reinvigorate the Dutch economy, but
in the Enlightenment context of working toward a broader revival of Dutch
culture based on moral principles.7
If the steam engine symbolized any-
thing to those who championed its introduction to the Netherlands it was
the promise not of industrialization but of national regeneration, which
they represented by images of an Arcadian reunion with nature.
Dutch identity, like the country’s physical existence, is historically en-
tangled with the landscape in a way that is true of few other nations. From
early on, the Netherlands and its culture have been shaped by human inter-
actions with the lowland environment, an environment both threatening
and promising. Finding the right balance between exploitation and conser-
vation, between profit and security, has been an ongoing Dutch experi-
5. Lissa Roberts, “Water, Steam and Change: The Roles of Land Drainage, Water
Supplies and Garden Fountains in the Early Development of the Steam Engine,” En-
deavour 24 (2000): 55–58. For a nineteenth-century case, see M. Norton Wise, “Archi-
tectures for Steam,”in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 107–40.
6. The most explicit exponent of this view is the historian Margaret Jacob, who dis-
cusses eighteenth-century Dutch science and technology in a number of publications.
See, for example,“Radicalism in the Dutch Enlightenment,” in The Dutch Republic in the
Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Margaret Jacob and
Wijnand Mijnhardt (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 237–39. Jacob’s interpretation is cited and par-
aphrased in what has become the standard history of technology in the Netherlands dur-
ing the nineteenth century; see Harry Lintsen, “Het verloren paradijs,” in Geschiedenis
van de techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving, 1800–1890, ed.
Harry Lintsen et al., vol. 6 (Zutphen, 1995), 39, 42.
7. Lissa Roberts,“The Moral Marketplace: Dutch Science, Politics and Economics in
the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The Culture of Exchange, ed. Lilianne Weisberg (Phila-
delphia, forthcoming).
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ment, implicated in the development of novel political organizations, tech-
nological innovations, and an aesthetic sensitivity to the landscape’s sym-
bolic power.8
Pictorial and literary representations of Dutch steam engines
at the time of their introduction during the politically and economically
stormy years of the late eighteenth century reveal this complicated process
in action.
This article begins by tracing the history that led to the construction of
the first fully Dutch steam engine on the country estate of an urban oli-
garch. The goal here is twofold: to highlight the role of gardens and foun-
tain design in the early development of steam engines and to emphasize
that Dutch interest in steam during the eighteenth century arose largely
from problems of drainage and water management. This concern with the
landscape—whether on a private estate or in the “national garden”—is
examined more broadly in the rest of the article, which treats the historical
significance of placing such a novel apparatus in the Dutch landscape, both
physically and symbolically. While the “machine in the garden” proved a
menacing image in other cultures, the steam engine’s first Dutch advocates
projected it as an Arcadian apparatus.9
The Machine in the Dutch Garden
Two lines of historical development led to the steam engine in John
Hope’s garden. Steam had first been harnessed in the Netherlands to oper-
ate garden fountains.10
But Hope did something new: he commissioned a
steam engine to manage the flow of water on his estate, which put his proj-
ect in the context of another important aspect of the steam engine’s early
career in the Netherlands. Beginning with Willem ’s Gravesande in the
1720s, advocates had promoted the use of steam engines to manage the
country’s overabundant water. In this regard, Groenendaal was a micro-
cosm of the Dutch national garden.11
Only through constant, engineered
vigilance, reformers argued, would the Netherlands continue to bloom.
8. See Technology and Culture 43, no. 3 (July 2002), the special issue on Dutch water
management. For portrayals of technology in the Dutch landscape, see Ann Adams,
“Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe’: Identity and Seventeenth-Cen-
tury Dutch Landscape Painting,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago,
2002), 35–76.
9. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(Oxford, 1967).
10. Roberts, “Water, Steam and Change”; G. Doorman, Octrooien voor uitvindingen
in de Nederlanden uit de 16e–18e eeuw (The Hague, 1940), 308.
11. For the image of the Netherlands as a garden, see P. J. van Winter,“De Hollandse
tuin,” Nederlandsch Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1957): 29–121.
5. ROBERTSK|KAn Arcadian Apparatus
255
FOUNTAINS
The role of garden fountains in early modern scientific and technolog-
ical development remains to be fully explored.12 Among other things, such
an exploration would illuminate the context of early steam power and the
conditions under which nature was engineered to serve human needs and
desires. During the early seventeenth century, for example, the architect
and engineer Salomon de Caus designed and built gardens for Prince
Henry at Richmond Palace in England, the Archduke Albert in Brussels,
and the Elector Palatine Frederick V at Heidelberg. These gardens pro-
claimed the position of De Caus’s patrons along with his own vision of the
divinely ordered natural and moral worlds.13 De Caus filled them with
elaborate waterworks and automata.Among his designs was a steam-driven
fountain employing a concept that dated back to Hero of Alexandria.14
A century later, Steven Switzer—kitchen gardener to the English royal
family, landscape architect, and author—became so interested in steam
power that he included one of the earliest histories of the subject in his
Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks. Like De
Caus, Switzer’s interests spanned the artifactual and the natural, the practi-
cal and the philosophical. Ultimately, he wrote, “the study of hydrostatics
does more particularly belong to a gardener, than to any other person what-
soever,” for it is the working gardener who is most drawn to analogize from
the order he creates in a garden to the order of nature.15
12. More general works on the history of waterworks are numerous. Two books that
draw explicit connections between this general history and the history of science and
technology are Erik de Jong, Kunst en Natuur en Kunst: Nederlandse tuin en landschapsar-
chitectuur, 1650–1740 (Bussum, 1993), and Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and
the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997). A recent article by Simon Werrett,“Wonders
Never Cease: Descartes’ Météores and the Rainbow Fountain,” British Journal for the His-
tory of Science 34 (2001): 129–47, gives a more specific indication of what such a history
has to tell us about the development of seventeenth-century natural philosophy.
13. Hélèn Vérin, “Salomon de Caus, un mécanicien praticien,” Revue de l’art 129
(2000): 70–76; Richard Patterson, “The ‘Hortus Palatinus’ at Heidelberg and the Refor-
mation of the World,” parts 1 and 2, Journal of Garden History 1 (1981): 67–104, 179–
202; Piet Lombaerde, “Pietro Sardi, Geworg Müller, Salomon de Caus und die Wasser-
künste des Coudenberg-Gartens in Brüssel,” Die Gartenkunst 3 (1991): 159–71. Roy
Strong describes the garden at Richmond Palace, with its fountains and automata, as the
inspiring setting for performances of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; see The Renaissance
Garden in England (London, 1979), 103.
14. Salomon de Caus, Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines, tant
utilles que plaisants (Frankfurt, 1615), 15; Marie Boas Hall, “Hero’s Pneumatica: A Study
of Its Transmission and Influence,” Isis 40 (1949): 38–48. Interestingly, Boas Hall sees
Hero as an important source not only for technological developments in Renaissance
and early modern Europe but also for investigations of Torricelli and Boyle and seven-
teenth-century corpuscularism more generally.
15. Stephen Switzer, An Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hy-
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Switzer’s history did not mention the first Dutch patent for the applied
use of steam. In 1716 the States of Holland granted Jacob van Briemen a
patent for a steam-powered fountain. The government’s report describes
him as someone long involved with the mechanical arts, a man who had
read widely to see how his predecessors had tackled the problem of raising
water and invested much time and money to realize his invention. Van
Briemen’s apparatus is only vaguely described. Compact and easily trans-
portable—it took up somewhere between four and six square feet—the
machine used a controlled fire to draw water out of reservoirs and ditches,
send it through pipes, and force it to heights as great as sixty feet.16
Intriguingly, Van Briemen’s application states that his device was simi-
lar to those found elsewhere, especially in France. Van Briemen, then, was
only one of numerous invisible mechanics in the field of steam-powered
waterworks. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, these invisible
mechanics were joined by others of greater notoriety. John Theophilus
Desaguliers, known for popularizing Newtonian natural philosophy, pro-
vided Czar Peter of Russia with a steam pump for a garden fountain in
1717. As Desaguliers explained in A Course of Experimental Philosophy, his
design for a modified Savery engine grew out of his collaboration with
Willem ’s Gravesande, who was in London as part of a Dutch diplomatic
mission in 1716.17
Willem ’s Gravesande collaborated with others as well. In 1721 he vis-
ited Hesse-Cassel and became involved in a scheme to build steam engines
for land reclamation and garden fountains. His two partners were P. J.
Roman Von Badeveld, building superintendent to the landgrave of Hesse-
Cassel, and Joseph Emmanuel Fischer Von Erlach, who inherited the posi-
draulicks, Philosophical and Practical, 2 vols. (London, 1729), introduction (“advertise-
ment”) to the second volume (unpaginated). I thank Ben Weiss of the Burndy Library at
the Dibner Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the precise citation.
16. For documents relating to Van Briemen’s patent application, Nationaal Archief,
Archive collection Staten van Holland (archive number 3515), inventaris number 1668,
September 1716. Doorman (n. 10 above), 308, mistakenly refers to Van Briemen as Van
Brienen. For the lack of detail in many Dutch patent applications, see Karel Davids,
“Patents and Patentees in the Dutch Republic between c. 1580 and 1720,” History and
Technology 16 (2000): 263–83, at 267. Van Briemen’s application used a set of qualitative
calibrations to describe the apparatus: the machine’s power to create, its portability and
economy. As the historian of patents Christine MacLeod has pointed out, this form of
description in patent applications would be replaced in the nineteenth century by stan-
dardized, quantitative measurements of power, such as horsepower. Christine MacLeod,
Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988).
17. I use the term “invisible mechanics” in partial analogy to Steven Shapin’s “invis-
ible technicians.”Steven Shapin,“The Invisible Technician,”American Scientist 77 (1989):
554–63. Mechanics such as Van Brieman are doubly invisible: not only has the record of
their individual work been lost to us, there is little recognition of the role played by gar-
den fountains generally in the history of steam technology. John Theophilus Desaguliers,
A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1733–44).
7. ROBERTSK|KAn Arcadian Apparatus
257
tion of royal architect and building inspector at the court of Vienna from
his father.18
It is unclear what became of their collaboration beyond the
construction of one Newcomen-style steam engine in Hesse-Cassel. A
number of other steam engines have been attributed to Fischer Von Erlach,
including one that operated fountains in the exotic garden his father con-
structed for Prince F. A. Von Schwarzenburg in Vienna. This impressive in-
stallation, featuring a novel boiler, sent jets of water to a height of seventy-
five feet.19
When ’s Gravesande returned to Leiden as an increasingly renowned
professor of philosophy and experimental physics, he called on his mechan-
ical expertise for both the practice-oriented courses he taught at the univer-
sity’s engineering school and more theory-oriented courses in experimental
physics.Among the demonstration devices he commissioned to illustrate his
lectures was a primitive model of a Savery steam engine. ’s Gravesande’s suc-
cessor, Petrus van Musschenbroek, had a more sophisticated replacement
built in 1730, but rather than store it in the university’s physics theater he
installed it in his garden, where it powered a fountain that spouted water to
a height of fifty feet.20
Steam-powered fountains could be found in English gardens as well.
The Duke of Chandos, better known for his scheme to supply London with
water pumped from the Thames, had one, and one wonders what role that
domestic engine played in inspiring his more ambitious conception.21
In
1769 an article appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine describing a steam pump
designed by William Blakey.22
Blakey had begun work on his modified Sa-
very engine in 1760 by constructing one in his garden, and received a patent
18. For the contract that spelled out details of this partnership and its goals, see R.
L. Brouwer, Wederlegging der aanmerkingen van den Heer P. Steenstra over de vuurma-
chines (Amsterdam, 1774), 5–9. The partnership is briefly mentioned in a number of sec-
ondary sources, the most interesting of which is Simon Schaffer, “The Show that Never
Ends: Perpetual Motion in the Early Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the History
of Science 28 (1995): 157–90.
19. The flue wrapped twice around the copper boiler, in order to make thorough use
of heat that would otherwise be lost. See J. F. Weidler, Tractatus de machinis hydraulicus
(Wittenberg, 1728). For an illustration of the garden and palace where the steam engine
was erected, see J. B. Fischer Von Erlach, Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (Vienna,
1721). For more details about J. E. Fischer von Erlach and pictures of his engines, see
L. T. C. Rolt and J. S. Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (Ashbourne, 1993),
70–76 and the appendix, which provides a list of all known Newcomen-type steam
engines built between 1710–1733.
20. Petrus van Musschenbroek, Beginselen der Natuurkunde beschreven ten dienste
der landgenooten (Leiden, 1736), 393.
21. Rolt and Allen, 29. On Chandos’s plan for London’s water supply, see Larry
Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1993).
22. The only biography of William Blakey, highly incomplete and faulty, is J. J. Boots-
gezel,“William Blakey—A Rival to Newcomen,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 16
(1935–36): 97–110.
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for his design in 1766. James Ferguson, whose patronage was responsible for
the article’s publication, also commissioned Blakey to build a steam-oper-
ated fountain for his own garden and went on to praise Blakey’s ingenuity in
his Lectures on Select Subjects.23
Blakey subsequently installed steam pumps at silk, corn, and rolling
mills, but he met with disappointment in the coalfields of Coalbrookdale,
where his engine boilers cracked and exploded. He responded by sailing for
the continent in search of further contacts and contracts. Paris proved espe-
cially inviting. There his design, modified following the coalfield setback,
won special approbation from the Académie Royale d’Architecture and the
Académie Royale des Sciences. Armed with these blessings, Blakey won
commissions for at least seven steam pumps in and around Paris, including
one for the Prince de Condé’s garden.24
In 1776 Blakey received patents for
his design in the Netherlands. Perceiving a new niche, he pitched his design
to the Dutch—not, however, as a device with which to create aesthetic
effects, but as an answer to their water management problems.
MANAGING WATER
With an entrepreneur’s instinct for adaptation, Blakey advertised his
French garden experience as good preparation for the challenges posed by
the lowland landscape. But he was not the first to propose using steam for
water management in the Netherlands. Willem ’s Gravesande, seeking
funds from Leiden University to purchase a model steam engine in 1727,
had asserted that steam engines were superior to windmills for powering
land reclamation projects, an assertion he echoed in his translation of
Desaguliers’s Course of Experimental Philosophy.25
Curiously, ’s Gravesande
did not pursue this idea when given the chance.26
The first steam-powered
23. Gentleman’s Magazine 39 (August 1769), 392; James Ferguson, Lectures on Select
Subjects, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1823), 1:312–14 (first published in 1770). See also William
Blakey, A Short Historical Account of the Invention, Theory and Practice of Fire-Machinery
(London, 1793), 5.
24. William Blakey, Observations sur les pompes à feu avec balancier (Amsterdam,
1777), 8–11. See also William Blakey to Van Liender, 27 December 1774, Rotterdam
Gemeente Archief, Archief Bataafsch Genootschap, inventaris no. 95, “Brieven betref-
fende de vuurmachine aan Huichelbos van Liender 1770–1780” (hereafter “Brieven”).
25. ’s Gravesande to university trustees, 6 February 1727, University of Leiden Uni-
versiteitsbibliotheek, Archief van curatoren van de Leidse Universiteit, vol. 1 (1574–
1815). See Peter de Clercq, “In de schaduw van ’s Gravesande: Het Leids physisch kabi-
net in de tweede helft van de 18e eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis der geneeskunde,
natuurwetenschappen, wiskunde en techniek 10 (1987): 149–73, at 163. J. T. Desaguliers,
De natuurkunde uit ondervindingen opgemaakt, trans. Willem ’s Gravesande, 2 vols.
(Amsterdam, 1736–51), 108–12.
26.“Rapport en Memorie van de Professoren ’s Gravesande en Wittichius, en van de
landmeter Cruquius wegens haare gedaane inspectie van de Rivier de Merwede van
Gorinchem af beneedewaarts, en wegens de voorgeslaage Middelen tot voorkoming van
Inundatien,” 8 July 1730, Universiteitsbibliotheek, University of Amsterdam.
9. 27. Pols and Verbruggen (n. 3 above), 30–37.
28. Compare this with the lack of support for steam-powered technology in Sweden
during the early eighteenth century. Svante Lindqvist, Technology on Trial: The Intro-
duction of Steam Power Technology into Sweden, 1715–1736 (Uppsala, 1984).
29. M. J. van Lieberg and H. A. M. Snelders, De bevordering en volmaking der proe-
fondervindelijke wijsbegeerte: De rol van het Bataafsch Genootschap te Rotterdam in de
geschiedenis van de natuurwetenschappen, geneeskunde en techniek (1769–1988) (Amster-
dam, 1989), 68.
30. Anne Radcliffe, who visited Amsterdam in 1794, described its canals as “the nui-
sances of Amsterdam. Many of them are entirely stagnant, and, though deep, are so laden
with filth, that on a hot day the seculence seems pestilential.” Anne Radcliffe, A Journey
through Holland Made in the Summer of 1794 (Leiden, 1998), 73.
ROBERTSK|KAn Arcadian Apparatus
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water management project was not undertaken in the Netherlands until
1776, when, thanks to the backing of the Bataafsch Genootschap der Proe-
fondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte te Rotterdam (Batavian Society for Experi-
mental Philosophy of Rotterdam) and financial support from its founder,
Steven Hoogendijk, a Newcomen engine was erected under the supervision
of the English engineer and inventor Jabez Carter Hornblower in an old
gunpowder magazine at Oostpoort (an industrial area on the outskirts of
Rotterdam) to help control the water level in Rotterdam’s canals.27
Inspired
by ’s Gravesande, the society hoped that the Oostpoort engine would con-
vince policy makers and fellow citizens to adopt this innovative technology
throughout the Netherlands.
Hoogendijk and his colleagues have often been depicted as heroes who
joined ideals of social and political progress with technological innovation,
but we must resist the temptation to cast their critics in a correspondingly
negative light. An inventor of some merit, Hoogendijk attempted to regulate
fluctuating water levels at Oostpoort by means of a steam engine coupled to
a complex pumping system of his own design. The system failed to work
properly, and the understandable response of the officials who observed its
unsuccessful test runs was to remain contented with the wind-driven system
already in place, whose operation, capacities, and limitations were comfort-
ingly familiar. Though it is easy to argue retrospectively that the future
belonged to steam, officials at the time could see no reason to invest limited
public resources in a poorly understood technology that had yet to prove its
worth.28
Ironically, one of the things that made the wind-powered installa-
tion so attractive was that it employed a very effective scoop-wheel design
(schepraderen) developed years before by Hoogendijk as part of his ongoing
quest to improve the efficiency of water management apparatus.29
It would
seem that Hoogendjik’s long-term ambitions were victims of his own inven-
tive abilities and that the Oostpoort officials with whom he dealt were not
opposed to the introduction of innovative technology per se.
Amsterdam faced its own water management problems. Travelers in the
Netherlands often contrasted the beauty and cleanliness of other urban
centers with the sickening odors given off by Amsterdam’s canals.30
In 1777
10. 31. Evidence that Blakey transported the parts of his Amsterdam installation to
Russia comes from a letter written by Matthew Boulton, cited in Eric Robinson, “The
Early Diffusion of Steam Power,” Journal of Economic History 34 (1974): 98 n. 33. In trav-
eling to Russia, Blakey followed a small stream of Dutch engineers—including the former
director of Amsterdam’s public works projects—who went there under contract to
Catherine the Great. See Martijn Bakker, “A la recherche des ingénieurs disparus—les
hydrauliciens Néerlandais au dix-huitième siècle, History of Technology 19 (1997): 143–58.
32. J. K. de Cock, Bijdrage tot de historische geografie van Kennemerland in de Mid-
deleeuwen op fysisch-geografische grondslag (Groningen, 1965); Jos Kluiters and Frits van
Daalen, Zuid-Kennemerland Natuurlijk: Vijfduizend jaar mens en natuur tussen duinen en
polders (Haarlem, 1988).
33. On the popular image of Zuid Kennemerland as an earthly paradise, albeit a
humanly constructed one, see Koos Levy van Halm et al., eds., De trots van Haarlem:
Promotie van een stad in kunst en historie (Haarlem, 1995). This image is beautifully cap-
tured in Jacob van Ruisdael’s painting Gezicht vanaf de duinen met Haarlem in de verte
(View from the dunes with Haarlem in the distance), 1670–75.
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the city contracted with William Blakey to build a set of steam pumps to
increase the flow of clean water through these living sewers. Blakey and his
engine thus completed a journey from aristocratic French gardens through
the Dutch rural landscape into the urban context of Amsterdam’s canals.
That migration attested to the fluidity of technological boundaries between
public and private, urban and rural, but in this case things did not end well;
Blakey had the misfortune of receiving a visit from Amsterdam’s mayor on
the very day that one of his pumps exploded, taking his Dutch career with
it. Angered by the withdrawal of municipal support, Blakey gathered up his
equipment and departed for Russia, leaving behind another reason for the
Dutch to beware of steam-powered promises.31
The next Dutch project that aimed to harness steam for water manage-
ment was spearheaded neither by a public-spirited society nor by a govern-
mental agency, but by John Hope at Groenendaal. Zuid Kennemerland,
which borders the North Sea coast south of Haarlem, consisted originally
of coastline dunes, fens, and woodlands. The region had been sparsely in-
habited by coastal hunters since 3000 B.C.E., but between the tenth and
twelfth centuries changing environmental conditions pushed the coastline
inward and built up a wall-like ridge of young dunes, changing the land’s
contours and creating possibilities for further settlement. Dikes, drainage,
and peat extraction brought about new habitation patterns behind the
beach walls, all of which conspired to change the face of “nature” in the
region.32
The introduction of bleaching fields and profit-oriented bulb cul-
tivation beginning in the mid-sixteenth century accelerated this process by
integrating market-oriented activities with the Kennemer landscape in a
way that had indelible consequences for the idyllic character it possessed in
the popular imagination.33
Even as the bulb and bleaching fields retreated in the face of economic
difficulties in the late seventeenth century, Zuid Kennemerland retained its
Arcadian image, thanks in part to the urban oligarchs who bought up land
11. 34. Eric de Jong, “Historisch landschap: Haarlem als hoofdstad van het Hollands
Arcadië,” in Levy van Halm et al., 130; F. Hopper, “The Dutch Regence Garden,” Garden
History 9 (1981): 118–36; A. G. van der Steur, Harlemia Illustrata: Haarlem en Zuid
Kennemerland in de prentkunst (Haarlem, 1993).
35. R. L. Brouwer to Van Liender, 23 February 1779, 12 March 1779, 25 April 1779,
28 April 1779, 14 May 1779, 27 May 1779, 7 August 1779, 14 September 1779, 2 Novem-
ber 1779, 15 November 1779, and 25 November 1779, “Brieven” (n. 24 above); G. J.
Borger, “Amsterdam en de afdamming van het IJ,” Ons Amsterdam 28 (1976): 226–33.
36. R. L. Brouwer,“Derde Antwoord op de Vraag: Welke is het beste middel of Werk-
tuig, het welk aan eene Stoom- of Vuur-Machine gevoegd, bekwaam is om, zonder
merkelijk te ontstellen, geduurende eenige maanden agter een te werken, en tot allerley
hoogten beneden de vijf voeten, op te brengen,eene hoeveelheid waters, welke toeneemt
naar maate de hoogte, tot welke het moet opgebragt worden, vermindert, en die overeen-
komstig is aan het bekend vermogen der Machine,” Verhandelingen van het Bataafsch
Genootschap 1 (1779): 179–210.
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in the area, built or remodeled stately homes, surrounded them with fash-
ionably landscaped grounds, reforested areas that had been cleared for pas-
tureland, and generally sought to make Zuid Kennemerland a domesticated
paradise. By the early eighteenth century a feeling for natural simplicity had
softened the region’s affection for formal gardens, and by the end of the
century it would provide fertile ground for “English” gardening.34
When John Hope purchased Groenendaal in 1767, its transformation
into a landscape park had already begun. To complete the transition, Hope
tapped the neighboring Rijnland boezem (reservoir) to supply water for
cool ponds and flowing streams on the estate grounds. Because the local
water table was relatively low, however, he commissioned the building of an
Archimedean-screw windmill to raise the incoming water. When this
proved insufficient, Hope asked the amateur engineer Rinze Lieuwe Brou-
wer to construct a steam engine, which he hoped would be more effective.
A merchant by profession, Brouwer possessed considerable talent and
industry. Judging from his correspondence with Jan Daniel Huichelbos van
Liender, director of the Bataafsch Genootschap and future agent for
Boulton and Watt in the Netherlands, Brouwer played the role of local
intelligencer—reporting on Blakey’s adventures, rumors about Matthew
Boulton’s visit to Amsterdam, and municipal projects relating to water
management, such as plans to make the IJ more navigable.35
Well-informed
and technically talented, he seems to have known most of what there was to
know about steam and its applications. No wonder, then, that in 1778 he
won a silver medal in a competition sponsored by the Bataafsch Genoot-
schap to describe how steam-powered pumps might be improved to replace
windmills for water management.36
It was with this storehouse of knowl-
edge that he came to work for John Hope.
While no documents remain to provide details of their communica-
tions, we should not be surprised that Hope knew who to contact for such
a novel project. As a member of Amsterdam’s city council, he might have
encountered Brouwer’s interest in the city’s water management problems;
12. 37. Recherches Physico-Chymiques, published 1792–94.
38. Brouwer to Van Liender, 15 November 1779 and 9 December 1779, “Brieven.”
Not only did Brouwer rely on his own engineering judgement to design the engine, he
had enough confidence in local craft skills to have all the parts locally made and assem-
bled. This counters an often-made claim that steam engines could not be and were not
constructed without English expertise in the eighteenth century; see, for example,
Robinson (n. 31 above).
39. The schedule was published, along with a technical description of the engine, so
that the public would know when to visit and see it at work. Den Hollandschen Weeklijk-
schennieuws-vertalder, no. 49 (8 December 1781), 194–95. For further description, see
Huet (n. 4 above), 33–35.
40. This Dutch attitude toward water and water management can further be under-
scored by contrasting Hope’s project with contemporary engineering schemes in France.
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he certainly would have been aware of Amsterdam’s misadventure with
Blakey. More generally, Hope’s family was known for patronizing innova-
tive scientific endeavors. They underwrote, for example, the short-lived
journal of the Gezelschap der Hollandsche Scheikundigen (Society of
Dutch Chemists), a small group of influential Dutch chemists who helped
bring the chemical revolution to the Netherlands.37
While they were hardly
part of the same socioeconomic set, then, Hope and Brouwer would have
had ample opportunity to meet.
Brouwer quickly wrote to Boulton and Watt as a first step in deciding
whether to have parts manufactured in England or do everything domesti-
cally. But while he considered manufacturing possibilities in England and
was familiar with Watt’s engine, having made copies of Watt’s sketches for
Van Liender, Brouwer did not trust Watt’s openness, nor did he think Watt’s
design appropriate for Groenendaal. He opted instead for a Newcomen-
type machine, for which he had a brass cylinder, iron piston, and wooden
pump made locally.38
Once installed, the apparatus worked most every
Monday and Tuesday in the summer months, maintaining the water level
and flow in the estate’s canals, brooks, and ponds.39
As we have already seen, by the 1780s steam-powered fountains already
had a long history, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. But John Hope was
not interested in jets of water spewing from the mouths of marble gods.
He wanted to do what the Dutch had done for centuries: domesticate the
landscape. Hope viewed the steam engine as a way of harnessing the power
of nature to tame the environment. His steam engine would do what
windmills had done for centuries, only more reliably and powerfully. But
his plan involved a complex paradox. On one hand, Hope wanted to con-
trol the landscape in order to project the appearance of undisturbed
nature. On the other, Hope adopted an urban-based approach to realize
his rural paradise. Like the steam engine installed at Oostpoort, the pur-
pose of the Groenendaal machine was to raise water levels in the summer
months and thereby shield the estate’s residents from seasonal stench and
decay.40
13. The course of the river that ran through the estate Méréville, for example, was altered for
aesthetic effect. While this was common in large landscape parks throughout Europe, at
Méréville, in a typically French touch, a mill was built on the river to enhance the rustic
aesthetic. The mill was not constructed to make anything work, only to look picturesque.
See William Howard Adams, French Gardens, 1500–1800 (New York, 1979), 131. Hope’s
steam engine, on the other hand, was admired precisely because it worked. Consider, for
example, the comment of Nina d’Aubigny, who visited Groenendaal in 1790 specifically
to see the steam engine. She described it as“a machine resembling those that conduct the
waters of the Seine throughout Paris and are operated solely by fire”; Nina d’Aubigny,
Journal du voyage d’Hollande (1790), Amsterdam Municipal Archives, entry for 21
August.
41. J. Z. Kannegieter, “Een stoomwerktuig op de buitenplaats van een Amsterdams
regent in het jaar 1781,” Amstelodamus 66 (1973): 27–29; F. Muller, “De eerste stoom-
machines van ons land,” De Ingenieur 52 (1937): 106.
42. “Gardeners . . . instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as
possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of Scissors
upon every Plant and Bush.” Joseph Addison, Spectator, 25 June 1712, 70–71, quoted in
David Watkin, The English Vision (London, 1982), 3 n. 7.
43. Chandra Mukerji argues that much of Versailles’ design took its cue from Vau-
bin’s fortifications, hence the reference here to barricades. See Mukerji (n. 12 above),
52–65.
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The Groenendaal engine was erected in 1781 and stood until 1842. The
estate remained in private hands until 1913, when the surrounding munic-
ipality purchased it for a park. As if to underscore how nature at Groenen-
daal had been engineered, the entrance to the new park was flanked by
Hope’s windmill and either the original or a copy of Brouwer’s pump.41
The
pump has since been dismantled, leaving the windmill to stand alone as
witness to a fascinating history. That history involved not only the physical
(re)construction of the Dutch landscape by an urban oligarch but also, as
we will see, a cultural (re)construction. For gardening, technology, and
Zuid Kennemerland were all caught up in the task of forging a revivified
national identity in the Netherlands during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.
Arcadian Representations and Real-Life Adaptations
The “English” or “landscape” garden style developed during the eigh-
teenth century in reaction to the geometric formalism that reigned in
places such as Versailles and Het Loo.42
In contrast to the ordered symme-
try that marked formal gardens as works of human ingenuity and power,
this new ideal hearkened back to a time before human engineering had cov-
ered the traces of Eden. In place of a barricade-like design that plainly
demarcated the garden and the world, these new parks gave no clear indi-
cation of where they began and where the countryside ended.43
Whether influenced directly by English trends or by similar develop-
ments in France and Germany, many estate owners in the Netherlands who
14. 44. Audrey Lambert, The Making of the Dutch Landscape (London, 1971).
45. The humanly constructed character of Dutch nature was noted by many in the
nineteenth century and might help to account for the lack of enthusiasm with which
Romanticism was received in the Netherlands. Consider, for example, this passage from
David Jacob van Lennep, Verhandeling over het belang van Hollands grond en oudheden
voor gevoel en verbeelding (1827):“[T]hat garden of Holland was not bestowed by nature,
but rather almost in defiance of nature, took shape through the skill and courage and
perseverance of its inhabitants. . . . But does Holland have only meadows and polders and
lakes and marshes, as the stranger, who has never seen the country, imagines? No doubt
we are richer than he, if not in awesome and terrifying sights, then certainly in attractive
rural scenes. No doubt nature is here more abundant in all that delights both heart and
feelings.” Quoted in Peter van Zonneveld, “Majestic, Wild or Charming: The Romantic
Landscape and Dutch Literature, 1750–1850,” in On Country Roads and Fields: The
Depiction of the 18th- and 19th-Century Landscape, ed. Wiepke Loos, Robert-Jan te Rijdt,
Marjan van Heteren (Amsterdam, 1997), 98. Incidentally, the Van Lennep family owned
Groenendaal between 1752 and 1767, at which time it sold the estate to John Hope.
David Jacob van Lennep spent his childhood summers at the nearby estate Huis te
Manpad.
46. Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London, 1984), 15.
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sought to construct a “natural” landscape faced a special challenge: their
estates were situated in areas only made habitable by centuries of human
intervention.44
Naturalizing the landscape in an already engineered envi-
ronment meant more than borrowing fashionable models from the neigh-
bors. The very idea of “nature” was filtered through centuries of struggle to
make the Netherlands safe and profitable, and the resulting image shied
away from the sublime. Displays of nature’s awesome power were precisely
what the ubiquitous dikes were meant to avoid. The Dutch opted instead
for an Arcadian idyll, technology peacefully integrated into a pastoral set-
ting to bolster the environment’s integrity. In literature, pictures, and gar-
den architecture, the Dutch and their technologies appeared as guardians in
their garden, keeping both unbridled nature and human rapacity at bay.45
This theme is too broad and complex to explore fully here. Instead, I
will focus on two more specific questions: How was the relationship be-
tween steam engines and nature represented in Dutch art and literature
during the second half of the long eighteenth century? And how did this
relate to the steam engine’s physical introduction to the Netherlands in the
politically charged and economically challenging context of this period?
MORALIZING NATURE, NATURALIZING MACHINES
The cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove writes that landscapes “repre-
sent a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and
their world through their imagined relationship with nature.”46
But if the
adaptation of landscape gardens to the Dutch countryside was first carried
out by an urban elite, the landscapes they commissioned were appropriated
by garden designers, artists, and writers for more popular consumption. As
15. 47. Roberts, “Moral Marketplace” (n. 7 above).
48.A good summary can be found in Wantje Fritschy and Joop Toebes, eds., Het ont-
staan van het moderne Nederland: Staats- en natievorming tussen 1780 en 1830 (Nijme-
gen, 1998), 46–51.
49. These societies included the Oeconomische Tak, whose members were popularly
referred to as “economic patriots,” and the Maatschappij ter Bervordering van de Land-
bouw. See Roberts, “Moral Marketplace.”
50. Gijsbert van Laar, Magazijn van tuin-sieraaden: Verzameling van modellen van
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the resulting representations of nature spread, landscape took on new
dimensions of meaning. Nature became a site of moral valuation, while
machines such as the steam engine became a naturalized part of their sur-
rounding environment.
Landscape gardens began appearing in the Netherlands during the
1760s and 1770s, a worrisome time for many Dutch, who perceived the
national economy slipping from the peak it had reached in the “Golden
Age.”47
While both population and manufacturing output were declining in
urban centers—the hub of Dutch economic strength in the seventeenth
century—people with sufficient capital to invest in banking, bonds, and
foreign endeavors continued to reap healthy profits. A widening gap
stretched between regents and rentiers, on one hand, and merchants and
lower classes on the other.48
Social and moral reformers voiced their discontent with this financial
and cultural gap between the elites and the general population and de-
nounced what they saw as the upper classes’ aristocratic decadence. For
them, the country’s economic problems grew out of its cultural malaise.
Economic recovery was only possible, they argued, if accompanied by
moral regeneration. Demands for reform led to the rise of what the Dutch
called “economic patriotism” and the establishment of enlightened soci-
eties that tied improving productivity to serving the community.49
Moral
utilitarianism called attention to the Dutch countryside as the source of
natural knowledge, the locus of agricultural reform and advances in envi-
ronmental engineering, and the site of communion with God. Appropri-
ating the naturalist ideal of landscape gardening—initially the preserve of
wealthy estate owners—for middle-class consumption brought these con-
cerns into the homes of a large swath of the population.
We find a good example of this in a popular garden design handbook
written by Gijsbert van Laar, nursery owner and landscape architect, in
1802. Van Laar aimed his Magazijn van tuin-sieraaden specifically at a mid-
dle-class audience. In it he detailed how desired effects could be produced
on a limited budget. What is more, he claimed that middle-class gardeners
enjoyed their earthly creations more than the wealthy because they had the
moral satisfaction of knowing that they had done the work themselves. Van
Laar’s book succeeded by bringing together his readers’ need to economize
with their desire to improve the combined natural and moral economy.50
16. aanleg en sieraad, voor groote en kleine lust-hoven, voornamelijk van dezulke die, met
weinig kosten te maken zijn (Magazine of garden decorations: A collection of layouts and
decorative models for large and small pleasure gardens, especially those that can be made
cheaply) (Amsterdam, 1802). It is helpful to note that in the eighteenth century the
Dutch word oeconomie tied domestic and moral responsibilities to more obviously
financial or monetary ones; see Roberts, “Moral Marketplace.”
51. On the Dutch Enlightenment, see Jacob and Mijnhardt (n. 6 above); Dorothée
Sturkenboom, Spectators van hartstocht: Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende eeuw
(Hilversum, 1998).
52. Johan Hendrik Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B Book voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd
(Amsterdam, 1781).
53. J. F. Martinet, Katechismus der natuur, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1779), 379–80. The
only monographic study of Martinet is A. N. Paasman, J. N. Martinet: Een Zutphens filo-
soof in de achttiende eeuw (Zutphen, 1971).
54. L. van Ollefen, De Nederlandsche Stad- en Dorp-Beschrijver (Amsterdam, 1796),
11–12. On the “naturalization” of technology in seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes,
see Ann Adams,“Competing Communities”(n. 8 above). For the naturalization of steam
engines in nineteenth-century Berlin, see Wise (n. 5 above).
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Receptivity to this formula was nurtured by the Dutch Enlightenment,
with its special stress on virtue and physico-theology.51
Children learned to
read with primers that, along with the alphabet, taught the values of thrift,
virtue, and care for the environment.52
J. F. Martinet’s Katechismus der
natuur, one of the most widely read Dutch books of the eighteenth century,
extended this moral training by focusing on what could be learned from
both observing and engineering nature. Grand struggles with the natural
world taught lessons of vigilance. But a peaceful countryside dotted with
villages was equally instructive. As Martinet’s protagonist instructs his stu-
dent while they gaze upon such a scene, “imagine the earlier state of our
country, and compare it with the present. In the past it consisted of wild
woods, salt marshes and flooded land: now you see it transformed into a
paradise.” Unbound nature might be sublime, he explains, but paradise
requires a human hand.53
With Martinet, we move from popularizing a new gardening style to the
literary representation of Dutch landscapes. Katechismus der natuur can be
read as a travelogue in which the local landscape piques its observers’ philo-
sophical interests. But even absent such moral musings, Dutch travel liter-
ature was a thriving genre. Because of its popularity with tourists, many
guides featured Zuid Kennemerland, and a stroll past John Hope’s estate
with its steam engine was often recommended. Guidebooks presented Gro-
enendaal’s steam engine not merely as a technological novelty but as an in-
tegral part of the landscape, a machine to be admired for the “natural”
beauty it sustained. We might regard this constructed continuity as the
“naturalization” of technology.54
A striking way to understand this process of naturalization is to exam-
ine contemporary pictorial representations of steam engines. We know of
two illustrations of the Groenendaal engine: a cross section drawn by Brou-
17. 55. The date 1785 is taken from Pols and Verbruggen (n. 3 above), 40. If the dating
of the painting is correct, we can assume that the people in the picture are not the Hopes,
as John Hope died in 1784.
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wer (fig. 2) and an anonymous watercolor made in 1785 (fig. 3). The for-
mer provides a structural record of Brouwer’s design, the latter a souvenir.
Note how the visitors in the watercolor do not inspect the machinery, but
pose like tourists before the building.55
Note also that the composition does
not differentiate between the engine and the windmill it was built to sup-
plement; they occupy the same line, beginning with a tree in the corner and
cutting across the foreground. It is not the steam engine that is celebrated
here, but the landscape of which it is a part.
An important difference between these two portrayals of the Groenen-
daal engine underscores the point. Like many other eighteenth-century dia-
grams of steam engines, Brouwer’s drawing shows his machine at work,
indicated by smoke billowing from the engine house. English landscape
paintings with steam engines often show them blackening the sky, but their
FIG. 2 R. L. Brouwer, cross section of the pumping station at Groenendaal,
1780. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)
18. 56. Dutch artists tended to represent the relationship between cities and countryside
with images of continuity; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Sev-
enteenth Century (Chicago, 1983), 152.
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Dutch counterparts offer no sign that the machines’ activity altered the
environment. On the contrary, the engine forms a part of the scenery.
This aesthetic can also be seen in other images from the period. Take
the two known pictures of the Oostpoort engine, a watercolor by Gerard
van Nijmegen, executed sometime between 1776 and 1780, and a similar
drawing by Dirk Langendijk (fig. 4). Both situate the engine within a vista
that looks far more pastoral than industrial and urban, near the windmill
designed by Steven Hoogendijk in 1742.56
Undisturbed by the sound of
machinery or smoky exhalations, the people in these scenes sit peacefully
or stroll through the landscape. Or consider the first Watt engine to power
a Dutch drainage project, installed in the Blijdorp polder near Rotterdam
in 1787, thanks to the efforts of the Bataafsch Genootschap.Again, we know
of two illustrations made by contemporary artists. The first, executed by
Johannes Prey (fig. 5), shows the steam engine under an unaffected sky,
tended by its keeper as a horse lazily grazes nearby and a farmer tends his
fields. There is no sign of conflict in this landscape, only the quiet tempo of
FIG. 3 Anonymous watercolor, managing water on the Groenendaal estate,
c. 1785. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)
19. 57. The best overview of this revolutionary period in Dutch history in English is
Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New
York, 1977).
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a rural afternoon. The second, made by Dirk Langendijk, portrays the offi-
cial visit made by Stadholder Willem V to Blijdorp in 1790 (fig. 6). Once
more the scene commemorates the landscape’s Arcadian continuity. The
royal coach waits in the background, grazing cows dominate the fore-
ground, and the stadholder’s entourage stand like tourists before the
machine, giving no indication of their rank or purpose. The Dutch coun-
tryside rules in Langendijk’s painting—not technology, and not the House
of Orange.
PATRIOTS, ORANGISTS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LANDSCAPE
In fact, Prey’s realist depiction of the Blijdorp landscape did not match
historical reality. Blijdorp was no more at peace than the rest of the Nether-
lands, where mounting antagonism between Patriots and supporters of the
House of Orange was punctuated by the arrival of Prussian troops in 1787.57
Local residents feared that pollution from the steam engine would dry up
their cows’ milk and compromise their livestock’s reproductive capabilities
long before it drained their polder. They refused to finance its maintenance
FIG. 4 Dirk Langendijk, De Oostpoort vuurmachine (The Oostdorp steam
engine), c. 1777. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)
20. 58. This story has been told many times in Dutch; for a version in English, see Pols
and Verbruggen, 45–47. Keezen (a breed of dog) was a derogatory term for members of
the Patriot movement.
59. For the Dutch origin of the word “fatherland,” see J. W. Muller, “Vaderland en
moedertaal,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal-en Letterdkunde 47 (1928): 43–62.
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and coined a menacing political slogan, die machine is een Keezending, en dat
moeten wij niet hebben (“It is a Patriot contraption and we will not stand for
it”), to call for its removal.58
Historians have used this outburst as evidence
that a historical divide existed between (industrially) progressive Patriots
and antimodern Orangists. The situation was, in fact, more complicated.
As already mentioned, some in the Netherlands responded to what they
perceived as the country’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury with calls for reform couched in the rhetoric of patriotism and love of
fatherland.59 If some reformers focused on economic renewal through
FIG. 5 Johannes Prey, Het stoomgemaal aan de Schie ten noordwesten van
Rotterdam (The steam mill on the Schie River northwest from Rotterdam),
1790s. (Courtesy of Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam.)
21. 60. Wijnand Mijnhardt argues that the concept of moral citizenship was not re-
placed by political citizenship and a modern national polity in the Netherlands until the
constitution of 1848. Wijnand Mijnhardt, “The Dutch Republic as a Town,” Eighteenth-
Century Studies 31 (1998): 345–59.
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271
patriotic support for domestic production and consumption, virtually
everyone agreed that national revival depended on reinvigorating moral
citizenship.60
But with economic and political tensions heightened by the
ineffectual rule of Stadholder Willem V, as well as worsening competition
and war with England, economic and moral patriotism spilled over into
overt political strife in the 1780s. Political Patriots (a loose amalgamation
of discontented noblemen, urban regents who benefited from a weak stad-
holder, middle-class reformers inspired by Enlightenment and American
Revolutionary ideals, and tradesmen, artisans, and other members of the
FIG. 6 Detail, Dirk Langendijk, Bezoek van Prins Willem V met gevolg aan het
stoomgemaal ten noordwesten van Rotterdam aan de Schie (Visit by Prince
Willem V and his entourage to the steam mill northwest from Rotterdam on
the Schie River), 1790. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)
22. 61. The willingness of Bataafsch Genootschap members (many of whom had Patriot
sympathies) and the stadholder to come together at Blijdorp was not a unique case. It
was fairly standard for Dutch societies to exclude political discussion from their meet-
ings by statute and take a conciliatory rhetorical line in the interests of social progress
and utility. For an example involving the society Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, see Lissa
Roberts, “Science Becomes Electric: Dutch Interaction with the Electrical Machine dur-
ing the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 90 (1999): 711–12.
62. Jan Lenders, De burger en de volkschool (Nijmegen, 1988).
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lower classes who hoped for greater political participation or simply for
food on their tables) gained the upper hand in a number of Dutch towns,
but met stiff opposition from Orangists (another loose network of aristo-
cratic, intellectual, and popular elements, some of whom owed their posi-
tions to the stadholder’s patronage) in places like Rotterdam. Buttressed by
the Prussian military presence, Willem V managed to gain temporary con-
trol of the situation in 1787, only to be removed in 1795 by a combination
of internal opposition and French revolutionary intervention.
This was the context in which Willem V visited Blijdorp in 1790. Unlike
local residents, who resented urban intervention in their local affairs and all
too easily conflated the “patriotic” orientation of reform-minded societies
such as the Bataafsch Genootschap with political Patriotism, Willem V
came to pay homage to a machine that promised to enhance the landscape’s
integrity. Like so many others who hoped for the reinvigoration of Dutch
culture, Willem was able to put partisanship aside in favor of making the
Dutch garden bloom again. Impressed by what she saw, his wife asked why
there were so few steam engines in the Netherlands. Bataafsch Genootschap
representatives replied that cultural conservatism—not political opposi-
tion—stood in their way. Judging from the historical record, this was an
honest answer.61
HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
The early nineteenth century was an era of upheaval in the Netherlands.
The Batavian Republic gave way to a monarchy under Louis Napoleon,
which yielded in turn to direct rule from Paris. Political tumult was matched
by economic distress. In response, Patriots of various stripes continued to
hold up the community of moral citizens as a political-economic ideal, a
goal to be realized concretely through projects such as a national education
program and symbolically through the evocation of a tranquil Arcadia.62
The task of evoking that pastoral ideal fell not only to visual artists but
to writers as well. The Patriot author Adriaan Loosjes’s Hollands Arkadia of
Wandelingen in de omstreken van Haarlem provides an example. Borrowing
from the popular genre of travel literature, Loosjes set his fictional charac-
ters to wander through the countryside around Haarlem. Their conversa-
tions are anchored in an appreciation for the surrounding landscape, which
leads them to discuss a broad range of subjects. Just as Virgil conjured his
23. 63. Adriaan Loosjes, Hollands Arkadia of Wandelingen in de omstreken van Haarlem
(Dutch Arcadia, or strolls in the area of Haarlem) (Haarlem, 1804), 4. For an interesting
discussion of Virgil in relation to pastoral literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, see Marx (n. 9 above), especially 19–24.
64. The Haarlemmermeer had been expanding for centuries due to peat extraction
and erosion. Its storm-swelled waters threatened to flood both Amsterdam and Leiden
in 1836. For eighteenth-century proposals to use steam power to drain the Haarlem-
mermeer, see Richard Ball to Van Liender, 10 March 1775, and William Blakey to Van
Liender, 7 April 1775, “Brieven” (n. 24 above).
65. Loosjes, 6–7. The word “shocking” is his.
66. Matthew Boulton to Van Liender, 29 August 1778, “Brieven.”
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Arcadia to delineate the tension between personal contentment and the
painful dislocation caused by Roman injustice, Loosjes’ landscapes express
both patriotic pride and scientific progress, on one hand, and a quietly fear-
ful sense of sociopolitical and moral decay on the other. The peaceful re-
union with nature symbolized Loosjes’ ideal,“to form tolerant, enlightened
and civilized people.”63
Among the sites his characters visit is Groenendaal, where they admire
the steam engine responsible for maintaining its “natural” beauty. While
recognizing the machine’s technological novelty, Loosjes describes it as
blending peacefully into the landscape. This contrasts starkly with his por-
trayal of the nearby Haarlemmermeer, a lake whose uncontrolled waters
menaced the entire region. Proposals to tame this aqueous monster had
been floated since the seventeenth century. It is possible that Loosjes knew
of contemporary suggestions to drain the lake with steam power; his char-
acters discuss the benefits that would accrue from bringing the Haarlem-
mermeer under control without mentioning any such specific schemes.64
The book’s message, nonetheless, is clear: fertility depends on the marriage
of human ingenuity and natural integrity. Their union provides a buffer
against the unbridled force of either in isolation. While his contemporaries
in other parts of Europe romanticized the landscape through sublime exag-
geration or harnessed it for industrial exploitation, Loosjes proffered the
less shocking vistas of his fatherland as more amenable to moral contem-
plation. And what made those Arcadian vistas possible, if not the continu-
ity between human ingenuity and respect for the environment?65
Watt and Boulton had received a personal invitation to enter the
Bataafsch Genootschap’s 1778 prize essay competition, which they politely
turned down; as Boulton explained, they made it a policy never to enter
competitions in which they were called upon to discuss the theories and
principles of their work.66
The Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschap-
pen (Dutch Society for Science) announced three additional essay compe-
titions in the early nineteenth century on the topic of the application of
steam power to water management, with similar results: no one replied.
The question was too technical to elicit broad interest, and it touched on
areas of expertise that entrepreneurs would rather use than describe; it was
24. 67. Bob Caron, “Een 18de-eeuwse vuurmachine in het Fysisch Kabinet, deel I,” Tey-
lers Magazijn 52 (1996): 11–14, at 14.
68. M. S. C. Bakker, “Overheid en techniek,” in Harry Lintsen et al. (n. 6 above), vol.
4 (Zutphen, 1993), 91–132.
69. See, for example, Rondo Cameron,“A New View of European Industrialization,”
Economic History Review 38 (1985): 1–23.
70. Joel Mokyr, Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795–1850 (New Haven,
Conn., 1976). Mokyr employs a comparative analysis of the quantity, distribution, and
power of steam engines in the Netherlands and Belgium to contrast those countries’
respective levels of industrial development. But he does not include water management
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not in their interest to publicize hard-won knowledge of which they would
thereby cease to be the exclusive masters.67
This points to the limited effect that a scholarly society could hope to
have on widespread, practical trends. In a context of administrative local-
ism and high commercial risk, societies could only choose between pro-
moting knowledge and popular interest through lectures and essay compe-
titions, on one hand, and stimulating the interest of local government
through privately financed projects on the other. What society-based patri-
otism could not accomplish, however, the coincidental rise during the nine-
teenth century of centralized government and technologically oriented
entrepreneurship did. The Orange King Willem I (1814–40), who visited
Blijdorp with his father in 1790, underwrote the Netherlands’ first steam
railroad. More important, he and his ministers helped create the financial
and physical infrastructure needed to support Dutch industrialization.
Whether the result of an “industrial vision” or not, it was the combination
of such infrastructural developments and capital investment that put the
Netherlands on the road to industrialization.68
A Fuller Picture
Histories of the steam engine tend to focus on industrial and economic
progress. Changing the focus to bring in landscape architecture, garden
fountain design, land reclamation, and water management helps recover a
fuller picture of that history. This complements the work of historians who
have demonstrated that steam engines were not the primary motor of the
Industrial Revolution.69
Moreover, thinking about the steam engine as a
machine in the garden allows us to examine it as a cultural artifact. How were
the steam engine and its relationship to its environment interpreted and
symbolically projected by those who advocated or observed its presence?
Putting these elements together in the case of the steam engine’s intro-
duction into the Netherlands enables us, further, to think about the place of
steam technology in Dutch history without having recourse to the negative
concept of “industrial retardation”employed by economic historians such as
Joel Mokyr.70
Rather than investigating why the Dutch didn’t industrialize
25. among his distributional categories, thus ignoring the primary use to which steam
engines were originally put in the Netherlands in both his quantitative analysis and cor-
responding discussion; see pp. 128–29. The phrase “industrial retardation” comes from
Richard Griffiths, Industrial Retardation in the Netherlands, 1830–1850 (The Hague,
1979), 7.
71. Compare this approach with Harry Lintsen, “Van windbemaling naar stoombe-
maling: Innoveren in Nederland in the negentiende eeuw,” Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis
van bedrijf en techniek (Utrecht, 1985), pt. 2, 48–63, esp. 50.
72. Lindqvist (n. 28 above).
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sooner (that is, why they weren’t more like the English and Belgians), we
should ask what they actually did on both practical and symbolic levels.71
As Svante Lindqvist demonstrates in his study of steam technology in
Sweden, the introduction and adaptation of technology in the eighteenth
century was a local affair, dependent equally on technological, economic,
and cultural concerns.72
In the Netherlands, representations of the steam
engine combined with the ways in which it was actually used to determine
FIG. 7 Detail, Willem Hekking Jr., Het Haarlemmermeer (The Haarlemmermeer),
c. 1850. Courtesy of Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam.
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Dutch cultural understandings of this technology. The steam engine’s
image as an Arcadian apparatus became so well entrenched that it re-
mained current in the mid-nineteenth century. When the artist Willem
Hekking Jr. sketched one of the steam engines finally built to drain the
Haarlemmermeer in 1849 (fig. 7), he framed it with the most benign of
pastoral settings. Nature had been tamed, but only so as to allow for its
peaceful continuity with those who inhabited its garden.
