De Moderne Tijd - Volume 6, Issue 4, 2022

‘That each one endeavors to exert his weak powers’. Resilience and Cholera in the nineteenth century

This paper applies the concept of resilience, as operationalized through the capacity to learn, strategize and implement lessons after crises, to the situation in the city of Utrecht during and after the three major cholera epidemics that raged through Europe. It examines and discusses the learning capacities in the city, within the corridors of power and in society itself. Did the Utrecht residents learn from the crisis, were they resilient? The cholera epidemics were clearly distinguishable and identifiable pandemics, spawned a flood of discussions and arguments, led to the first major international sanitary conferences, and, throughout the 19th century, triggered medical-scientific and social-administrative paradigm shifts. The article follows these debates and the ensuing attempts to translate findings into measures on a local level, thus highlighting how the transboundary scope of a pandemic played out on the micro level of a city.

Resilience behind bars. Emotional practices in the prisons of Rotterdam and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1800-1830

This article focuses on the emotional resilience of prisoners that affected both the prison community and their personal selves by using sources from the prison archives of Rotterdam and ‘s-Hertogenbosch from the years 1800-1830. Concentrating on emotional practices of fear, sadness, and anger, this contribution problematizes the idea of the passive and powerless prisoner. Moreover, it aims to show that prisoners were a small power within the nineteenth-century prison by examining the relationship between resilience, emotions, and agency.

From ‘mutual aid’ to ‘ignorance and prejudice’. Changes in literary representations of adversity in the countryside, 1850-1914.

In nineteenth-century Dutch village tales, rural communities often face adversity due to natural hazards. However, representations of (dealing with) adversity change over time. In early village tales (ca. 1850-1885), natural hazards are portrayed as unavoidable, whereas some early twentieth-century village tales emphasise the importance of risk management. Moreover, communities in later village tales might more often resort to blame in the context of natural calamities. This article argues that the changing attitude towards adversity can be linked to the late-nineteenth-century agricultural crisis in Europe, caused by cheap import of agricultural products from the United States and Canada, which lead to an increasing rationalisation of the Dutch countryside.