De Achttiende Eeuw - Current Issue

Abstract: This ‘portrait’ of Anna Elisabeth Christina van Tuyll van Serooskerken (1745-1819) is based on what remains of her correspondence with her husband Frederik Christiaan van Reede (1743-1808), lord of Amerongen and fifth earl of Athlone. Whereas he enjoyed a life of public offices and privilege, she was mainly occupied in their Utrecht home and Amerongen castle, where she usually spent the summer. Despite bein Read More

Abstract: This article examines how opium was used and regulated in the Moluccas at the turn of the nineteenth century. While much research has focused on the economic effects of this trade on the economy in Java, this article demonstrates the importance of opium in the Moluccas as well. Although the VOC imposed penalties on opium use, it was tolerated in practice and was popular as a painkiller and used within local cour Read More

Abstract: In the first half of the eighteenth century, London’s moralists campaigned against the rise in popularity of a new distilled beverage: gin. Current-day historians argue convincingly that this so-called gin craze was a moral panic. On the other side of the Channel, gin’s Dutch equivalent jenever also rose in popularity during the eighteenth century. Yet, a similar jenever craze did not take place there. This article traces ho Read More

Abstract: Around 1700, three farces were put on the Dutch stage in which addiction to fashionable consumer products played an important role: Pieter Bernagie’s De románzieke juffer (1685), De buitenspoorige toebaksnuiver by Enoch Krook (1697), and De theezieke juffers by Enoch Krook and Daniël Kroon (1701). On the one hand, these farces functioned as a form of social criticism, in which addicted characters illustrated Read More

Abstract: This article shows how knowledge about tea circulated through the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC’s) information network during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Knowledge about tea was not only an example of the scientific advances Europeans made regarding Asia, it can and should also be seen as a commercial product in itself. The production and circulation of tea knowledge was nourished in consid Read More

Abstract: During the eighteenth century, the consumption of Chinese tea became a widespread phenomenon all throughout the German states of the Holy Roman Empire. Germans from a multitude of social backgrounds took to the consumption of this psychoactive substance in their daily lives. Shortly after its introduction, the popularization of tea was followed by a counterreaction by German writers and intellectuals, in an Read More