De Achttiende Eeuw - Volume 56, Issue 2024, 2024

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 being a mother of seven in 1774, Van Serooskerken preferred to run the household herself. She took responsibility for managing the staff, the financial situation, and for educating the children. It seemed natural for her to consider herself an equal partner in this marriage. When it came to topics such as vaccination and education, Van Serooskerken took the side of the Enlightenment. Although criticizing her husband a lot, she appeared to be reasonably happy with the situation, knowing it was she who was in charge.

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 court traditions. Additionally, opium was employed strategically: during periods of an oversupply of cloves – the most important cash crop on the Moluccas – its production was reduced by discouraging harvesting. Distributing opium among the population was one way this was implemented. The article also examines how opium regulation changed with the VOC’s bankruptcy and the onset of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century, and argues that, despite official rhetoric about the beginning of a new era, the opium trade continued.

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 how contemporary Dutch songs reflected on the rise of jenever. While their lyrics do point to anxieties about alcohol-consuming women, destitute drunkards, and destabilised households, the Dutch reaction to jenever’s rise was relatively mild.

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 how the consumption of tea, tobacco, and romance novels could get out of hand. On the other hand, they seem to explain the very concept of addiction to its respective audiences through a process of imagineering. The farces imagine addiction as a social problem, and suggest that the consequences are more serious for the addict’s environment than for the addicted individual themselves. This article closely analyses these three farces in order to gain insight into early modern Dutch conceptions of addiction, morality, fashion, and consumption culture, as well as the correlations that existed between them.

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 considerable part by the efforts of VOC employees, with varying rates of success. In their endeavors, they found themselves often supported, yet occasionally also obstructed, by the VOC. While scientific activity under the VOC has often been described as either deliberate business policy or as an unintended offshoot of commerce, the story of tea serves as a compelling case to argue that the hodgepodge of actors and materials moving through space and time calls for more nuanced historiographical examination of long-distance information networks.

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 attempt to stem the import of this colonial product by foreign trading companies. These writers put forth a wide array of medicinal, social, economic, theological and even nationalistic arguments, polemicizing against the consumption of Chinese tea. To strengthen their arguments, they used language borrowed from a sixteenth-century tradition in which German humanists reacted against the introduction of exotic goods and spices out of Asia and the Americas. To counter the popularity of Chinese tea, eighteenth-century German intellectuals proposed an alternative in the consumption of herbal tea wrought from local ‘German’ flora. By these means they sought to ward off the perceived negative impact of a globalizing world on their own culture, economies and societies.