Building Futures
Polders and Progress
in the Netherlands,
1890-1933
Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius
Research Master Thesis
[LET-HLCS-HS15]Research Master Historical Studies, August 2017, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen Supervisor: Prof. Wim van Meurs, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
de lucht hangt er laag
en de zon wordt er langzaam in grijze veelkleurige
dampen gesmoord en in alle gewesten
wordt de stem van het water met zijn eeuwige rampen gevreesd en gehoord.
- Hendrik Marsman, Herinnering aan Holland (1936).
the sky hangs low and slowly the sun by mists of all colours is stifled and greyed and in all the regions the voice of the water with its endless disasters is feared and obeyed.
T
ABLE OFC
ONTENTSINTRODUCTION ... 4
1. Status Quaestiones ... 7
2. Landscape, Technology and Environment ... 11
3. Thesis Statement ... 14
4. Method: A History of Concepts ... 16
CHAPTER I-VISUALIZING THE ZUIDERZEE ... 19
1. Ordering of the Sea Bottom ... 20
2. Maps or Diagrams? ... 28
3. Visual Knowledge and Visible Authority ... 33
4. Expertise and Power ... 35
5. Technical Drawing and Landscape Construction ... 37
CHAPTER II-THE CONCEPT OF NATURE ... 40
1. Cultivating Nature, Conquering Land ... 43
2. Adapting Nature - efficiency, utility, and profit ... 48
3. Human Nature ... 51
3.1 External Nature and the Dutchness of Landscape ... 51
3.2 Human Nature ... 53
CHAPTER III-TEMPORALITIES OF THE ZUIDERZEE ... 57
1. Organizing time, trusting modernity ... 57
2. Temporal consciousness – entangled times ... 59
3. Mourning the past ... 60
3.1 Nostalgia ... 60
3.2 Synchronization ... 64
4. Building futures ... 65
4.1 Rupture - Making History ... 65
4.2 Catching up with Europe ... 68
CONCLUSION ... 74
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 77
Literature ... 77
Primary Sources ... 82
Books and Albums ... 82
Newspaper Articles ... 83
Archival Sources ... 83
I
NTRODUCTIONOn an overcast, almost rainy Monday afternoon in September 1933, an assembly of distinguished men came together to celebrate a “historic moment” in the geographical and national history of the Netherlands.1 The Minister of Transport and Public Works, ir. J.A.
Kalff, officially opened the Afsluitdijk (the Enclosure Dam) to the public. Exactly one year before, the cranes had dropped the last buckets of boulder clay in the whirling Zuiderzee to close the dam. From that moment on, the North Sea inlet in the heart of the country would turn into a giant fresh water lake, making the destructive storm surges and floods a part of history. A monument was erected on the spot where the ‘Vlieter’, the deep water channel where seagoing vessels would enter the Zuiderzee, was closed by machines. A large relief shows three stone workers, depicting the laborers that built the technological tour the force. The monument is accompanied by a very revealing text: “A people that lives, builds its future.”2
The Afsluitdijk was only one part of the gigantic Zuiderzeewerken (Southern Sea Works). This system of water drainage works, pumps, dams, sluices and large-scale land reclamation has been decisive for the Dutch geographical and ideological landscape. The construction of the project started in the 1920’s, with the drainage of the Wieringermeer-polder. A polder, the word being of Dutch origin, is a low-lying embanked artificial flatland within a sea or a lake. The constructions of the project lasted until the late 1970’s during which period in total about 200.000 hectares of polders, of new land, were created. The new province of Flevoland in the center of the country completely consists out of drained land, and still counts as one of the biggest land reclamation projects worldwide. Plans for this hydraulic enterprise had long since existed in different forms and scales. The hopes and dreams of a safer, dryer, and larger Netherlands know a history in and of itself. 3
All of these plans and designs were in some way or the other based on and simultaneously feeding the narrative of the ‘battle against the water’ that has been a leitmotiv of throughout Dutch geographical, as well as national history.4
1 “Een historisch oogenblik op den Afsluitdijk”, De Telegraaf, 26 September 1933.
2 "De plechtigheid op den afsluitdijk. Op historischen grond.", Algemeen Handelsblad, 26 September 1933. 3 For a brief explanation of a number of the different ideas of enclosing the Zuiderzee please see Ben de Pater, ''De verovering eener nieuwe provincie' Plannen voor afsluiting en droogmaking van de Zuiderzee', in: Erik Walsmit, Hans Kloosterboer, Niels Persson and Rinus Ostermann (eds.), Spiegel van de Zuiderzee, Geschiedenis
en Catobibliografie van de Zuiderzee en het Hollands Waddengebeid.(Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2009) 120-138.
4 G.P. van de Ven (ed.), Man-Made Lowlands: History of Water Management and Land Reclamation in the
The reasons for this enterprise were manifold. World War I (WWI), during which the Netherlands had officially been neutral, caused increasing difficulties to provide the whole of the population with sufficient amounts of food. Imminent shortages of all kinds of resources would pose increasing threats, on top of the rapidity of population growth. Sustainable fresh water supply became problematic for the expanding urban area of the Randstad.5 The newly
reclaimed polders would prove the needed farmlands to cultivate different crops and the construction of the works would provide sustainable employability. Furthermore, the Zuiderzeewerken should not be underestimated as an international prestige project to make up for the neutral position in WWI. The technical enterprise was supposed to put the Netherlands back on the map in between the Western imperial powers.6
Apart from these contextual reasons, a more general, long-term argument turned out to be decisive: that of flood protection. This reason all of a sudden became an urgent matter after the beginning of 1916, when the January Storm Surge hit Zuiderzee coast. Large areas of the provinces of North Holland, Friesland, and Gelderland flooded, 58 people and a large number of life stock drowned. These losses, on top of the enormous amount of land surface that was now temporarily unworkable as farmland due to the salinization, were too much to ignore according to the advocates of the project. 7
It turned out to be the decisive factor that provided the sense of urgency that was needed for a project of this size that had seriously been in the making since the 1890’s to be actually carried out. In 1918 the Zuiderzeewet (Zuiderzee Bill) passed through parliament, enabling the enclosure bureaucratically and marking the legislative end of the Zuiderzee. Both the creation as well as the process of populating the new land were eventually commissioned by the Dutch state, yet heavily based upon the scientific knowledge provided by experts in several scientific disciplines.8
Scientists - civil and hydraulic engineers, agricultural biologists, and social geographers - and their leading
5 Cordula Rooijendijk, Waterwolven. Een geschiedenis van stormvloeden, dijkenbouwers en droogmakers, (Amsterdam and Antwerpen: Atlas, 2009).
6 Ben de Pater, “Authentiek, onecht, achtergebleven? De meervoudige identiteit van het Zuiderzeegebied rond 1900”, Sintobin, ‘Getemd maar Rusteloos’, 115 – 131, 124.
7 The gravity and impact of the storm surge was taken on by the proponents of the Zuiderzeeplan, Cornelis Lely first and foremost, to explain the urgency of the matter. Little booklets like Januari-vloed 1916, by M. Van der Staal, (Rotterdam: Libertas, 1916) were published to inform the public about the events, commemorate the victims, and to underline with rhetorical fireworks the importance and urgency of a structural solution to the ‘Zuiderzee topic’. This in combination with pregnant pictures of the old towns under water turned out to be quite effective in shaping the public and political opinion on the plans.
8 Cornelis Disco and Jan van den Ende. ""Strong, InvincibleArguments"? Tidal Models as Management Instruments in Twentieth-Century Dutch Coastal Engineering." Technology and Culture 44:3 (2003) 502-535.
principles of technological progress de facto ruled the new land and new society that was to inhabit the new land.9
The most influential of those experts was undoubtedly the Cornelis Lely (1854-1929). Being educated as a civil engineer at the famous Delft Polytechnical school, he managed to make headway within the Zuiderzee-Vereeniging (Zuiderzee Society), and served his first out of three holdings of the ministerial post of Water Management, Trade and Industry in 1892. The Zuiderzee-Vereeniging was founded in 1886 with the goal to investigate the desirability and the technical feasibility of an enclosure and the partial reclamation of the Zuiderzee. Lely lead most of the investigations, and published them – along with a detailed plan for the new lands that would be known as the ‘Plan Lely’ – in eight memorandums (“nota’s”, in Dutch), the last of which was published after he was appointed minister. He was consequently appointed as the president of the Staatscommissie (State Committee) that was put together to pass judgment on whether the execution of his own plan was in the ‘national interest’.10
In 1894, they published an important report in which the committee almost unanimously decided in favor of Lely’s plan, despite the lack of consensus in the cabinet and public support for a large-scale reclamation.11
After a second term of service as a minister, and career as member of Parliament, the senate, and governor of the colonies in Surinam, Lely managed in 1918 to shepherd his plan through Parliament in the form of the Zuiderzee Bill during his third term as minister of Water Management and Transport. At the time, all of these accomplishments were seen as a sign of great competence and expertise.12
By that time, the public opinion had been swayed by the efforts of the Zuiderzee-Vereeniging, that in many publications and other forms of display underlined the expertise of people like Lely and urgency of the enterprise.
The scale of it the project required an enormous amount of institutional organization. The Zuiderzee-vereeniging was a private organization with political ambitions, but many of its had members that played double roles and for example combined their position of scientific expert with holding a high office in government. After the Zuiderzee Bill past
9 Liesbeth van de Grift, “Community Building and Expert Involvement on Reclaimed Lands in the Netherlands 1930s to 1950s”, in: Stefan Couperus and Harm Kaal (eds.) (Re)Constructing Communities in Europe,
1918-1968: Senses of Belonging Below, Beyond and Within the Nation-State (Routledge, New York: 2018).
10 Willem van der Ham, Verover mij dat Land: Lely en de Zuiderzeewerken (Amsterdam: Boom, 2007) 387-390. 11 Cornelis Lely, and Staatscommissie tot het instellen van een onderzoek omtrent eene afsluiting en eene droogmaking van de Zuiderzee, Verslag Der Staatscommissie, Benoemd Bij Koninklijk Besluit Van 8 September
1892, N° 21, Tot Het Instellen Van Een Onderzoek Omtrent Eene Afsluiting En Eene Droogmaking Van De Zuiderzee, (The Hague: Belinfante, 1894).
12 To illustrate: Lely’s close friend and colleague Colijn referred to Lely’s many roles repeatedly in his speech for the unveiling of a monument for Lely in 1939. The event was covered by many newspapers, for example: “De ontwerper der Zuiderzee-drooglegging herdacht”, Het Vaderland, 4 May 1939. This event will come up again later in this thesis.
Parliament, the Zuiderzeeraad (Zuiderzee Council) was called into existence. This advisory body to the Dutch State would provide the executive organs with different kinds of knowledge about the Zuiderzeewerken. Advice on the technical matters was provided by the
Zuiderzeecommissie (Zuiderzee Committee). This was more of an executive commission that
concerned itself with the technicalities of the project. In the first years after 1918 it was led by the renowned physician and Nobel laureate Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1923).13 As a professor in
Leiden and personal friend to Albert Einstein, Lorentz’ position as scientific expert was already widely established. His formulas would eventually decide precisely where the actual enclosure of the Zuiderzee would be placed geographically. Positions of power and authority concerning the Zuiderzeewerken were, like in the cases of Lely, Lorentz, or Minister Kalff who opened the Afsluitdijk, based on the trust in expertise of a specific sort. Ranging from the realm of political decision making until mathematically motivated resolutions regarding the constructions itself, influential men often wore several hats. Particularly when it came to the development and execution of public works, which required great levels of strategic and executive planning these expert authorities were active members in different committees, societies, and councils.
1. STATUS QUAESTIONES
Both the process of land reclamation, hydraulic engineering in general, as well as the project of the Zuiderzeewerken in particular have been of interest to a considerable number of academics from a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Most notably it has been placed in the context of the history of technology and engineering – not to be confused with the discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to which I will come back more extensively later on. In this context, the historical narrative is often teleological and consists out of an accumulation of knowledge and expertise. In this context, the Zuiderzeewerken function as a primary example of the virtuosity of mankind and the engineers of the as visionaries and heroes of the hour.14 The civil and hydraulic engineers, mathematicians and physicists were
the ones that succeeded in developing state-of-the-art techniques to keep the Dutch lands and its peoples from drowning once and for all. The leading parts are played by Cornelis Lely and Hendrik Lorentz, whose brilliant plans saved hundreds of poor fishermen from the next deadly flood. The Dutch engineers created an international network for interchanging
13 Frits Berends, “Hendrik Antoon Lorentz: His Role in Physics and Society.” Journal of Physics: Condensed
Matter, 21.16 (2009).
14 An example is Van de Ven, Leefbaar Laagland, a publication that was funded by the Ministry of Water management and transport,
hydraulic expertise, particularly in the United States, but also in colonial spaces such as Egypt.15
“In sum, a great man!” according to Willem van der Ham’s rather laudatory biography of Lely that was published because of the 75th
anniversary of the Afsluitdijk.16
This narrative is mostly found in publications that are meant for a broader audience, rather than fellow academics. The primary examples of this ‘expert-perspective’ are the many memorial volumes on either the Zuiderzeewerken or their younger brother, the Deltawerken that have been produced across the whole of the 20th
century and up until now, mostly commissioned by the government or governmental organizations.17
It can still be found on the website of institutions such as the Rijkswaterstaat that describes the Afsluitdijk as a “Dutch businesscard for hydraulic engineering, culture, and innovation.”18
The current restorations of this landmark are pregnantly titled “Icoon Afsluitdijk” (Afsluitdijk as an icon).
This narrative is, however understandable, also deeply problematic for a number of reasons. It builds upon fallacies that make it problematic and incomplete. Firstly, because it is a rather traditional and limited story of Great Men and Great Deeds. It leaves out small communities - like for example the fishermen towns along the Zuiderzee that were deprived of an income and their characteristic culture – and it trivializes or even ignores resisting opinions. It could therefore also be typed as a purely technocratic and a-social perspective because it paints a picture without people. Secondly, and this is important in many respects, the narrative is a-historical. The reclamation of the Beemster in the 17th century, the Haarlemmermeer in the 19th century, the design for the Zuiderzeewerken, and the Deltawerken in the 1950’s – they are all made to be part of the same project: the “taming of the waterwolf”. A clear example of this is Stuvel’s Het Deltaplan: De Geboorte (“Birth of the Deltawerken”) which treats the construction of the Zuiderzeewerken as a technological forerunner for the Deltawerken, another large-scale hydraulic construction project in the South West of the Netherlands.19
This narrative is one of the battle of a small, crowded country against the threat of the immense destruction of the water, that is finally won by the wit of a number of clever engineers. Whether the battle is fought by farmers with wind mills
15 Martin Reuss, "Introduction: Learning from the Dutch: Technology, Management, and Water Resources Development." Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 465-472. ; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts : Egypt,
Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.)
16 Van der Ham, Verover mij, 7.
17 The Deltawerken are a construction of dams, dikes and sluices that close off the river delta and shorten the coast line of the low lying province of Zeeland, in order to reduce risk of flooding. See for more elaborate information: Van de Ven, Leefbaar Laagland.
18 Website Rijkswaterstaat: http://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/water/waterbeheer/bescherming-tegen-het-water/waterkeringen/dijken/afsluitdijk/icoon-afsluitdijk.aspx (30 August 2017).
in the middle ages, or hi-tech hydraulics and advanced movable damming, it is considered to be essentially the same thing. This is problematic, because it denies profound differences in historical contexts and does not account for complexity and change in ideas and concepts. It is based on a narrative of accumulating knowledge and scientific progress, which is an eminently linear interpretation of historical time. Growth is in inevitable in this context, essential even to arrive at the promised progressed future.20 I will come back extensively to
this narrative, and the way in which it was mobilized to influence public opinions in the second chapter.
Closely related to these histories of the technology of the Zuiderzeewerken is the discipline of landscape history. In terms of disciplinary approach, it can be situated in between this scientific expert-perspective on the one hand, and approaches by urban, social, and political historians on the other. This is relevant, because of the peculiar role that the landscape plays. It is not treated as a technological artifact or background to building a new society, but as the primary object of technical research. In these ‘landscape biographies’, dikes are not treated as material witnesses of progress and historical source material, but as the leading character in the history of the physical landscape itself as a blue print on which social planning could take place.21
From the area of urban history or urban studies the land reclamation project is of interest because of the character of newly reclaimed lands as tabula rasa. In this case it is not necessarily imagined for possible agricultural or colonization aims, rather it was seen as a proto-urban landscape. Ed Taverne’s piece on the Haarlemmermeer, the first big reclamation project south of Amsterdam, carried out around the 1850’s, is an example of this approach.22
He shows how not only the function of the land as a productive agricultural space was considered important, but also that there were fierce discussions on the aesthetics nature of the land. The romantic image of ‘cultural landscape’ based on images of the Beemster polder, now part of the UNESCO-heritage list for its characteristic rural fields, towns, mills, and urban areas, was believed to be of great influence on the society that was about to inhabit the newly reclaimed lands.
20 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘”Progress” and “Decline” An Appendix to the History of Two Concepts’, trans. Todd Pressner, in: The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2002), 218-235.
21 M. Horst and M. Spek, “De landschapsbiografie. Beschrijving van de methodiek en toepassing in de praktijk”, in: W. H. G. Simons and D. van Dorp (eds.), Methoden van praktijkgericht onderzoek bij ruimtelijke
planvorming (Velp: Landwerk Uitgeverij, 2014) 103-125.
22 Ed Taverne, “Het betwiste landschap van de Haarlemmermeer”, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 121.4 (2006) 711–726.
This notion of the strong connection between the nature of the people and the landscape in which they build their community is one that circulated widely. Particularly since the late 19th century, according to Willemien Roenhorst, whose study of the early natural conservation movement in the Netherlands describes the monumentalization of Dutch landscape and its connection to Dutch nationalism.23 Images in the form of both visual as well
as literary representations have recently been researched from different “multidisciplinary and interdiscursive” angles in Tom Sintobin’s edited volume Getemd maar Rusteloos, in which a number of scholars investigates the disappearing folklore in the Zuiderzee area.24
One of them is Ben de Pater whose study about the conception of authenticity in the Zuiderzee areas also discusses the interpretation of the Zuiderzeewerken as an attempt to strengthen feelings of patriotism.25
He refers to this image to as an example of ‘national environmental ideology’, thereby following the American historian John Short.26
Both Roenhorst and De Pater pay attention to a domestic nation building narrative, but the project cannot be seen from a global tendency of modernist planning.
National landscape is also present in the perspectives of political historians that researched the process of populating the newly claimed lands as a project of state planning. Liesbeth van der Grift and Stefan Couperus have demonstrated that the project is a prime example of High Modernist grand-scale schemes.27
They underline the importance of international prestige, and discuss an external, rather than domestic construction of nationality. Extensively discussing the degree of deliberate design and planning, they compare the project to grand environmental schemes such as Mussolini’s Pontine Marshes in Fascist Italy, and the Donau-Schwarzmeer channel in Soviet Romania.28
Both are examples of Utopian engineering projects that alter the environment on a large and irreversible scale and in a way that is often associated with totalitarian regimes.29
Characteristic of these kinds of
23 Willemien Roenhorst, “De natuurlijke natie. Monumentalisering en nationalisering van natuur en landschap in de vroege twintigste eeuw.”, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 121.4 (2006) 727–752.
24 Tom Sintobin, “’Maar het volk was gered!’ Inleiding op een multidisciplinair en interdiscursief onderzoek.”, in: Idem. (ed.) 'Getemd maar rusteloos' : De Zuiderzee verbeeld : een multidisciplinair onderzoek. (Hilversum: Verloren., 2008).
25 De Pater, “Authentiek, onecht, achtergebleven?”, 115-117.
26 John Short, Imagined Country. Environment, Culture and Society. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 27 Stefan Couperus, Liesbeth van de Grift, and Vincent Lagendijk, “Experimental Spaces: a Decentred Approach to Planning in High Modernity. Introduction.”, in: “Experimental Spaces: a Decentred Approach to Planning in High Modernity”, Stefan Couperus and Liesbeth van de Grift (eds.), Journal of Modern European History, 13.4 (2015) 475-479.
28 See for example Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s argument for land reclamation as a part of fascist political ideology: ‘Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Pontine Marshes’, Differences. A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies. 27:1 (2016) 94-142.
29 Liesbeth van de Grift, “On New Land a New Society: Internal Colonisation in the Netherlands, 1918– 1940”, Contemporary European History, 22.4 (2013) 609–626.
modernist planning projects was the connection between some authoritarian idea of a “new human” for which the environment was tailored.30
This notion becomes particularly visible in the practice of the meticulously planned composition of the new polder land population that Van der Grift examined as an act of internal colonization.31 The Wieringermeer in particular functioned as an experimental space
for the state, that closely worked together with spatial planners, agricultural engineers, and sociologists who provided the scientific knowledge on which the policy was based. State power was thus drawn heavily upon expert knowledge, making experts in the fields of physics, mathematics, but mostly social sciences and civil engineering incredibly influential. Historian of technology Cornelis Disco has repeatedly described the nature of government during the period in which the Zuiderzeewerken were carried out as ‘technocratic’.32
The sciences and their leading principles of progress and efficiency were de facto in charge and scientific practices of social and hydraulic planning became leading for politicians, who seemed to be merely providing funding.33
2. LANDSCAPE, TECHNOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT
This short overview of scholarly literature about the Zuiderzee project shows that histories of technology provide detailed descriptions of the accumulation of knowledge and the increasing elaboration of the level of engineering resulting from that. Landscape historians meticulously describe the technical characteristics of the landscape. Urban historians attribute to landscape a much less essential role, more like cultural, or political historians do. They make inquiries about the meaning of the images that are projected on the landscape, how they come into being, or how institutions of power influence them. In these histories, the role of landscape is not necessarily a tangible one but of a more symbolic and abstract nature. Landscape is present nonetheless, but features as the coincidental background in which the historical actors play out their parts. There are two approaches that could provide a relevant middle ground for the aim of this particular investigation, in between landscape as the
30 Wim van Meurs, “Der Donau-Schwarzmeer-Kanal, eine Großbaustelle des Kommunismus”, in: Jahrbuch für
Historische Kommunismusforschung (Berlijn: Aufbau Verlag Berlin, 2012).
31 Couperus, Van de Grift, and Lagendijk, "Experimental Spaces’.
32 Cornelis Disco and Bert Toussaint, "From projects to systems: the emergence of a national hydraulic technocracy, 1900-1970.", in: John Lonnquest, Bert Toussaint, Joe Jr. Manous, and Maurits Ertsen (eds.), Two
centuries of experience in water resources management: a Dutch-U.S. retrospective (Alexandria, VA: Institute
for Water Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Rijkswaterstaat, Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, 2014) 155-204.
33 Idem, and Jan Van Den Ende. “"Strong, Invincible Arguments"?: Tidal Models as Management Instruments in Twentieth-Century Dutch Coastal Engineering." Technology and Culture 44.3 (2003) 502-535.
research object on the one hand, or a background projection screen for ideological imaginaries on the other.
Not only the technologies are loaded with meaning, so are landscapes, or rather the entire environment to which the landscape – often in the form of a romanticized ideal type – belongs. This assumption that Simon Hailwood put as: “a landscape then is not just scenery; it is a physical and intellectual construction” is central to historians and cultural scholars that identify with the discipline of environmental history, and more broadly the Environmental Humanities.34
Already in the beginning of the 20th
century historians like Mark Bloch have emphasized the importance of a history that takes environments into account. As a scholar of rural history and much under the influence of Marxist theory, Bloch gave the opening move in the 1920’s for the interpretation of humans as actors that were highly influenced by their environment – not necessarily in its current sense of natural environments, but rather as the physical space in which for example factory workers had to make a living.35
Fernand Braudel, Bloch’s heir when it comes to the intellectual heritage of the Annales School, is seen by some as one of the first substantial environmental historians.36
His monumental The Mediterranean is an impressive account of the intertwinement of time and nature, explaining how human history is in its very foundations determined by natural history.37
Important, however, is to note that although Braudel’s concepts of the cultural and natural domains might not be entirely detached, his conceptions of nature and landscape are profoundly different than that of the earlier mentioned discipline of science and technology studies. Braudel’s
Mediterranean beautifully displays nature as something primal, untouched, and deeply
layered. Ultimately, the landscape influences people, not the other way around.
Whereas Environmental History has developed since the 1970’s, inspired by alarming reports on urgent environmental issues, such as the 1972 Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome, the development of the Environmental Humanities are of a more recent date. Not only historians identify with this approach, so do literary scholars (ecocricists), philosophers, and archeologists, among many others. The organization of the Environmental Humanities as a discipline should be read as “a wide response to the environmental challenges of our time”,
34 Simon Hailwood, “Landscape, nature, and Neopragmatism”, Environmental Ethics, 29.2 (2007) 131-149, 133. 35 For example in his rural history of France, originally published in 1931: Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale Française (Oslo: Institut pour l’Etude comparative des civilisations, 1931).
36 Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016) 32.
37Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1947) Transl. Siân
according to the founders of the Environmental Humanities journal in 2012.38
Other than for example landscape history, this approach does not write the history of the environment, nor does it take the Braudellian approach where people are eventually left to the tender mercies of the natural world. Rather, it attempts to produce a history in which the historian accounts for the natural environment as a space in which the actors of its narrative move, live, think - exist. It departs from a presumption of reciprocity and interaction. Compared to the earlier mentioned notion that environments and cultural identity are connected, scholars redirect their focus away from solely political ideological interpretations and aim it towards imaginations of the environment as such. Their research is often programmatic, and attempts like Debra Rose has put it, to no longer be “focused on ‘the human’ in a way that has often excluded or backgrounded the non-human world.”39
This aim and ambition to think beyond the anthropocentrism of the humanities is also central to central assumption of the discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS). As Sergio Sismondo explains in his introductory work: “STS starts from an assumption that science and technology are thoroughly social activities.”40
The protagonists of this discipline therefore take into account not only the scientists and engineers, but also the knowledge, facts, and technologies they generate and the social, cultural, and political context in which this happens. Landscape therefore does not need to be reduced to either the result of scientific, political, or cultural activities because it can be all of that. It does not function as a backdrop, but as an actor in itself: technology, altered landscape, or even knowledge about landscape and the way in which it is organized have agency of themselves. In this sense, landscapes are first and foremost environments that are (either or not deliberately) construed by technologies. About the example of the Dutch hydraulic technologies this means that dams such as the Afsluitdijk are “thick” in connections and linkages, according to Dutch STS-specialist Wiebe Bijker. 41
While simultaneously and constantly being remade by experts and politicians, they are loaded with values, with politics, and have a distinct function in establishing those relations of power. That means that the particular kinds of landscape that are central in this study are examples of what STS-scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, to which I will come back to in the first chapter, have reflected on and coined as
38 Deborah Bird Rose, et al. "Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities", Environmental
Humanities 1.1 (2012) 1-5, 1.
39 Bird Rose, "Thinking Through the Environment”, 1.
40 Sergio Sismondo, An Introduction To Science and Technology Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),3. 41 Wiebe Bijker, "Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics." Isis 98.1 (2007) 109-123, 109-110.
“natureculture”42
, or what Sarah Pritchard in her excellent study of the course of the French river Rhône an “envirotechnical landscape.”43
Precisely this blurring of the strict domains of nature and culture is what makes this approach a fruitful prism for researching the particular circumstances in the early twentieth century Netherlands. The environment, and landscape in particularly are things to which technology and power are an integral shaping part, STS provides a theoretical framework through which this can be investigated and explored.
3. THESIS STATEMENT
Excellent and extensive descriptive studies about the Zuiderzeewerken have been written, like I have elaborated on in earlier sections of this introduction. This study will therefore not attempt to attribute to a more complete and all-encompassing precision when it comes to the events or the involvement of the afore mentioned historical actors and institutions. My aim is not to disclose new source material, or to reassess conclusions that have been extracted from already researched material, for that matter. Rather, the aim of this study is to shift focus from the actors and events to concepts and ideas. By entering the material via a number of concepts, this research aims to attribute to a more profound and perhaps complex understanding of how land reclamation works when it is seen as the intensive and radical forming of the planet’s surface. The process of land reclamation in general, and the case of the Zuiderzeewerken in particular provide rich and relevant material to do so. For one, because the creation of land out of water on a scale like this has never been done before or since. More so because the process of land reclamation in itself is dominated by two main principles: malleability and progress. Both of them have extensive histories and layered definitions and determine dominant organizations of knowledge, engineering, landscape, and perhaps society on a larger scale.
Both these fundamentals are also at the core of the emergence of the Anthropocene, of which land surface change is one of the primary markers. 44
This study of the Zuiderzeewerken aims to contribute to the debates and discussions on what it means for humans to exist as Earth shapers. The emergence of the Anthropocene, signifies the sense of urgency for the humanities by and large to critically engage in the understanding how such a
42 Many STS-scholars have been developing theories and methodologies to address this problem. Influential works have been Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, Routledge: 1991), 149-181.; and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
43 Sara Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Harvard University Press, 2011), 1.
mega-event has come about. Encouraged by the realization that humans are indeed “planetary terraformers,” to put it in Donna Haraway’s words, this study is an attempt to get to a better understanding of what it means to shape landscape, to indeed form terra.45
The references to a literary discourse are deliberate because the process of shaping landscapes in order to make the earth’s surface more habitable is per definition an anticipation on an expectation of a specific kind of future and has been thoroughly reflected on in popular culture.46 I will come
back to this issue of futurology more extensively in the last chapter. When hydraulic engineering and land reclamation are taken out of the context of civil engineering or social planning, but re-imagined as terraforming practice, the influence of the otherwise rather ungraspable issue of time becomes visible. To look at the Zuiderzee project from this perspective could help to comprehend its conceptual implications on a deeper level than merely its technology and physical consequences.
Inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s paramount attribution to the Anthropocene debate, stating that “The idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies Humanist histories of modernity/globalization” this investigation aims to re-enter an already disclosed corpus of source material from this perspective.47
I argue that, although the outcome of the current discussion on the onset of the Anthropocene might not correspond with the start of the Zuiderzeewerken construction, the subject could benefit from an approach that keeps the Anthropocene in the background.48
It is precisely the elastic nature of a topic like modernity and its complex connotation with time that I wish to engage with in this study of the Zuiderzeewerken. The aim of this thesis is therefore to argue that the all-encompassing dominance of the idea of malleability in the event of the design and start of the Zuiderzeewerken should be explained in relation to progress as a temporal concept: the focus will eventually be on time.
45 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthuluscene: Making Kin”, Environmental
Humanities, 6 (2015) 159-165.
46 See for a lucid explanation of the intertwinement of geo-engineering practices and popular culture: Chris Pak,
Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2016), 1-18.
47 Dipesh. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009) 197-222, 207. 48 There are wide debates about the exact dating of the Anthropocene still a lot of discussion, see for example: E.C. Ellis, et al., “Dating the Anthropocene: Towards an empirical global history of human transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Elememta Science of the Anthropocene 1 (2013) 18. Or Jan Zalasiewicz, et al. "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?." Gsa Today 18.2 (2008) 4-8. For more detailed information and data on the developments around the early 1950’s, a thorough study is W. Steffen, et. Al, Global Change and the Earth
4. METHOD: A HISTORY OF CONCEPTS
Methodologically, I aim to follow the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck and his heuristic method of Conceptual History. Rather than focusing on people, events, or social structures, Koselleck focuses on language and more in particular on semantics. In his monumental work Geschichtlige Grundbegriffe, of which the first volume was published in 1972, Koselleck laid the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the focus on concepts as a historical approach.49
It departs from the assumption that concepts, for example ‘democracy’ or ‘crisis’, but also ‘freedom’ or ‘modernity’ provide a fruitful focus point for studying historical change.50
Words become concepts when they build up meaning through time by the adding up of attached connotation in new contexts, without losing the old functions. They gain complexity and meaning through time, as if layers add up like sediments. That makes the role of concepts in historical research complex, ambiguous, and even contradictory at times because with every use, they carry all the meaning that is attached to it by association. Concepts describe observations of a certain historical subject matter, but they also have the ability to shape the perceptions and experience they are meant to describe. An example within this thesis obviously is ‘nature’ or ‘natural’, to define something as ‘natural’ – in a political context an example could be the Universal Rights of Man and Citizen – it is assumed to be self-evident and inevitable.
The function of concepts for historians is therefore twofold: they can either operate as tools for analysis, or as objects of study. When they are mobilized as tools for analysis, they function as indicators. The concepts themselves might nog always be literally mentioned in the source material, but that does not necessarily mean that it is absent all together. Conceptual history in this sense uses concepts as heuristic instruments. To look for certain concepts when studying source material will help to get a better understanding of the specific historical context. In the second case, when they function as objects, concepts can be studied as factors of historical change. The historian does look for the literal use of words, and a specific semantic history of that use. The premise of the historical discipline is that concepts carry such an important meaning, that they become discursive elements in history. In short: concepts can change history. Like the German historian Willibald Steinmetz explains in the introduction to a recent work: “Concepts can be seen as focal points of interpretation and understanding; as identifying regularities and differences in human discourse; as windows
49 Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches
Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. I (Stuttgart: Klett–cotta, 1972).
through which we can appreciate how comprehensions of the world are organized and brought to bear on action; (…) and as rational and emotional containers of social logic and imagination.”51
By focusing on concepts in researching the Zuiderzee project, I aim to add to the understanding of the enterprise as more than a technical, national, or political one.
Koselleck’s writings are relevant for another reason, and that is his theory on historical times – times in multiple. Because of their multiplicity in meaning, all of which were added to the layercake in different times, the multiplicity in meaning also consequently means a multiplicity in temporality. With the help of Helge Jordheim’s readings of Koselleck’s theory of time as something that can exist in the plural, I will examine how a number of concepts organize time52
. ‘Modernity’ is a highly ambiguous, but definitely powerful temporal concept, that expresses a temporal awareness of the now being different from the before and after. It is also permeated by leading principles – also concepts – of malleability, efficiency, and profitability, all of which subscribe to the concept of progress as a way to organize the experience of time.53
My focus will not be to write a semantic history of the central concepts. Rather, I will focus on the behavior and the function of concepts with regard to the Zuiderzeewerken. I will attempt to shed a light on how some of them could be wielded as rhetorical tools, how they make arguments, express or undermine power relations and expert influence or the way in which they classify and organize.
The material on which I will base my interpretations and argument are of a versatile nature. The select corpus of images consists out of maps, plans, diagrams, as well as photographs. It will become clear that images, especially visualizations that entail a projection of one sort or the other, convey meaning and information by themselves, yet in order to make a coherent observation with regard to my thesis statement these images cannot be treated as isolated objects. Almost all of the visual material that is relevant in this study either contains some kind of language, or is accompanied by text. For instance, maps contain a ‘memorie’, a key to the symbols that are used, and photographs usually have captions, either in close proximity to the image or in a text to which they belong. The pith of my argument will however be based on textual sources. Like the visuals, they are coming from a number of publications, such as newspapers, magazines, books, and albums. Others were not initially
51 Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden, “Introduction: Conceptual History: Challenges, Conundrums, Complexities”, in: Idem, and Javier Fernández-Sebastián (eds), Conceptual History in the European Space (Berghan, New York and Oxford, 2017) 1-46, 2.
52 Helge Jordheim, “1. Introduction: Multiple Times And The Work Of Synchronization.” History and Theory, 53 (2014) 498–518.
53 Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity”, trans. Keith Tribe, in: Futures Past. On the
produced for the public to be seen, such as the minutes of committee meetings, or manuscripts of private correspondence, the physical copies of which are stored in the archives of public administration offices, such as Rijkswaterstaat, and in private archives, like the Lely family archive, that are kept by the Nationaal Archief or Nieuw Land Museum, Archive and Study Center.
In three thematically organized chapters I highlight three concepts – visual knowledge, nature, and time - and examine their role within the perceptions and imaginations that were at the core of the Zuiderzeewerken. The first chapter is about knowledge and its visual occurrences in the form of maps. I discuss a number of optical representations of the Zuiderzee project and explore how they work as producers of knowledge- and truth, rather than merely representation. The way in which they organize, classify and present knowledge and provide future visions reinforces the public trust in technological malleability and progress. This creates expert authority that is built on that perception and way of knowing truths. The second chapter is about nature, a notoriously difficult to define and multi-layered concept. I attempt to flesh out an answer to the question what different imaginations of nature around the turn of the century encompassed and how they functioned. The issue of authority will again be discussed, in this case in an attempt to explain how nature and landscape as concepts facilitate the legitimation of power. The overarching question will be how it is possible that seemingly contradictory concepts of nature – namely that of absolute ambition for its malleability, and that of vulnerable nature in need of protection – can coexist. This question will be taken into the third chapter, in which the focus will be on time.
The trust in scientific knowledge, and the mobilization of that knowledge in the form of engineering can be read as a manifestation imaginaries of what contemporaries thought the future would bring: expectations of growth and prosperity. Simultaneously, these things are answers to challenges of the present – the 1916 flood for example – and build on organizations and experiences of historical time, in the form of for example nostalgia. The chapter starts out with a theoretical reflection on the consequences of ordering time, using texts by the French historian Francois Hartog. Koselleck’s theory of time as something that should be seen as existing in plural, and organized in a way that is non-linear helps to understand how progress and malleability are very distinct and dominant ways of ordering time. Finally, Helge Jordheim’s theory of synchronization explains how expressions of temporality that are out of joint are worked together again in order to sync with each other.
C
HAPTERI
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V
ISUALIZING THEZ
UIDERZEEIn the process of designing Plan Lely, examining it for technical and political feasibility, and spreading it to a broader public, images played an immensely important role. Visualizations – the translation of information in the form of numbers, measurements, geographical data, or ideas and plans into an optical form – were persuasive in the political decision making process. They helped to steer public opinion about the enterprise and were indispensable in the design and execution of the constructions themselves. Scientists such as geologists, land surveyors, mathematicians and hydrographers collected immense quantities of information about the environment of the Zuiderzee on a scale of that had not been done before. On the basis of this data, engineers such as Cornelis Lely could build their water works. This information was translated into a myriad of visual forms, such a tables, cross sections, sea bottom contours, and geological maps.
In this chapter, I will start with an introduction to the process data collection within the Zuiderzee context and an overview of a number of theories that help to interpret the processes of visual understanding and knowing through the image. I will then discuss a number of the many ways in which visual knowledge in the form of maps and diagrams ordered and categorized the physical world. The works of Michel Foucault and the lucid elaboration on his ideas by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star from the field of STS are used to interpret how the collection, categorization, and visualization of knowledge underlines power structures and eventually create realities of new land.54
Furthermore, writings by Bruno Latour, Denis Wood and Johanna Drucker will help explain the nature of maps as working objects rather than seemingly neutral representations of objective realities that they appear to be. 55
In the sections that follow I will argue how a number of these maps and diagrams were – sometimes deliberately and sometimes less consciously - instrumentalized as rhetorical tools by the Zuiderzee-Vereeniging in the process of creating social basis for the immensity of the project. The suggestion of objective truth springs from a long visual tradition that the makers of the maps and diagrams tap out of. The argument in this chapter will be that visual aids contribute to the development of the legitimation for authority based on expertise, whereas in
54 Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power', Power/Knowledge, selected interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 109-133. ; Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star, Sorting Things Out : Classification
and its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
55 Bruno Latour, "Visualization and cognition. Drawing Things Together." in: H. Kuklick (ed.), Knowledge and
Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6.1 (1986) 1-40.; Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York & London: The Guilford Press, 2010). ; Johanna Drucker, Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
the process of visualizing categorizing knowledge on the sea bottom this objective truth is inevitably steered in specific directions. In other words, objectivity in visualizations is arguably ambiguous. However, expertise and authority is based on these visualizations. Experts consequently create new realities, on the basis of some, and with the help of other visualizing practices. In a way, one could say that some of these are therefore imaginations of preferable futures.
In the third section, a different way of visual understanding and knowing will be examined. By shifting the focus to engineering drawing I will discuss the aesthetics of modernity, the process of visual organization of the landscape, as well as the architectural language of the buildings that house the pumps and sluices. Here I will show how a comparable argument for the authority of experts in science and engineering is made with the aid of visual means, albeit different in form and less explicit.
1. ORDERING OF THE SEA BOTTOM
In order to actualize the plans to not only close off the North Sea inlet, but also drain substantial parts of it, an enormous amount of data had to be collected, ordered, and transformed into understandable and interpretable forms. Hydraulic engineering, and land reclamation in particular, had not been done on a scale and complexity like this project, so much of this empirical work created knowledge that was new. Data gathering was done through a number of methods, for example by means of naval expeditions, of which detailed handwritten accounts of tidal currents, water levels and soil measurements are the result.56
Tests were carried out through a scale model in a laboratory to measure and calculate how wind speeds would affect water levels, and to calculate how long it would take for the sea to transform into a fresh water lake. Mathematical models were used in combination with meteorological data to calculate the probability and severity of future storm surges, and the thickness of dikes and dams to be able to resist a flood. Formulas like these were also used to calculate the maximum water capacity that the new IJsselmeer, in case the water flow from the river IJssel would be unprecedentedly high in spring, or the probability of ice blocking the free water flow in winter.57
Much of this knowledge was collected by the Zuiderzee-Vereeniging in close connection with the Delft Polytechnic School. Most of it was supervised by Cornelis Lely. A lot of the
56 Nieuw Land Erfgoedcentrum, Lelystad (NLE-Le), Collection: 810 Zuiderzeevereeniging (1182) 1886-1945. Documentnr: 28064: “Verslag reizen technische commissie”.
57 The findings were first published in Lely’s memorandums, that were collected and neatly arranged in the 1894 report of the State Committee, the visualizations were added as extensive appendixes. Lely and Staatscommissie,
seemingly quite technical specialist knowledge was deliberately made public, much of it through visualizations in the form of maps, charts, tables and diagrams. The data was apparently deemed to be useful not only as the basis for calculations and construction design among the scientist and engineers that were closely involved in the project. Particular knowledge was also spread among “the public” in the form of educational material, newspaper articles, and other publications that were often initiated and funded by the Zuiderzee-Vereeniging.58
In most occasions, however, visualizations in the form of maps composed the background to the ‘plan Lely’, often visually represented on top of an existing geographical map. Considering that Lely was among the most influential statesmen during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the process of collecting, processing, diagramming and mapping knowledge and the way in which this is connected to his position deserves a closer look.
Two kinds of information will be the focus of attention in this chapter: the depth of the sea floor of the Zuiderzee, and its geological profile. Their visual representations in the form of depth profiles and geological maps circulated widely by the time the construction of the Zuiderzeewerken started in 1926. I will investigate two maps more closely, both of which were published in 1921, in an article by Lely himself. It was originally published in the journal Flevo and later reprinted in De Ingenieur – the journal for civil engineers that was published by the Delft University of Technology.59
In the article, Lely discusses the history of designs of the idea to close off the complete coastline of the Netherlands. These maps in particular are prime examples of the processes I aim to explain in this chapter, of because of the context in which they were published and their wide circulation in a number of newspapers and journals, and even in geology handbooks.60
58 Examples of these publications are the album series Album van de Afsluiting en Gedeeltelijk Droogmaking van
de Zuiderzee, that consists out of twelve volumes between 1926 and 1941, or a three-monthly journal Driemaandelijkse mededelingen betreffende de werkzaamheden voor de afsluiting en droogmaking der Zuiderzee, that was funded by Rijkswaterstaat.
59 Cornelis Lely, ‘Geschiedenis der plannen omtrent droogmaking van de zuiderzee’, Flevo (1921). The article was first published in the journal ‘Flevo’, that only existed for two years (1920-1921) and was meant to inform fellow engineers as well as the wider public about the progress concerning the plans. In this paper I base my argument on a reprint found in the National Archives: Nationaal Archief, Den Haag (NL-HaNa,) collection 398 C. Lely, 1712-1979, number of access: 2.21.210, Inventory nr: 288.
60 F. J. Faber, Geologie van Nederland, (Amsterdam : Maatschappij voor Goede en Goedkoope Lectuur, 1926) 439.
Fig. I: ‘Geological map’ (‘Geologische kaart’).61
The map devides the sea bottom into four categories when it comes to the soil profile. Clay (‘Klei’), light clay or light clay sand (‘lichte klei – lichte zavel’), sand (‘zand’) and peat (‘veen’), a type of soil that was used to cut out turves for fuel. Only clay, sandclay and veen were suitable for agricultural production.
Fig. II: ‘Depth profile’ (Dieptekaart’).62
The sea bottom is again divided in four categories: Depth of 0-3 meters under low tide level (‘Diepte van 0-3 m onder Laag Water’), under 3-4 m, under 4-5 meters and under 5 meters and more.
The maps (Fig. I and Fig. II) both show clear distinctions, for example the distinction between sand floor in one area clay in the other, or the line that establishes the area that is five meters deep. The establishment of these divisions is preceded by process of ordering information. The lines and colorings tell the map-reader how the area should be known. By defining distinctions, the map makes a certain kind of truth, inevitably excluding other truths. This is particularly the case with these two objects, because the depth profile as well as the geological bottom profile is literally invisible to anyone who just perceives the sea with their bare eyes. This particular truth is only revealed through the maps. Before examining how the maps make rhetorical impact, it is essential to take a closer look at the process of classification of information, knowledge and truths.
Michel Foucault is one of the most important scholars who have theorized the relation between what is perceived as truth and how it relates to and enables mechanisms of power. His reflections have been published in the form of lectures and interviews, of which
Power/Knowledge is specifically relevant for the material that is discussed in this chapter.63
Many examples underline what he defined as “the politics of the scientific statement”, namely the argument that the way in which something is known often underlines certain, often institutional, power structures.64
In a more abstract sense “the politics of truth” is a mechanism that decides the difference between what is considered true or false.65
Foucault’s perspective on power as a tremendously complex working entity, and how it is related to knowledge production beyond state institutions has been of paramount importance to the critical understanding of science and technology.
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star’s study Sorting Things Out (1999) is largely inspired by Foucault’s work. The book is an attempt to tackle the question “how properties (definitions) inform social and moral order via the new technological frameworks.”66
Bowker and Star argue that classification is a practice that is as inevitable as it is problematic. The ordering of the world in all sorts of ways is necessary and every-day practice, bu, making definitions and orderings on the basis of in- and exclusion have structural, real, and far-reaching consequences. Bowker and Star define classification as “a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world”.67
Hereby focusing on the spatial aspect, the geological
63 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 109-133. 64 Ibidem, 112.
65 Ibidem, 131.
66 Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 5. 67 Ibidem, 10.
