Probable, Possible, and Other Futures: The Netherlands
The Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) monopoly on East Indian spices, writes Amitav Ghosh in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse. Parables for a Planet in Crisis, “made the Dutch famous across Europe for their enterprise and commercial prowess”. The English East India Company was green with envy of its Dutch counterpart VOC, and the French—Ghosh quotes the encyclopedist Denis Diderot—talked about Holland as Europe’s commercial hub. These stories originate in the 17th century, when the profits made from spice trade, to once more quote Ghosh, “helped to underwrite the remarkable flourishing of the arts that occurred in Holland in the seventeenth century, a period that came to be known as the Dutch Golden Age”.4
What provided the basis for this Golden Age? How and by whom was it produced and reproduced? Who perceived it as golden, shimmering, special, prosperous, or promising?
Reading Ghosh’s book, this so-called Golden Age quickly loses its lure. He draws us into a global web of stories that speak of the immense violence that made possible the flourishing of places like the Netherlands. We read about massacres, genocidal war, extermination, annihilation, slaughter, enslavement, torture, and the exploitation of nature, which was regarded as an inert resource there for the taking. All this violence happened somewhere else, somewhere far away, out of sight. ‘We’ in Western Europe don’t (get to) see it. What we get are paintings, investments in buildings and urban spaces, infrastructures, institutions, organisations, nation building. And we shouldn’t forget the luxuries these ‘trade’ relations brought to European kitchens and tables: sugar, coffee, cocoa, nutmeg and mace, pepper. The colonial project—often trivialised as ‘trade relations’—was and remains to be even more expansive than is generally acknowledged. Our world has been shaped and formed by the colonial project’s huge environmental interventions, disruptions and the weaponisation of the environment (especially in the context of settler-colonial conflicts)—which are by no means a thing of the past but con- tinue to be intertwined with our by now democratic societies.
These stories aren’t the first that come to mind when we look at the Netherlands today. Instead, we see cosy little towns and cities, a (still) prosperous nation, expert technicians and managers of water, mobility and agricultural infrastructures. To say that the Netherlands is an exemplary place for research into the Anthropocene, the descriptor of human impact on the Earth’s system, risks to be short-sighted if the country’s role in the establishment of, amongst other things, modern stakeholder capitalism (entangled as it was in globalised colonial networks) is neglected. To this day, a series of path dependencies renders the small country a site of contention central to understanding the past, present and future of our time.
This book presents our encounters with this country and its institutions as well as questions about its pasts and its presents. It unfolds and compares the inevitable entanglement of the colonial project with the technological solutionism of today, discusses the politics of working with and against the forces of nature, the dynamics of local action, trade-offs, risk management, vulnerabilities and legal struggles for environmental rights. It also asks what we as architects can do in these contexts. We divided the book into three sections. The first and third focus on the two urban environments of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Between them lies the section ‘Institutions’ that concerns itself with our visits to universities, academies, architectural centres and courts. Three city walks, planned and prepared by students in advance, contributed to several chapters, for which we would like to thank Antonia, Cedric, Christian, Malte and Mona (colonial history of Ams- terdam), Jan, Giorgi, Caroline and Julia (legal institutions in The Hague) as well as Jennifer, Marlon, Mascha and Vanessa (gentrification in Rotterdam). Taken together, the book traces our journey and the conversations we had with practitioners, educators and activists—all of whom helped us gain insights into the complexity of the multiple crises we have created. Dive in and keep exploring!
