Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.

中文翻译：

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排水失败：17 世纪荷兰共和国的专家抵抗与环境思想


长期以来，历史学术研究一直强调国家代理人、早期资本家和专家在近代早期发起的广泛景观干预，并指出他们从地方和农村社区引发的激烈、往往是暴力的抵抗。这种方法有可能将专业知识与为国家或资本主义精英服务的干预狭隘地结合起来，并将专家置于与人民直接对立的立场上。本文以 17 世纪荷兰共和国的填海造地历史为主题，通常作为前现代人类干预自然的和谐成功故事来讲述，探讨了不同精英冲突时专业知识和环境思想的本质和政治。它侧重于拟议但未执行的 Haarlemmermeer 排水系统，展示了专家如何成为抵抗者，主张保护和谨慎而不是干预，并表明我们可以通过专家交流来更好地了解近代早期环境思想的分裂本质。