Knowledge and Potato Blight: Historicizing Expertise in the Dutch Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This thesis traces the development of Dutch expertise surrounding potato cultivation from the late Enlightenment to the potato blight. By putting the potato centre-stage, it highlights the roles of peasant farmers, landowners, elite reformers, and scientists in the making of agricultural knowledge. It shows how sites for expert knowledge production shifted over the nineteenth century, moving from elite and local societies to newspapers and specialised scientific communities. A Digital Humanities analysis of the press coverage of the potato blight reveals that newspapers became a platform for the constitution and contestation of expertise, with potato cultivators increasingly engaged in such discourse. Scientific accounts of the potato blight demonstrate that, in the face of the publication boom on the subject, scientists sought to demarcate their research from lay understanding and used the disease to craft the social relevance of their research programmes. Overall, this thesis depicts expertise as a dynamic part of modern Dutch society, with the actors and infrastructures involved in its constitution constantly evolving.