Ashes to ashes: the stewardship of waste and oeconomic cycles of agricultural and industrial improvement, 1750–1800

Abstract

This essay examines the development of a cycle in the eighteenth-century Netherlands, in which urban filth and industrial ashes were allocated in rural areas as fertilizer for producing raw materials that supplied urban factories. The essay interprets the oeconomic norms, values, and goals that drove this development as open-ended, gaining context-bound meaning through socio-material ‘imagineering,’ interconnecting city and countryside. It first examines how developing practices of waste collection and fertilization were entangled with practices of signification, driven by and feeding into oeconomic imaginaries of thrift and ‘sustainability’ (‘duurzaamheid’). Second, it explores how entrepreneurs and administrators mutually engaged with soils, crops, and ash through land reclamations, in situ experimentation, societal communication, and statistical surveys, finally leading to a centralized stewardship of filth and ash in 1804. In the process ‘oeconomy’ was defined more specifically, made to refer to the cultivated order that sustained the circulation of materials within a bounded domain.