In 1665, the British Crown made cheese contraband. The Second Anglo-Dutch War was raging at sea, and Charles II's ministers decided to weaken the United Provinces by banning the import of every wheel of Edam, Gouda, and Leyden crossing the Channel. It sounded decisive. It sounded mercantile. It was the most peculiar foreign policy decision of the seventeenth century. This is the story of what happened next.
This week on Dark Ages: a thriving black market, a price spike across London, Samuel Pepys grumbling in his diary, a plague that turned contraband cheese into a public health hazard, and a Great Fire that quietly erased the policy from the books.
00:00 — The Absurd Proposal
07:10 — The Cheese Itself
14:21 — The Blockade Begins
21:32 — The Plague Intersection
28:42 — The Great Fire Connection
35:53 — The Quiet Collapse
43:04 — Lessons in Foreign Policy
50:14 — Outro
seventeenth century, Anglo-Dutch War, food sanction, Charles II, Samuel Pepys, Great Plague of London, Great Fire of London, Dutch cheese, Edam, Gouda, Broken Wharf, mercantile policy, smuggling, Restoration England, history podcast, dark ages
This episode was produced with the assistance of generative tools, then shaped, edited, and narrated by a human producer. Historical research draws on the diary of Samuel Pepys, the diary of John Evelyn, the State Papers Domestic at the National Archives, the Clarendon State Papers at the Bodleian, and modern scholarship by Paul Slack, Colin Platt, and Peter Earle.
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