Preliminary Programme

In the mid-18th century, flood events have been used by public administrations (Water, Forest, Bridges and Roads) to strengthen their town and country planning: renewed legislation, creation of a specialized service - the R.T.M. (Restoration of mountain territories) - ..
Establishing solutions to prevent possible future damages, these administrations aimed, actually, to protect their cities and their “low” lands.
Using their new technical expertise and knowledge, these administrations imposed their solutions, claimed to be the experts and progressively erased the protection measures adopted by local populations.
Working on protection policies concerning flood issues, is an interesting prism to define the antagonisms, the contrasts and the silent resistances in 19th century societies, especially in mountain territories, the very archetype of the fragile land. (Show less)

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries property relations in the estuary of Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt changed considerably. Peasant property, which was predominant in several parts of the region in the late Middle Ages, diminished and in some areas even almost disappeared. Urban landownership increased strongly and by 1650 some 50-60% of the land was owned by inhabitants of towns.
This change was mainly caused by a series of storm surges from the mid-thirteenth century to 1570. These had catastrophic consequences because of human intervention in the landscape: overexploitation of the dunes, excessive peat digging and refusal by landowners to invest in maintenance of dikes. In the late Middle Ages, man did not seem to be capable of sustainable water management. Peasants, but also members of the lower nobility and some ecclesiastical institutions were not able to finance the reclamation of their flooded land. From c. 1450 more and more land was reclaimed by groups of urban investors, resulting in a drastic change in property relations. These became increasingly capitalist: urban landlords leased large holdings to capitalist tenant farmers, who tilled the land employing wage labourers.
An unexpected consequence of this change was that from the seventeenth century water management became more sustainable. Storm surges no longer had catastrophic consequences and instead of decreasing the cultivated area was expanding tremendously. The paper aims at explaining why under capitalist property relations water management was more sustainable than in the period when peasant agriculture was dominant. This issue is especially interesting since Van Bavel stated in his recent book Manors and markets stated that a ‘social balance’ was required for ecological and social sustainability. In the area under study this balance seems to have disappeared, but ecological sustainability was reached. The explanation can be found in changing institutions concerning water management, different attitudes of landlords towards risk and investment, and increasing influence of larger farmers on water management. (Show less)

In the Netherlands in the early modern period it proved extremely difficult to change traditional practices of dike maintenance into more modern systems and so adapt them to new social-economic and ecological circumstances. This lack of flexibility and lack of suitable mechanisms for change caused very long lasting conflicts. Unsolved conflicts on who is responsible for the maintenance of the dike going on for many generations are found in the historiography of every one of the major sea dikes in the Low Countries. Involved in those conflicts were landowners, local authorities, waterboards, cities situated in the vicinity, the sovereign etc.

To better understand these conflicts the paper proposes a comparative approach. The modernisation of dike maintenance systems in several regions in the present day Nertherlands, Germany and Flanders in the 16th-18th century will be set against each other. All those regions were low lying coastal regions, experiencing a permanent ecological deterioration which caused the land to sink relatively to the sea level. The low embankments, once sufficient to protect the land from the sea, gave way to high and strong dikes in the course of time. Their upkeep and repair became more complicated and more expensive and, as a consequence in order to garantuee the same quality, the systems of dike maintenance had to be modernised. Traditionally the people owning land immediately behind the dike were responsible for its upkeep and repair. They, often farmers, worked on their part of the dike a certain number of days per year. In the course of time, (but, as said, only after painful conflicts and often dike breeches) these practices were replaced by professional maintenance by contractors, financed by monetary levies on land in a much larger region than the lands near the dike.

The paper will deal with questions like: what social, economic, political and environmental factors determined how changes were made towards more modern systems? What was the role of the sovereign? To what extent did traditional rules and regulations include flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances? Did the fact that people did not participate personally in dike maintenance any more influence the range of conflict solving mechanisms? How are differences in the fierceness and longitude of the conflicts explained? (Show less)

Floods along rivers in the French plains kept recurring during the nineteenth century. These “usual” events had been constantly increasing in scope and became a cause for concern in the 1840s. Foresters’ professional literature blamed the floods on deforestation in the mountains, which was supposed to have caused floods in plains. This led to the 1860 law for soil protection in the mountains. Parallel to the discussions on causes of flooding and on the deforestation process, local flood-control actions were implemented continuously in order to reduce the recurring damage.
This paper presents a case study of flood and flood control measures on the river Sarthe. Towns along the river Sarthe planned new developments to control floods. This gave rise to a series of cultural conflicts between the inhabitants, the town and the public administration, as well as to some rivalry between urban and rural citizens when the measures implemented to protect the towns actually worsened the situation of the villages downstream. (Show less)