Climate, Governance, and Culture during an Era of Disaster: Managing the Dutch River Floods of 1740–41

Beginning on the 15th of December 1740, river flooding inundated a large portion of the southern Netherlands. After a brutal previous winter and late snow melt sent water pouring down the Rhine, Meuse, and Waal rivers, dikes already weakened by months of localized heavy rainfall collapsed. Initial breaches in the Dutch river lands were only the beginning of a months-long struggle to contain the swollen rivers, cope with disastrous loss of property, and rebuild infrastructure. New dike breaches would open up across a region spanning from Cleves to the Rhine delta from 1740 to January of 1741.
River flooding is not uncommon in early modern Dutch history. Scholarly attention has often focused on river floods in the nineteenth century resulting largely from ice dams. The frequency of these floods is often interpreted in the context of the newly centralized regulation of river management. The floods of 1740-41 offer an opportunity to investigate the connections between climate, flooding, and flood response during an earlier period: the climatic “pivot phase” of the mid-eighteenth century. How did the variability of climate affect the severity of these flood disasters? What role did other climate-induced disasters play in disaster response? What larger lessons about the relationship between climate, governmental response, and river flooding can we draw from this eighteenth-century example?
This paper presents the river floods of 1740-41 as a case study in decentralized response to disaster during an era of climatic, economic, and cultural instability. The severity of the floods was predicated in unusual winter weather, but also problematic systems of river governance and an economic malaise that resulted in the decay of dike infrastructure. Following the wake of extreme weather events, mortality crises, cattle plague, and political unrest, contemporaries integrated these floods into a broader narrative of the decline of the Dutch Republic.