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Conflicts around the Maintenance of Sea Dikes in the early Modern Period. A Comparison of Major Sea Dikes in the Northern Netherlands, Germany and Flanders
| 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?
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