Reclaiming the Land: The Drainage Paradigm and the Making of Twentieth-Century Rural Europe

Land reclamation played a crucial role in the making of twentieth-century rural Europe. This chapter explores attempts to render purportedly “unused” land productive through the conversion of wetlands to arable lands and the creation of “new” land from the sea. It demonstrates that land drainage and reclamation relied upon a transnationally shared set of discourses and practices, which created new socio-ecological environments through contentious processes in which the natural and the social were deeply intertwined. State bureaucracies played a crucial role in designing and implementing such schemes which often marginalized or destroyed existing land and water use practices. In the last third of the twentieth century, scientists, environmental activists, and citizens began to scrutinize such interventions in rural livelihoods and environments. These new actors proved effective at challenging not only individual reclamation schemes but the drainage paradigm as such. Writing the history of the twentieth-century European countryside, we must recognize the importance of land reclamation as a factor which shaped lived experiences and natural environments with results that reverberate into the present.