Abstract
Riparian communities in the Habsburg monarchy experienced perennial flooding with tragedy often eliciting heroics and generosity. What made these empathetic responses even more admirable was their juxtaposition with the antipathy that nationalist groups expressed in the political realm in the monarchy's final decades. Studying government and public responses to flooding in the nineteenth century demonstrates the critical link between empire and environment which forged transnational communities through floods of adversity, charity and cooperation. As this paper is part of a special issue, Water History in the time of COVID-19, it has undergone modified peer review.