People have lived in this corner of the Waasland since at least the late Neolithic, roughly 2200 to 1800 BC, and Roman occupation has left its traces in the wider region. For most of the early Middle Ages, the landscape around Burcht was wet woodland broken by small clearings - more swamp than village. That began to change in the second half of the 11th century, when a rising population pushed the inhabitants to clear the forests between settlements and lay out shared fields, worked under a three-course crop rotation and called kouters. The raised paths that crossed the wetlands hardened into dikes. By the 14th century, the first polders were producing crops where there had once been standing water. The Scheldt was no longer a frontier; it was a working partner.

On 15 April 1281, Count Gwijde van Dampierre of Flanders granted manorial rights over Zwijndrecht and Burcht to Nikolaas van Kets, and the title settled into the family's possession for more than 160 years. After 1445 it passed by sale and inheritance through the Vilains and into the van Montmorency family - the same family that produced Philip de Montmorency, Count of Horn, who would be executed in Brussels in 1568 alongside Lamoral of Egmont in one of the opening cruelties of the Eighty Years War. Financial pressure forced Filips to sell the rights to the Vier Leden, a consortium of four Flemish cities: Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and the Brugse Vrije. They lost the title to the Spanish crown in 1585 during the war, recovered it, defaulted on a repair loan, lost it again to a creditor named Jan van Hove, and finally auctioned it in 1621 to an Italian businessman, Jacomo Antonio Carenna. In 1666 Carenna split his estate between his two sons, and Burcht and Zwijndrecht became separate villages. They would not be reunited until 1977.

Burcht spent most of its history as farmland. That changed in the middle of the 19th century. The fertile fields of Borgerweert, the riverside section of the village, were buried under slurry dredged from the Scheldt to provide foundations for new factories. The industries that moved in tell a story by themselves: a guano factory processing imported seabird droppings into fertilizer, a linoleum factory, a cement plant, a pot-and-pan works, a lard processing plant. The Ytong plant, making aerated concrete building blocks, still operates here. So does the Lt. Thoumsin military base, which houses the 11th Battalion of Engineers of the Belgian Army. The village that took its name from birch trees is now mostly concrete and industry, and a country that was once part of East Flanders has been a piece of the Province of Antwerp since 1923.

Burcht's role in the First World War was the role of every small Belgian town near a fortress line. The villagers were drafted into reinforcing the forts of Zwijndrecht and Kruibeke. Houses were blown up to clear sightlines. Farmers gave up their horses and carts. After the German occupation began in October 1914, eighty young men from Burcht and Zwijndrecht died on the front, and one hundred eighty-one civilians were taken to Germany as forced labor. Eight of the deportees never returned. In May 1940 the second occupation began with a botched demolition: Belgian troops tried to blow the two tunnels under the Scheldt to keep the Germans from crossing easily, but the charges in the pedestrian tunnel only partly detonated. The fighting that followed in the streets of Zwijndrecht killed sixteen German soldiers, twenty-nine Belgian soldiers, and thirty-two civilians, two of them from Burcht. Liberation came in September 1944, but the war was not finished with the village. Between 25 October 1944 and 28 March 1945, seventy-six V-1 and V-2 rockets fell on Zwijndrecht-Burcht, aimed at the Port of Antwerp and falling short. Fourteen residents of Burcht were killed. Fifty houses were destroyed completely, and more than two hundred fifty were badly damaged.