When the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was founded in 1815, it had a problem of geography. The commercial center was in the harbors of the west. The industrial center was Liege, in the south. The river that connected them was the Meuse, and the Meuse, above Venlo, dropped 34 centimeters per kilometer, three times the slope of the Rhine near Emmerich. In summer it was too shallow for shipping. In winter it ran dangerously high. Towing barges upstream was difficult in every season. So Inspector General A.F. Goudriaan was ordered on 23 February 1818 to design a canal that would simply skip the worst of it. His plan, presented in May 1819, called for a waterway 2.1 meters deep, 10 meters wide at the floor, and 18 meters wide at the waterline, with 19 locks. It would cut the journey from 233 kilometers to 122. The first stone was laid in November 1822 in 's-Hertogenbosch. The canal opened in Maastricht on 24 August 1826, with speeches, a dinner at Pietersheim Manor, festivities for the population, and a ball for the upper class that ran until morning.

Four years later, in 1830, Belgium seceded. The canal had been built to connect Liege to the harbors of the north through Maastricht, and now most of it ran through what was suddenly a different country. Cross-border traffic stopped. It did not resume until 22 June 1839, when the first Belgian-flagged barge reached Helmond from Liege, loaded with iron goods and roof shingles. By 1841 over 4,000 ships and barges were passing along the canal in a year. The poor sandy-soil villages of North Brabant were transformed by what arrived along the new water route. Helmond developed textile manufacturing. Veghel built a harbor and attracted industries. Around Weert, farmers planted fir trees because they could finally ship the wood profitably south. Cattle ranching expanded throughout the province. The canal that had been built as a shortcut had become, after Belgian independence interrupted its purpose, something different: a regional artery that quietly enabled the industrialization of an entire province.

Nothing much was done to modernize the canal after it was built. By 1975 it was suitable only for ships of CEMT class II, with a maximum draft of 1.90 meters, allowing 600-ton vessels to use only 450 tons of their capacity. The locks were essentially the originals from the 1820s. By 1988, Locks 2 through 13 were in alarming condition, the chambers held together with metal sheeting to reduce collapse risk. A skipper at Lock 3, near Schijndel, reportedly lost a full hour passing through, because the masonry required that much care. Helmond was a particular crisis. In 1957 some 20,000 vessels passed through Sluis 7 in the center of town, and the bridges, opening constantly for ships, had to handle quadrupled road traffic from the postwar car boom. The Helmond detour, planned for years and finally begun on 11 December 1981, took until 11 December 1993 to open. By then the rebuild of Schijndel Lock was underway upstream, and a generation-long modernization of the entire canal was finally moving.

There is something honest in the canal's old numbers. A nineteenth-century Maasschip, the type of barge that worked the Meuse trade, had an empty draft of 23 centimeters and could hold roughly 150 to 160 tons of cargo, about 100 wagonloads of coal at perhaps 800 kilograms each. At full load it sank to 110 or 120 centimeters. If the river dropped to three feet of water it could carry only 75 wagonloads. At 20 inches of water, only 45. The cargo cost per wagonload could more than double, from 7.30 to 16.30 Belgian francs, simply because of the season. By 1858, a survey of canal traffic found two-thirds of the boats were under 150 tons and pulled by a single horse, one third were larger and pulled by two horses, and there were perhaps five or six 300-to-400-ton ships pulled by three horses. The Maxima Canal, the most recent of the modernizations, opened in December 2014 around 's-Hertogenbosch, finally allowing class IV ships up to Veghel. Almost two hundred years after the first ball, the canal is still being adjusted.