The Netherlands and the sovereign it never replaced

Who held the delta before the Dutch

Rome drew the first border across this ground. Julius Caesar took Gaul as far as the Rhine during his Gallic Wars, and his account of the campaign is the first surviving written description of the region; he called the land between the Rhine and the Waal the island of the Batavi. For about 450 years the Rhine was a militarised frontier, and Rome recruited soldiers on both banks of it. In 69 AD the Batavian rebellion under Gaius Julius Civilis burned several Roman forts before legions led by Quintus Petillius Cerialis put it down in April 70 AD. Writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adopted the Batavians as ancestors, which is why the colonial capital on Java was named Batavia in 1619 and the republic proclaimed in 1795 called itself Batavian.

What followed Rome was three peoples and no single authority. Frisians held the coast and the north, with a kingdom recorded between 650 and 734 whose centre of power was Utrecht; Franks held the south, where Old Frankish had become Old Dutch by the ninth century; Saxons held the northeast. Missionaries converted the region during the eighth century, and the Frisians killed Boniface at Dokkum in 754. By 800 the Carolingians had folded the whole area into one empire, and it later sat inside the Holy Roman Empire as part of the duchy of Lower Lotharingia, which governed it in no centralised way at all.

Local rulers filled the gap. The Count of Holland, the Duke of Gelre, the Duke of Brabant and the Bishop of Utrecht each ran a shifting patchwork, and Friesland and Groningen kept their own arrangements under the lower nobility, with institutions collectively called the Frisian freedom that survived until German mercenaries defeated them in 1498. Holland grew out of a fief granted to the Danish chieftain Rorik in 862. The name first appears in a deed of 1083, and Count Floris V subjugated the Frisians of West Friesland in 1289. It spent 1350 to 1490 in the Hook and Cod Wars, fought between the trading cities and the nobility, and ended by inviting Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had no claim to the county, to take it. By 1433 he held most of the Low Countries, and his Habsburg heir Charles V added Tournai, Artois, Utrecht, Groningen and Guelders to make the Seventeen Provinces.

How draining the land created its own governments

Government in the Low Countries began below the level of the state, because the water could not wait for one. Villages and farmhouses in the first millennium were built on raised mounds called terps, which were later joined by dikes. Drainage and flood control expanded sharply after 1200, and the work required standing institutions and cooperation between districts answering to different lords. Drainage boards known as heemraadschappen were set up, and the office of dike count acquired fiscal, policing and judicial powers alongside water. The first water board appeared in 1196, four centuries before the republic and six before the kingdom. By the thirteenth century windmills were pumping water, and they were later used to drain whole lakes into the fields called polders.

Making land had a cost that took centuries to present itself. Drained peat contracts, so the ground sank; groundwater levels were lowered to compensate, and the peat beneath sank further. Peat was also cut and burned as fuel into the nineteenth century. By the fifteenth century Holland could no longer grow enough grain to feed itself, and Amsterdam had become the port through which Baltic grain reached Flanders, northern France and England. The country that had built its own soil was fed by shipping.

The sea kept auditing the work. St Lucia's flood on 14 December 1287 killed more than 50,000 people in the Netherlands and neighbouring Germany, and the St Elizabeth flood of 1421 destroyed a newly reclaimed polder and left the 72 square kilometres of tidal floodplain known as the Biesbosch. The North Sea flood of February 1953 collapsed dikes across the southwest and drowned more than 1,800 people, and the Delta Works built in answer began in 1958 and were largely finished with the Maeslantkering in 1997, raising 3,000 kilometres of outer sea dikes and 10,000 kilometres of inner, canal and river dikes. The water boards that took on that work are the same institution first recorded in 1196, and their members are still directly elected.

How the revolt against Spain divided the Low Countries

The Reformation arrived in three waves and only the third held. Lutheranism won elites in Antwerp and the south and was suppressed there. Anabaptism spread among farmers in Holland and Friesland and produced Menno Simons and the Mennonite church without ever growing large. Calvinism arrived in the 1540s and took root among both the elite and the general population, and the Spanish crown answered it with the Inquisition of the Netherlands. The iconoclasm of 1566 stripped Catholic images from churches across the provinces.

The territory Philip II was trying to hold was worth holding. Its population reached 3 million in 1560, with 25 cities of 10,000 people or more and Antwerp at about 100,000. Philip's enforcement of religious persecution, together with his centralisation of government, law enforcement and taxation, turned grievance into revolt. He sent Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, with an army in 1567. Alba arrested the nobles who came to Brussels to negotiate, executed the Count of Egmont and the Count of Horn, revoked the treaties the regent had signed with Protestants and installed the Inquisition to enforce the Council of Trent.

The war that ran from 1568 to 1648 was fought around towns. The Spanish killed the inhabitants of Zutphen and Naarden in November and December 1572, Haarlem was besieged from 11 December 1572 and held out until 13 July 1573, and Maastricht was sacked twice, in 1576 and 1579. Governor-General Alexander Farnese then changed the terms, offering surrendering cities amnesty, the retention of their urban privileges and a gradual return to the Catholic Church, and on those terms recovered Antwerp and nearly all of what became Belgium. Half the population of Antwerp and three quarters of that of Bruges and Ghent moved north. Seven provinces bound themselves together in the Union of Utrecht in 1579, and the Act of Abjuration of 26 July 1581 declared that they no longer recognised the Spanish king. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 confirmed the separation and ended the formal membership of the Holy Roman Empire that had continued throughout, and gave the republic about 20% more territory, held directly by the States General as the Generality Lands. Catholics settled at about a third of the population of the north, an outlawed minority that rebuilt its seminaries and sent missionaries into Protestant districts after 1572.

What replaced the king in the provinces

Deposing a sovereign in 1581 left a vacancy, and the vacancy was never filled. Attempts to find a competent replacement prince came to nothing, and the decision taken instead was that sovereignty would sit in the Estates of the individual provinces. The Estates-General, with representatives from all of them, settled what concerned the republic as a whole. Each province and each city kept its own government, its own laws and a wide autonomy, and the governing class was an aristocracy of city merchants, the regents.

Each province also appointed an official called a stadtholder, literally a steward, an office nominally open to anyone. Most provinces appointed a member of the House of Orange, the position drifted towards heredity, and a prince holding most or all of the stadtholderships was in practice the head of a state that had not agreed to have one. That ambiguity organised Dutch politics for two centuries. Orangists wanted a strong stadtholder and Republicans a strong States General, and the Republicans twice forced the office to stand empty, from 1650 to 1672 and again from 1702 to 1747.

The republic held about 1.5 million inhabitants and paid for a global position out of freight. In 1670 its merchant marine totalled 568,000 tons of shipping, about half the European total, and that income funded wars against much larger states: the Dutch-Portuguese War from 1602 to 1663, four Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Franco-Dutch War from 1672 to 1678, and the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1713. Toleration was part of the arrangement. In a society living on trade, freedom of belief was treated as a condition of business, and Amsterdam took in Portuguese Jewish merchants who practised their religion openly.

How a company acquired the powers of a state

What the East India Company was allowed to do

The Dutch East India Company was chartered in 1602 with a monopoly on trade with Asia, and the charter carried powers that belong to governments: it could wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money and found colonial settlements. It was the first company to issue stock. Between 1602 and 1796 it sent almost a million Europeans to Asia on 4,785 ships and returned more than 2.5 million tons of goods, and it paid an annual dividend of 18% for close to two centuries from a base at Batavia. It colonised parts of Taiwan between 1624 and 1662 and again between 1664 and 1667, and at Dejima it held the only western trading post in Japan. Corruption weighed it down through the eighteenth century, and it went bankrupt in 1800; its possessions passed to the government and became the Dutch East Indies.

How the Atlantic trade was organised

The Dutch West India Company received its charter on 2 June 1621, with a monopoly in the Caribbean and jurisdiction over the African slave trade, Brazil and North America. New Netherland was a private venture in beaver pelts that grew into an Atlantic port with a mixed population before Fort Amsterdam was surrendered to the English in 1664, a transfer made final by the Treaty of Westminster of 5 April 1674. Slavery was illegal inside the Netherlands and legal everywhere the companies operated. Historians put the total the Dutch shipped across the Atlantic at about 550,000 people, of whom about 75,000 died on board, and between 1596 and 1829 Dutch traders sold 250,000 people in the Dutch Guianas, 142,000 in the Dutch Caribbean islands and 28,000 in Dutch Brazil. Abolition in the Dutch colonies came in 1863, and the enslaved population of Suriname was fully free only in 1873.

At the Cape, a VOC supply station founded on 6 April 1652 had grown by the time Britain took it in 1806 into a colony of 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan and 1,000 freed people, speaking the Dutch dialect that became Afrikaans. The seventeenth century is conventionally called the Dutch Golden Age, a term several Dutch museums including the Amsterdam Museum have dropped because it names the trade and the painting and passes over the slaving and the colonies.

Why the monarchy arrived after the republic ended

Economic decline brought political instability in the Patriottentijd between 1780 and 1787, put down by a Prussian invasion in support of the stadtholder. When a French army invaded in January 1795 the underground clubs rose, overthrew the municipal and provincial governments and proclaimed the Batavian Republic in Amsterdam. Stadtholder William V left for England and the States General dissolved itself. On 19 January 1795 the confederal structure was replaced by a unitary state, permanently. The constitution of 1798 was genuinely democratic in character, a coup in 1801 replaced it with an authoritarian regime, and ministerial government appeared in Dutch history for the first time, which is why many current departments date their founding to those years.

Napoleon found the arrangement insufficiently obedient. In 1806 he converted the country into the Kingdom of Holland and installed his brother Louis Bonaparte on 5 June as king. Louis proved willing to cross his brother in the interests of the kingdom, was forced to abdicate on 1 July 1810, and the Netherlands was absorbed directly into the French Empire, with economic controls and conscription of young men, until the French withdrew in November 1813. A provisional government then offered the crown to William Frederick, son of the last stadtholder, on 30 November. Most of its members had helped drive out his father eighteen years earlier, and they judged that a prince installed by the Dutch would hold better than one imposed by the anti-French alliance. He declined the crown and proclaimed himself hereditary sovereign prince on 6 December 1813, and raised the country to a kingdom on 15 March 1815 with the encouragement of the powers at Vienna.

The kingdom the Congress designed included the southern provinces, and it lasted fifteen years. The north had 2 million people and the south 3.4 million, about 80,000 Dutchmen and 60,000 Belgians were eligible to vote, and William I's government and army were Protestant in a south that was almost entirely Catholic. His attempt to make Dutch the language of government was rejected outright in Wallonia. Revolution in France in 1830 set off a revolt that became a separation, settled by the London Conference of 1838 and 1839, after which the kingdom consisted of the 11 northern provinces. Colonial revenue held the state together through it: the Cultivation System introduced in the East Indies in 1830 required 20% of village land to be given to government export crops.

The constitutional settlement came in 1848. With unrest across Europe, William II asked the liberal Johan Rudolf Thorbecke to draft a constitution, proclaimed on 3 November 1848, which made the government answerable to an elected parliament and protected civil liberties. The relationship it set between monarch, cabinet and parliament has stood since, and the constitution in force is that document, amended.

What pillarisation did to Dutch public life

Religion divided the country vertically instead of geographically. From about 1850 Dutch society organised itself into pillars, each a complete set of institutions for one confession or outlook: Protestant, Catholic and secular, the last of which later split into a socialist pillar and a liberal one. Abraham Kuyper, who founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1879, supplied both the organisations and the theory, arguing under the name of sphere sovereignty that the country was a society of organised minorities. Each pillar ran its own churches, parties, schools, universities, unions, sports clubs and newspapers. Members of different pillars lived on the same streets, spoke the same language and traded with one another, and seldom met socially or married across the line.

The system was formalised in the Pacification of 1917, which gave socialists and liberals universal male suffrage and gave the religious parties equal state funding for all schools. When radio was organised in 1930 each pillar received its own network, and when television began in the late 1940s the pillars divided the airtime on the single channel equally. Leaders of the pillar organisations cooperated at the top while their memberships stayed apart at the base, and the habit of settling disputes by negotiated consensus is what Dutch historians and politicians still call the polder model. Depillarisation was rapid through the 1960s and 1970s.

How occupation and famine marked the war years

The Netherlands stayed neutral through the First World War, helped by the fact that goods imported through Dutch ports kept Germany supplied until the British naval blockade of 1916.

Neutrality did not survive the next war. Germany invaded on 10 May 1940 and the Rotterdam Blitz forced most of the Dutch army to surrender. During the occupation more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were transported to extermination camps and few survived. Workers were conscripted for labour in Germany, civilians were killed in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers, and the countryside was stripped for food. Thousands of Dutch people hid Jews at the risk of their lives, and more than 20,000 Dutch fascists joined the Waffen SS; the NSB was the only legal political party under the occupation. The government in exile in London declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941 and could not prevent the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. More than 20,000 people died of starvation in the famine of 1944 and 1945, when supplies were cut off as the resistance grew. The First Canadian Army liberated much of the country in 1944 and 1945, and American aid through the Marshall Plan paid for the reconstruction that followed.

How the Kingdom outlived its overseas empire

Indonesia had declared independence in August 1945, and the Dutch fought a colonial war against the new republic that ended with decolonisation completed in 1949. Under international pressure to decolonise the rest, the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954 rebuilt the state at the top: Surinam and Curaçao and Dependencies stopped being colonies and became constituent countries of a Kingdom in which the Netherlands was one country among several. Suriname left in 1975. The Netherlands Antilles was dissolved in 2010 after referendums on each island, and Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba became special municipalities of the Netherlands, collectively the Caribbean Netherlands. The Kingdom today is a compact between the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, and the Dutch constitution applies to the European territory and the three special municipalities while the Kingdom as a whole has its own Statute.

Europe absorbed the rest. The Netherlands was a founding member of Benelux and of NATO in 1949, and one of the six states that founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 and the European Economic Community in 1958, folded into the European Union in 1993. Euro banknotes and coins entered circulation in 2002. Movement ran the other way as well: government-encouraged emigration to reduce population density took about 500,000 Dutch people out of the country after the war. The state that emerged from all of this keeps its oldest and its newest layer at once, a set of directly elected water boards under it and a charter of four countries above it.