Netherlands

A nation reclaimed from the sea, born of revolt against an empire.

The Netherlands grew from the marshy delta of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, where Romans built their northern frontier and Frisians, Batavians and Franks contended for the waterlogged Low Countries. Knit together by medieval counts and the dukes of Burgundy, then ruled by the Habsburgs, its northern provinces rose against Catholic Spain in the Dutch Revolt. The Union of Utrecht (1579) and the Act of Abjuration (1581) created the Dutch Republic, whose independence Spain finally recognised at the Peace of Münster in 1648. In its seventeenth-century Golden Age the Republic became a global trading power, pioneering the joint-stock company through the VOC while building an empire bound up with colonial violence and slavery. Conquered by Revolutionary France, the country re-emerged in 1815 as the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The twentieth century brought the trauma of Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, the loss of empire through decolonisation, and reinvention as a prosperous, low-lying European democracy that still fights, and farms, the sea.