The history of the Netherlands

The Netherlands is a low-lying country at the mouths of the Rhine, Maas and Scheldt, much of it land won from the sea and from marshes over a thousand years of diking and draining. Its territory was the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, then a patchwork of Frisian, Frankish and imperial lordships that the dukes of Burgundy and the Habsburgs gathered together. A revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century produced the Dutch Republic, which for a century was the richest trading power in Europe, with an empire stretching from Indonesia to the Caribbean that was built in large part on force and on enslaved labour. A kingdom since 1815, the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany in the Second World War, lost its largest colony to Indonesian independence, and became a founding member of NATO and the European Union.

During the last Ice Age the region was tundra, crossed by reindeer hunters. As the climate warmed and the sea rose, the coast took shape, and from about 5600 BCE the Swifterbant culture of fishers and hunters lived along the rivers and creeks of the delta, slowly adopting pottery and livestock. The Neolithic Revolution reached the far south, in Limburg, with Linear Pottery farmers around 5000 BCE, and by about 4000 BCE the Funnelbeaker culture had brought farming to the north, where its people built the hunebedden of Drenthe, tombs of huge boulders left behind by glaciers. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker peoples followed in the third millennium BCE, bringing copper and, it is thought, Indo-European languages. In the Bronze Age the Elp culture flourished in the north and the Hilversum culture in the south, and from about 600 BCE farmers on the northern salt marshes began raising their villages on artificial mounds, terpen, to keep above the tides. By the Iron Age, Germanic-speaking peoples lived in the north and groups related to the Celts in the south.

Julius Caesar conquered the land south of the Rhine in the 50s BCE during his war in Gaul. Under the Roman Empire the Rhine became a fortified frontier, the limes, lined with forts at places such as Utrecht and Nijmegen. North of the river lived the Frisii, while the Batavians, settled in the river land between the Rhine and Waal, supplied Rome with famous cavalry and bodyguards. In 69 CE, during Rome's civil wars, the Batavian noble Julius Civilis led a major revolt that was put down only in 70. Roman rule along the river weakened in the third century, and by the early fifth century the frontier had collapsed.

In the early Middle Ages the coastal lands formed a Frisian kingdom under rulers such as Aldegisel and Redbad, which competed with the Frankish Kingdom for control of Dorestad, the largest trading town of northwestern Europe. The Franks defeated the Frisians at the Boarn in 734 and pushed north. Missionaries followed: the Northumbrian monk Willibrord became the first bishop of Utrecht, and Boniface was killed by Frisians at Dokkum in 754. Under Charlemagne the whole region was absorbed into the Carolingian Empire.

In the ninth century the delta suffered heavily in the Viking Age. Dorestad was raided repeatedly and declined, and Danish chiefs such as Rorik and Godfrid ruled parts of Frisia as Frankish vassals. When the Carolingian realm was divided, the Low Countries ended up in East Francia and, from 962, in the Holy Roman Empire.

With distant emperors, power fell to local rulers: the counts of Holland, the dukes of Brabant and Guelders, and the prince-bishops of Utrecht. Holland, first named in a document of 1083, grew strong by subduing West Friesland under Count Floris V in 1289, while Friesland itself kept its independence until 1498. In the high Middle Ages settlers drained vast peat bogs for farming, but the land subsided as it dried, and the people had to build dikes and organise water boards, among the oldest democratic bodies in the country, to keep the sea out. Storm floods took a heavy toll, among them the St Elizabeth's flood of 1421. Towns grew rich from cloth, herring and river trade, and several eastern towns, such as Deventer and Kampen, joined the Hanseatic League. The religious movement known as the Modern Devotion spread from Deventer, and in this world the humanist Erasmus was born in Rotterdam around 1466.

From the late fourteenth century the dukes of Burgundy acquired one Low Countries territory after another, and by 1433 Philip the Good held most of them. Through the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian of Habsburg, the inheritance passed to the Habsburgs. Charles V, born in Ghent, completed the collection by adding Friesland, Utrecht and Guelders, and in 1549 his Pragmatic Sanction made the Seventeen Provinces a single inheritance.

The Protestant Reformation took hold, first among Anabaptists and then among followers of John Calvin, despite fierce persecution. Charles's son Philip II of Spain tightened religious repression and central control. In 1566 Calvinist crowds stripped churches of images in the Iconoclastic Fury, and in 1567 Philip sent the Duke of Alba, whose Council of Troubles executed the nobles Egmont and Horn and thousands of others. In 1568 William of Orange, the leading noble of the Netherlands, led the revolt that became the Eighty Years' War. The rebel Sea Beggars took Brielle in 1572, and Leiden survived a Spanish siege in 1574 when the dikes were cut to flood the land.

In 1579 the northern provinces bound themselves together in the Union of Utrecht, and in 1581 the Act of Abjuration declared that Philip had forfeited his rule, in effect a declaration of independence. William was assassinated in Delft in 1584, and the next year Spanish forces retook Antwerp, fixing a division between the Catholic south, which became the Spanish Netherlands and later Belgium, and the Protestant north. Under William's son Maurice the Republic held its ground, and after a truce from 1609 to 1621 and renewed war overlapping with the Thirty Years' War, Spain recognised the independence of the United Provinces in the Peace of Münster in 1648.

The Dutch Republic was a federation of seven provinces with a stadholder from the House of Orange, but real power lay with the merchant regents of the towns, above all Amsterdam. Antwerp's fall sent Flemish merchants, money and skills north, and Amsterdam became the warehouse and bank of Europe. By 1650 Dutch merchant ships numbered around 16,000, carrying Baltic grain, timber, salt, herring and spices. The Republic tolerated religious minorities more than most of Europe, though Catholics had to worship in hidden churches, and it attracted Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots and dissenters of all kinds.

Painting flourished in a market of middle-class buyers, from Rembrandt and Frans Hals to Johannes Vermeer. The Republic was also a centre of the Scientific Revolution and of free printing: René Descartes lived there for two decades, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza worked in Amsterdam and The Hague, Christiaan Huygens studied light and time, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first saw bacteria through his microscopes. Hugo Grotius laid foundations of international law.

Rivalry at sea led to four Anglo-Dutch Wars. In 1672, the Disaster Year, France under Louis XIV, England and two German bishoprics invaded together; a mob in The Hague lynched the leading statesman Johan de Witt and his brother, and the young William III of Orange took power and halted the French by flooding the land. In 1688 William crossed to England and took the throne in the Glorious Revolution. In the eighteenth century the Republic declined into a second-rank power, and from the 1780s democratic Patriots challenged the Orangist regime until a Prussian army restored the stadholder in 1787.

The Dutch overseas empire was built by two chartered companies with the power to make war. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, founded in 1602, seized the spice trade from the Portuguese by force. Its governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen founded Batavia, today's Jakarta, in 1619, and in 1621 he conquered the Banda Islands, the only source of nutmeg, where most of the population was killed, enslaved or driven out. The VOC took Malacca and the coastal regions of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, held a post on Taiwan until 1662, and from 1641 was the only Western trader permitted in Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1652 it founded a station at the Cape of Good Hope, the start of the Cape Colony, whose expansion dispossessed the Khoekhoe and San peoples of South Africa.

The West India Company, chartered in 1621, founded New Amsterdam in 1624 on Manhattan, lost to England in 1664 and renamed New York. It conquered northeastern Brazil from Portugal from 1630 until it was driven out in 1654, and in 1637 it captured Elmina on the Gold Coast, in today's Ghana. The Dutch became major traders in the Atlantic slave trade: Dutch ships carried at least 550,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, of whom around 75,000 died on the voyage. Curaçao served as a hub for selling captives to Spanish America, and most of the enslaved were taken to Suriname, held from 1667, where plantation slavery was notoriously harsh and many escaped to found Maroon communities in the forest. In Asia the VOC bought, sold and used an estimated 660,000 to over a million enslaved people over two centuries.

The Dutch slave trade was abolished in 1814, but slavery itself was ended in the East Indies only in 1860 and in Suriname and the Caribbean on 1 July 1863, when owners, not the enslaved, received compensation. Freed people in Suriname had to keep working on plantations under state supervision until 1873. In the East Indies the Cultivation System introduced in 1830 forced villagers to grow export crops for the state, and the Aceh War, fought from 1873 into the early twentieth century, cost tens of thousands of lives. In December 2022 Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised on behalf of the state for slavery, and on 1 July 2023, the 150th anniversary of abolition, King Willem-Alexander made his own apology in Amsterdam.

The French Revolution arrived with French armies in 1795, when Patriots proclaimed the Batavian Republic and the stadholder fled to England. Napoleon turned it into the Kingdom of Holland under his brother Louis Bonaparte in 1806 and annexed it to the First French Empire in 1810. After French rule collapsed in 1813, the son of the last stadholder returned, and the Congress of Vienna united the north with the former Austrian Netherlands as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, with William I as king from 1815.

The southern provinces rebelled in 1830 and became Belgium, a split the Netherlands accepted in 1839, when Luxembourg also became a separate grand duchy in personal union with the Dutch crown until 1890. After the revolutions of 1848, King William II accepted a liberal constitution drafted by Johan Rudolf Thorbecke, which made ministers answerable to parliament. Industrialisation came late, but railways, canals and the port of Rotterdam grew quickly from the later nineteenth century. Society divided into Protestant, Catholic, socialist and liberal "pillars", each with its own schools, newspapers and parties. Universal male suffrage came in 1917 and votes for women in 1919. The painter Vincent van Gogh came out of this Calvinist, provincial world before leaving for France.

The Netherlands stayed neutral in the First World War, and in 1918 gave refuge to the deposed German emperor Wilhelm II. Between the wars the Zuiderzee was closed off by a great dam, completed in 1932, and new polders were drained.

Neutrality failed in the Second World War. Nazi Germany invaded on 10 May 1940, and after the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May destroyed its centre, the army surrendered. Queen Wilhelmina and the government went into exile in London. In February 1941 workers in Amsterdam staged a general strike against the persecution of Jews, the first mass protest of its kind in occupied Europe. Of the roughly 140,000 Jews in the country, about 102,000 were murdered in the Holocaust, most of them deported through the Westerbork camp to Auschwitz and Sobibor, one of the highest proportions in western Europe. Among them was Anne Frank, who had hidden in Amsterdam for two years. Some Dutch people resisted or hid Jews, while others collaborated, and more than 20,000 joined the Waffen-SS. Allied forces liberated the south in 1944, but the Battle of Arnhem failed, and during the Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945 more than 20,000 people died in the occupied west before liberation in May 1945.

In Asia the Empire of Japan had conquered the Dutch East Indies in 1942. On 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. The Netherlands fought to restore its rule in two large military offensives in 1947 and 1948, and its forces committed massacres such as that at Rawagede in 1947. Estimates of Indonesian deaths in the war range from around 100,000 to as many as 250,000. Under international pressure the Netherlands transferred sovereignty on 27 December 1949, and gave up western New Guinea in 1962. Suriname became independent in 1975. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten remain countries within the Kingdom, and Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba became special municipalities of the Netherlands when the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved in 2010.

At home, Marshall Plan aid supported recovery and a generous welfare state. The Netherlands abandoned neutrality to join NATO in 1949, formed the Benelux with Belgium and Luxembourg, and was one of the six founders of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, forerunners of the European Union. After the North Sea flood of February 1953 killed more than 1,800 people, the Delta Works, a vast system of dams and storm barriers, were built from 1958 to 1997. From the 1960s the pillars broke down and the country became known for liberal policies, and in 2001 it became the first state to allow same-sex marriage. In 1995 Dutch peacekeepers failed to protect the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 men and boys, and the Dutch government resigned in 2002 after an official report on the disaster.

The Netherlands adopted the euro in 2002. The murders of the anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 opened a long debate about immigration and Islam, and in 2005 voters rejected the proposed European constitution. In 2014 the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine killed 196 Dutch citizens. Willem-Alexander succeeded his mother Beatrix as king in 2013. Mark Rutte led four governments from 2010 to 2024.

Geert Wilders's anti-immigration Party for Freedom won the most seats in the 2023 election, and in July 2024 a coalition of four right-wing and centre-right parties took office under the non-partisan prime minister Dick Schoof. The Party for Freedom left the government in June 2025 over asylum policy, and in the election held that October the liberal D66 and the Party for Freedom each won 26 seats. On 23 February 2026 Rob Jetten of D66 became prime minister at the head of a minority coalition with the VVD and the Christian Democrats, the youngest person to hold the office.