“Lower countries” keep a quarter of the land under the sea
The Netherlands—informally Holland—is Northwestern Europe’s low country and the largest constituent of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with twelve provinces and Caribbean overseas territories. The name means “lower countries”: twenty-six percent of the land sits below sea level in polders reclaimed since the fourteenth century, yet it ranks second worldwide in farm exports.
Germany lies east and Belgium south, with the North Sea along the rest. More than 18 million people live on 33,500 square kilometres of land, about 541 per square kilometre. Amsterdam is the nominal capital, but parliament, cabinet and the Supreme Court sit in The Hague, and Rotterdam runs Europe’s busiest port. West Frisian shares official status with Dutch in Friesland, and Papiamento and English serve the Caribbean islands.
Holland properly means just the provinces of North and South Holland, home to about 38 percent of citizens, and since 2019 the government has preferred the Netherlands. Burgundian dukes spoke of the lands over here, which under the Habsburgs became the lands down here, rendered Neder-landen in Dutch. The English word Dutch goes back to a Proto-Germanic term meaning of the people.
Neanderthal traces near Maastricht are about 250,000 years old, and Drenthe yielded the world’s oldest canoe, from about 8000 BC. Funnelbeaker farmers built Drenthe’s stone dolmens between 4300 and 2800 BC, Bell Beaker people brought copper and gold, and the King’s grave at Oss, around 700 BC, is Western Europe’s largest burial mound of its type. Germanic groups that became the Frisii, Saxons and Salian Franks settled by about 250 BC.
During the Golden Age the Dutch East and West India companies built colonies and trading posts worldwide. Neutral in World War I, the country was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945. A parliamentary monarchy since 1848, it grew around separate religious and political pillars, granted women the vote in 1919, and in 2001 led the world in allowing couples of the same sex to marry. It helped found the EU, NATO and the eurozone.
Source: Netherlands
