The golden age and its ships
The Dutch Republic won its freedom from Spain in a long revolt settled in 1648, then astonished Europe with its wealth. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was the financial capital of the world, home to the first stock exchange and to painters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. The Dutch East India Company built an empire in Asia; the Dutch West India Company did the same in the Atlantic.
That golden age rested on trade in everything, including people. The Netherlands became a modern constitutional monarchy in the nineteenth century, was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945, and rebuilt afterwards into one of Europe's most prosperous and socially liberal societies, a founder of the EU and host to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
The West India Company and a long-delayed apology
The Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, ran forts on the West African coast, seized part of Brazil, and trafficked hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, above all to Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean, where they were worked to death on sugar plantations. The Netherlands abolished slavery only in 1863, decades after Britain, and even then forced the enslaved to work a further ten years.
The reckoning came late. In December 2022 the Dutch government formally apologised for the state's role in slavery, and King Willem-Alexander followed in 2023 on the 150th anniversary of abolition, asking forgiveness. The apologies were welcomed and criticised: Suriname and the Caribbean territories complained of being consulted too little, and the question of reparations remains open. Suriname, independent since 1975, and the six Dutch Caribbean islands keep the connection alive, and Amsterdam today is a genuinely multicultural city shaped by that history.
Trade, tolerance and a shifting politics
The modern Netherlands lives by trade: Rotterdam is Europe's largest port, and the country punches far above its weight in agriculture, water engineering and law. Long famous for liberal drug and euthanasia policies and for cycling, it has also seen the rise of a hard anti-immigration right; in the 2023 election Geert Wilders's party came first, and a government led by the independent Dick Schoof took office in 2024. The old questions of empire and belonging have not gone away.
They surface in unexpected places. For years the country argued over Zwarte Piet, the blackface companion of Saint Nicholas, which Afro-Dutch campaigners condemned as a colonial caricature and many cities have since dropped. Amsterdam Zuidoost, the Bijlmer, is home to a large Ghanaian and Surinamese population that has reshaped the capital's food, churches and music. And in 2023 the Netherlands began returning hundreds of looted colonial objects to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, an admission, like the slavery apology, that a golden age built on other people's labour and land carries a debt that is still being counted.