Netherlands historical timeline

The Netherlands is a country that had to be built before it could be settled, and almost everything else follows from that. It sits in the delta of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, roughly a quarter of it below sea level, and the institutions that drained and defended it are older than the state itself. A traveller meets the result constantly without necessarily noticing: the dead-straight roads on top of dikes, the pumping stations at the low corner of every polder, the fact that the land either side of a canal often sits well below the water in it.

Chronology

1. c. 1122 A collaborative body is formed to build and maintain a dam in the Rhine, the earliest of the water boards. They are among the oldest democratic institutions in the country, they predate the Dutch state by centuries, and twenty-one of them still exist with elected members -- which is why water management here is a matter for the ballot rather than for a ministry.
2. 1568 The provinces revolt against Philip II of Spain, beginning eighty years of war. The fighting is what turns a set of separately governed territories into something with a shared interest, and the fortified towns and water-defence lines built during it are still readable in the landscape.
3. 1579 The northern provinces sign the Union of Utrecht, and in 1581 the Act of Abjuration declares them independent of Philip. The Union is treated as the founding document of the Republic, and its habit of provincial autonomy inside a federal whole is the ancestor of a political culture still built on negotiated consent.
4. 1602 The States General amalgamates existing trading companies into the Dutch East India Company on 20 March. Its shares can be bought by any citizen and resold in the open-air markets, one of which becomes the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. The wealth is what pays for the canal rings and merchant houses a visitor walks through today, and for a colonial and slave-trading empire; the company's charter is allowed to expire at the end of 1799.
5. 1648 The Peace of Westphalia finally has Spain recognise the Republic. Independence arrives eighty years after the revolt started, and the border it settles in the south is close to the one between the Netherlands and Belgium now.
6. 1795 French armies arrive and the stadtholder is expelled in the Batavian Revolution, ending the Republic. After Napoleon's defeat the country is remade in 1815 as a kingdom under the House of Orange -- the monarchy a visitor sees today is that settlement, not a survival from the Republic.
7. 1815 The modern Kingdom of the Netherlands is founded after the defeat of Napoleon. The northern provinces that had been the Republic became a monarchy, and the arrangement lasted fifteen years before the southern half left.
8. 1830 Belgium leaves the kingdom. The split fixes the modern southern border, and it is why Limburg reaches so far down and why the Scheldt estuary is divided between two countries -- an arrangement that still shapes how Antwerp and Rotterdam relate.
9. 1940 Germany invades in May, in the Second World War, and occupies the country until 1945. Rotterdam was bombed on 14 May, with 711 deaths in that raid alone and at least 1,150 killed in the campaign, and the city centre a visitor walks through today is the modern architecture that replaced what burned. Anne Frank's family hid in an Amsterdam annex from 1942 until their arrest in 1944; the house is now one of the most visited places in the country.
10. 1944 The Hunger Winter strikes the densely populated western provinces north of the great rivers during and after the winter of 1944-45, with about 20,000 deaths attributed to the famine. It is within living memory for the oldest Dutch generation and it is why Dutch museums treat the occupation as social history rather than only military history.
11. 1953 A North Sea storm surge breaks the south-western sea defences and kills 1,836 people. The response is the Delta Works, the largest flood defence system ever built, and the dams and surge barriers across the Zeeland estuaries are the most conspicuous piece of engineering in the country.
12. 1968 The Oostvaardersplassen polder is completed, part of the reclamation that creates Flevoland out of the sea. It was drained for industry and became a nature reserve instead, which is as concise a summary of postwar Dutch land policy as exists.
13. 1992 The twelve members of the European Communities sign the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht on 7 February, the foundation treaty of the EU. It was signed in the Netherlands because the Dutch held the Council presidency through the negotiation, and the treaty carries the city's name.
14. 2009 The Dutch and German parts of the Wadden Sea are inscribed by UNESCO, with the Danish part added in June 2014. It puts the country's least built-on landscape -- ten thousand square kilometres of tidal flat along the northern coast -- under international protection.

What survived, and how

Very little of the Dutch landscape is old in the sense of being untouched; almost all of it is old in the sense of being continuously maintained. The dikes have been raised repeatedly, the windmills that drained the polders were replaced by steam and then by electric pumps, and the reclaimed land goes on subsiding as it dries, so the pumping never stops. The country is less a place that was built than one that is still being held.

The twentieth century did most of the damage that is visible. Occupation and bombing took large parts of several city centres -- Rotterdam most completely -- and what stands there now is deliberate postwar architecture rather than restoration, which is why Dutch cities differ so sharply from one another in age. The 1953 flood then reshaped the south-west permanently: the Delta Works closed estuaries that had been open water for centuries, turning saltwater inlets into freshwater lakes and changing the ecology of the region as thoroughly as they secured it.