Thursday, January 1, 2026

Amsterdam And The Hague

Amsterdam, the largest city and constitutional capital of the Netherlands is actually built on a site that is about two meters below sea level. That is where the name of the country comes from. Netherlands means "low lands" and Holland means "hollow land". The Netherlands, Belgium and, Luxembourg are collectively known as "The Low Countries".

The Netherlands has just about every natural disadvantage that a country can have. Much of it is below sea level. It has little in the way of resources. It is a small and crowded country with larger and powerful countries all around.

But what makes this amazing little country such a global superstar is not the country but the people. Take a bunch of Protestants with their thrift, ingenuity, resourcefulness and ceaseless hard work and this disadvantaged corner of Europe becomes a nation that has shaped the world far and away out of proportion to it's population and consistently rates as just about the best place in the world to live.

Isn't it ironic, but yet fitting, that this country with so many apparent disadvantages should end up producing the tallest, on average, people in the world?

The Netherlands is actually an ideal example of the so-called "Resource Curse", or the "Paradox of Plenty". It may seem logical that the people of a country with abundant natural resources should be better off than those in a country lacking such resources. But then human nature enters the picture. The leaders of the country can use the wealth from the resources to increase and secure their own power, thus oppressing their people. There is also not as much need to build skills and knowledge if the country can live off it's abundant resources.

The leaders of the country lacking resources, in contrast, are more dependent on the will of the people to stay in power so that the country is more likely to be a democracy. The lack of resources to live off means that the people have to concentrate on developing their skills and knowledge, and the people in this country end up being better off than those in the one with abundant resources.

One thing that the Netherlands did have is the wind off the sea and that was used to power the famous windmills which pumped the water out after dykes and polders had been built to reclaim land from the sea. The four red dots, in the following image from Google Earth, show sections of land that have been reclaimed from the Netherlands shallow inland sea, the Ijsselmeer.


Amsterdam apparently began as a village in the Twelfth Century. It became a city by the Fourteenth Century. The population of Amsterdam increased greatly after the Reformation, due to Protestants moving north from what is now Belgium. The Netherlands was ruled by Spain but gained it's freedom in what is known as the Eighty Years War, and the country became known as a tolerant Protestant society.

Independence from Spain was followed by what is known as the Dutch Golden Age, in the Seventeenth Century. Amsterdam became one of the most important centers of global trade by ship. Important Dutch contributions to the world include lenses and the first stock exchange.

New York City had Dutch beginnings as New Amsterdam. Dutch names are all over the eastern part of New York State, and include Roosevelt. "Tappan Zee" means "inland Sea". The name of "Hudson" is all over this area. Henry Hudson was English but was sailing for the Netherlands.

Both Japan and Russia got their knowledge of the outside world, while they were relatively closed societies, from the Netherlands. The Dutch were the only European nation that was allowed to trade with Japan. The resulting knowledge of the outside world was referred to as "Dutch Knowledge".

William Adams, the English sailor who became a Japanese Samurai, had been sailing for the Dutch East India Company when he was shipwrecked in Japan.

Peter the Great actually spent time as a laborer in the Netherlands in order to see how to best go about modernizing Russia and building his new capital of St. Petersburg.

(By the way, an apparently forgotten fact is that Peter the Great, while also spending time in England, became a friend of William Penn, the founder of the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the name of which means "Penn's Woods").

The Calvinistic brand of Protestantism in the Netherlands after the Reformation lives on in South Africa. The Afrikaners were descended from Dutch settlers, as we saw in our visit to "Cape Town". The Afrikaner language, Afrikaans, was originally a dialect of Dutch, and Dutch-style architecture is abundant in South Africa.

The Netherlands was later ruled by France, by Napoleon, but gained it's freedom in 1813. The three Low Countries are sometimes referred to as the "17 Provinces" and the Netherlands alone as the "7 Provinces". But the country did not stay in one piece. After independence from France, Catholics in the southern part of the Netherlands rebelled, and broke away to form the nation of Belgium in 1830.

During the Victorian Age, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam regained it's global importance. The city today has a very high proportion of immigrants and their descendants. The Dutch tradition of global trade continues and it is today the center of the global market in both cut flowers and diamonds.

Canals are very important to Amsterdam, which should not be surprising given it's very low elevation. The city is built as a semi-circular ring road plan, but with four main canals instead of roads. The original, and innermost, was originally a defensive moat. The canals were begin in the Seventeenth Century, and lead to the Amstel River. The name of Amsterdam comes from a dam on the Amstel River.

The central area of Amsterdam, with all of the canals, is known as the Centrum. The following scenes begin in the square known as Leidseplein. There are many museums and the concert hall nearby. The first seven images from around the Centrum are from Google Earth and Street View.








There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >,. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amsterdam-Centrum,+Amsterdam,+Netherlands/@52.370973,4.8989263,3a,75y,145.61h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1saY70nDL2MvalJr7IX7e5YA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0%26panoid%3DaY70nDL2MvalJr7IX7e5YA%26yaw%3D145.61208!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x47c609bb6821e9d3:0xd29b21b043cebd9b!8m2!3d52.367592!4d4.9041469!16s%2Fg%2F12h2qw41b?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTExMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Another central Amsterdam square is Dam Square. The Dutch royal family has three palaces, the main one of which is in Dam Square. The following scenes begin inside the palace. The first three images of the area of Dam Square are from Google Earth and Street View. The first image is of the palace.


















https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amsterdam-Noord,+Amsterdam,+Netherlands/@52.3952951,4.9143724,3a,75y,167.37h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s1rQqn5gu_xl8ZDrC8UatFA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0%26panoid%3D1rQqn5gu_xl8ZDrC8UatFA%26yaw%3D167.36611113872186!7i13312!8i6656!4m6!3m5!1s0x47c608c5ade68363:0xd3b4a640838b16eb!8m2!3d52.3961592!4d4.9296128!16s%2Fm%2F026v0l2?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTExMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Amsterdam is the constitutional capital city of the Netherlands but the modern government functions are actually in The Hague. Remember that, in our visit to Pretoria, we saw that South Africa also has it's government functions in various cities, although I usually think of Pretoria as being the capital of the country. Foreign embassies are also in the Hague. We could consider Amsterdam as the Royal capital and The Hague as the republic capital. The Hague is close enough to Rotterdam, the second-largest city of the Netherlands, to share an airport with it.

Amsterdam, at it's old center, revolves around it's canals. But The Hague revolves around a central rectangular pond, known as the Hofvijver. The adjacent complex of government buildings, including the Dutch Parliament, which date back to the Thirteenth Century, is known as the Binnenhof. The first seven images of the Binnenhof are from Google Street View.













https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0825505,4.302841,2a,60y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s448-As4MKIPbQ__-MZ7S0g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

The modern downtown of the Hague is the Beatrixkwartier. The first two images are from Google Earth.



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