World region

Once known as Holland, the Netherlands is located in Western Europe. It borders Belgium to the
south, Germany to the east and north, and the North Sea along its western coast. The country has
a total area of 41,526 square kilometers (16,485 square miles). This includes 33,889 square
kilometers of land (13,084 square miles) and 7,643 square kilometers (2,950 square miles) of
water. The coastline of the Netherlands is 451 kilometers (280 miles) long. Its land borders are
1,027 kilometers (638 miles) in length. The border with Germany is 577 kilometers (358 miles)
long and that with Belgium is 450 kilometers (280 miles) long. The country is about the size of
Maryland. The Netherlands is located at the crossroads of 3 of Europe's major rivers: the Rhine,
the Meuse and the Schelde. The nation's 2 largest cities are Amsterdam, with a population of 1.1
million, and Rotterdam, also with 1.1 million people. Other major cities include The Hague
(700,000 people) and Utrecht (554,000 people). Both the capital and the seat of government are
located in the west-central region of the country, near the coast. The Netherlands still has 2
colonies, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles (both are located in the Caribbean).
 Capital city
The capital city of the Netherlands is Amsterdam. It is the center of one of the largest metropolitan
areas in Europe with 6.7 million people as of 2008. Throughout history and into the modern era,
Amsterdam has been a financial center of the world. The city has also developed into the site of a
number of unique features amongst other European metropolitan areas, with its red light district and
cannabis coffee shops.

The city of Amsterdam is believed to have been named after a bridge and dam built across the river
Amstel . Local legends say the city was founded by two fishermen.
 Currency
The Euro is now the official currency of 12 EU member states including The Netherlands.
The first Euro coins and notes were introduced in January 2002; the Dutch Guilder was in
circulation until 28 January 2002, when it was completely replaced by the Euro. In terms of
Euro's history, the most important part of EMS was the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), in
which the participating countries were tied together by a system of fixed exchange rates, known
as central parity rates.The ERM system was in effect a managed float, in which the currencies
were allowed to move within a certain fluctuation band, but if one currency value varied too
much against another, the central banks had the possibility to correct the situation by intervening
in the forex market.This system worked well into the late 1980s, a time in history best marked by
strong global economic growth.For the European countries and euro currency history, the
economic progress also resulted in pressure to create a single internal economic market.The end
result of those ambitions was the Single European Act, which was adopted in 1986.To further
economic and monetary union within Europe, the Hannover Summit of 1988 draw up a plan to
make economic and monetary union become a reality.

The exchange rate between EURO with CDN$

100 EURO = 134.489 CAD

 Climate
The Netherlands has a maritime climate, with cool summers and mild winters. The average
temperature is 2° C (36° F ) in January and 19° C (66° F ) in July, with an annual average of
about 10° C (50° F ). Clouds generally appear every day, and in the winter months fog often
abounds, while rainfall occurs frequently. Average annual rainfall is about 76.5 cm (30 in). The
mild, damp climate is ideal for dairying and livestock raising, but the limited sunshine restricts
the growing of food crops.
 Type of government Type of government

The country's government is based on the principles of ministerial responsibility and

parliamentary government. The national government comprises three main institutions: the
Monarch, the Council of Ministers, and the States General. There also are local governments.

Background of current leader

Prime Minister, Minister of General Affairs

Personal details

Full name: Mark Rutte

Place and date of birth: The Hague, 14 February 1967
Place of residence: The Hague
Civil status: unmarried

Education

1984: Secondary school, The Hague

1984-1992: Degree in Dutch History, University of Leiden

Career

On his graduation in 1992, Mark Rutte joined Unilever, where he worked as a human resources
manager and was responsible for staff training. Mr Rutte was also in charge of several
reorganisations.

In 1997 Mr Rutte became personnel manager of Van den Bergh Nederland (Calvé), part of
Unilever, where he also worked on a reorganisation. In 2002 he was appointed director of human
resources at the IGLOMora Group BV, a Unilever subsidiary.

From 22 July 2002 to 17 June 2004 Mr Rutte was State Secretary for Social Affairs and
Employment in the first and second Balkenende governments. He was State Secretary for
 Education, Culture and Science in the second Balkenende government from 17 June 2004 to 7
July 2006.

From 30 January 2003 to 27 May 2003, Mark Rutte was a member of the House of
Representatives for the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). From 29 June 2006
he was the leader of the parliamentary party.

Party political positions and outside activities

Mark Rutte was national chair of the JOVD, the youth organisation of the VVD, from 1988 to
1991, and a member of the VVD party executive from 1993 to 1997.

He led the VVD campaign for the March 2006 municipal elections. On 31 May 2006, he was
elected political leader of the party.

From September 2008, he worked as a guest teacher at the Johan de Witt Varias College for pre-
vocational secondary education in The Hague, teaching Dutch and social studies.
 Past trading history
Dutch trade in the east: AD 1595-1651

The first Dutch expedition round the Cape to the far east, in 1595, is captained by Jan Huyghen
van Linschoten, a Netherlands merchant whose only knowledge of the orient comes from
trading in Lisbon. The survivors of this journey get back to Holland two years later. They bring
valuable cargo. And they have established a trading treaty with the sultan of Bantam, in Java.

Their return prompts great excitement. Soon about ten private vessels are setting off each year
from the Netherlands to find their fortune in the east. The States General of the newly
independent Dutch republic decide that this unlicensed trading activity, in distant and
dangerous waters, needs both control and protection.
In 1602 the States General form a Dutch East India Company, with extensive privileges and
powers. It is to have a tax-free monopoly of the eastern trade for twenty-one years. It is
authorized to build forts, establish colonies, mint coins, and maintain a navy and army as
required.

With these powers the company takes only a few decades to deprive Portugal of the spice
trade. A capital is established at Batavia, in Java, in 1619. The Portuguese are driven out of
Malacca by 1641 and from Sri Lanka by 1658. But the main focus of Dutch attention is the
Moluccas - the Indonesian islands of which the alternative name, the Spice Islands, declares
their central importance in the eastern trade.
The Moluccas are the source of the most valuable spice of all, the clove, coveted for many
different purposes - as a flavour in food, as a preservative, as a mild anaesthetic, as an
ingredient in perfume, even to mask stinking breath. In pursuit of Moluccan cloves, and also
nutmegs, the Portuguese make local treaties as early as 1512.

In the early decades of the 17th century the Dutch East India Company gradually excludes the
Portuguese from trade in the Moluccas. The Dutch also take on, and oust from the islands,
another European nation attempting to get a foothold in the region - the English East India
Company.
The Dutch control the trade in cloves with ruthless efficiency. During the 17th century clove
trees are eradicated on all the Spice Islands except two - Amboina and Ternate - to limit
production and keep prices high. Strict measures are taken to ensure that plants are not
exported for propagation elsewhere (a restriction successfully maintained until the late 18th
century).

The Portuguese never recover their trading strength in the east. But in expelling the English
from the Moluccas, the Dutch unwittingly do them a favour. The English East India Company
decides to concentrate its efforts on India.
Meanwhile the Dutch company has taken a decision, small in itself, which has momentous
results. Dutch sea captains have discovered that it is feasible to sail directly northeast across
the Indian Ocean from the southern tip of Africa.
 This makes the Cape a very important port of call for taking on water and fresh supplies.

In 1651 the company decides to meet this need by establishing a small Dutch settlement on the
bay beneath Table Mountain. By now there is also a thriving Dutch colony on the other side of
the Atlantic.

Dutch in America: AD 1624-1664

In 1621 the States General in the Netherlands grant a charter to the Dutch West India
Company, giving it a monopoly to trade and found colonies along the entire length of the
American coast. The area of the Hudson river, explored by Hudson for the Dutch East India
Company in 1609, has already been designated New Netherland. Now, in 1624, a party of
thirty families is sent out to establish a colony. They make their first permanent settlement at
Albany, calling it Fort Orange.

In 1626 Peter Minuit is appointed governor of the small colony. He purchases the island of
Manhattan from Indian chiefs, and builds a fort at its lower end. He names the place New
Amsterdam.
The Dutch company finds it easier to make money by piracy than by the efforts of colonists
(the capture of the Spanish silver fleet off Cuba in 1628 yields vast profits), but the town of
New Amsterdam thrives as an exceptionally well placed seaport - even though administered in
a harshly authoritarian manner by a succession of Dutch governors.

The only weakness of New Amsterdam is that it is surrounded by English colonies to the north
and south of it. This place seems to the English both an anomaly and an extremely desirable
possession. Both themes are reflected in the blithe grant by Charles II in 1664 to his brother,
the duke of York, of the entire coastline between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers.
New Amsterdam, and behind it New Netherland, lie exactly in the middle of this stretch. When
an English fleet arrives in 1664, the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant accepts the reality of the
situation and surrenders the territory without a shot being fired. New Amsterdam is
transformed without upheaval into New York.

This reduces the Dutch presence in the new world to the region of Guiana, in south America,
where the first settlements are established before 1616. Taken over by the company from 1621,
they survive on sugar grown with slave labour. Frequently disputed between Dutch, French
and English interests, the Dutch section of the Guiana coast eventually becomes Surinam.
Cape Town: AD 1652

Ships sailing to and from the east make a habit of calling in at the bay below Table mountain - to
barter with the Khoikhoi tribes of the region for fresh food, and to engage in an informal postal
system. Letters and news sheets are left under marked stones, to await a particular recipient or to
be carried in the appropriate direction by the next passing ship.

There has even been a feeble attempt by the English to settle the Cape, in 1615, leaving ten
criminals reprieved from the gallows as the founding colonists. But the first serious effort to
establish a settlement comes in 1652, with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and ninety employees
of the Dutch East India Company.
 

They arrive in three ships, well equipped with seeds and with tools for agriculture and building.
Their purpose is to establish a secure fort, to acquire cattle from the Khoikhoi and to develop a
vegetable garden to provision passing Dutch ships. During the ten years which van Riebeeck
spends in the settlement (and records in detail in his journal), these aims are fulfilled. A fort is
built, of earth ramparts and wooden palisades, and eight miles of coast are brought under
cultivation.

Van Riebeeck also initiates two developments of great significance for the future.
 

Free burghers and slaves: AD 1657

By 1657 it is clear that there is more work at the Cape than can be done under central direction
by the company's employees. Van Riebeeck proposes that it will be more effective to release
married men from their contracts and to give them farms of their own to cultivate. This
development is approved by the company. The independent farmers become known as free
burghers.

The second innovation, also put into effect from 1657, is van Riebeeck's purchase of slaves to do
domestic and agricultural work. At the start many of the slaves are brought from the company's
eastern stations, in Indonesia and India; later Mozambique becomes the main source of supply.
 
By the mid-18th century half the white adult males in the Cape colony own at least one slave. In
this society slavery forms, from the start, an integral element.

With adult male slaves outnumbering their free counterparts by two to one, and a high purchase
price prevailing in the market, both the penal code for slaves and the level of work demanded
from them become brutally harsh in the developing Dutch settlement.
 

Cape Dutch and Trekboers: 18th century AD

Until 1707 the Dutch East India Company makes some effort to encourage immigration to the
Cape. Yet by that time, half a century after the first settlement, the burgher families still number
only 1779 men, women and children - consisting of Dutch, German and a minority of
Huguenots. Together they own 1107 slaves, mainly adult males.

Thereafter the growth of the settler population is by natural expansion - reaching about 15,000
(with approximately the same number of slaves) by the end of the 18th century. Something
approaching a full-scale Dutch colony has developed by accident rather than design, in place of
the original depot for the provisioning of ships.
 

During the 18th century the colony's territory expands more dramatically than its population, for
a reason directly connected with the reliance on slaves. Free burghers come to regard manual
labour as slaves' work. But for many of them there is no other available employment.

The response of the unemployed is to move away from the coast, into vast open expanses
sparsely occupied by Khoikhoi and San tribes. In these regions the Dutch live as semi-nomadic
herdsmen, fiercely independent, fighting the native tribes for their land and their cattle.
 
By the 1770s the Dutch nomads have penetrated as far as Graaff-Reinet, some 400 miles
northeast of Cape Town. They become known as Trekboers (Dutch for 'wandering farmers'), a
word subsequently often shortened to Boers. When they go on raids, to rustle the cattle of the
tribes, the Trekboers form themselves into armed bands of mounted gunmen known as
commandos.

At first the commandos make short work of tribal opposition. Between 1785 and 1795 they kill
some 2500 San men and women and take another 700, mainly children, into slavery. But by this
time the Boers, approaching more fertile territory near the Great Fish River, are meeting stronger
opposition from Bantu-speaking Xhosa tribes.
 

A series of frontier wars between Boers and Xhosa begins in 1779. The Boers appeal to Cape
Town but get little help. In their frustration, in 1795, they declare Graaff-Reinet an independent
Boer republic.

The Boers are by now, both in their own estimation and in reality, a people different from the
Dutch at the Cape. They call themselves Afrikaners, proudly emphasizing their birth in Africa.
Their language, Afrikaans, already differs from Dutch. Their fierce independence is
accompanied by an equally uncompromising variety of Calvinism. But in the very first year of
their new republic a wider conflict intervenes. In 1795 the British seize Cape Town.
 

The Cape during the French wars: AD 1795-1814

The pretext for Britain's seizing of the Cape, as the most strategic point on the important sea
route to India, is the French conquest of the Netherlands in 1795. This brings the Dutch into the
European war on France's side and makes their attractive African colony a legitimate prey.

The peace of Amiens, in 1802, restores the Cape to its previous owners and brings back a Dutch
administration. But war is renewed in 1803. The British capture the Cape again in 1806. And this
time the terms of the peace ending the Napoleonic wars, agreed in the congress of Vienna, leave
the southern tip of Africa in British hands. It is an arrangement which, for the rest of the century,
will lead to friction between the British administration and the original Afrikaner colonists.