Author: Michael W Jackson

GoodReads meta-data is 502 pages, rated 3.70 by 140 litizens. 

Genre: history.

Verdict: Alstublieft! 

‘God made the world; we made the Netherlands,’ say the Dutch, referring to the 60% of the Netherlands’ current landmass which has been reclaimed from the North Sea via land fill, drainage, polders, dikes, levees, canals, sluices, weirs, damns, culverts, and windmills.  All the mud, water, mire, swamp, morass, bog, and more, combined with the lack natural resources, meant that the Netherlands was largely left alone by the larger nation states surrounding it (France, Germany, and England), though it offered a soggy passage among them.  

At one time the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium, Brabant, Dunkirk, Flanders, the Netherlands, Limburg, and Luxembourg) loomed large, but the Hapsburgs had other more pressing problems, as their gene pool swung from Austria to Spain.  When they withdrew the Low Lands were left to their own devices as a buffer between the greater powers.  It is a complicated story.  For a time the Netherlands included Belgium, but the latter broke away in an argument about taxation between Antwerp and Amsterdam. The provinces of the Netherlands squabbled among themselves about taxation, even when William  III of Orange was King of England.  He gets short shrift in these pages.  

By the way, Holland is one of the nine provinces, and to refer to the whole country as Holland is like calling Australia by the name of one of the states, e.g., Victoria.  

Rotterdam and Amsterdam used the experience of the Hanseatic League to go into global trade, and the Dutch Golden Age was born.  Literally golden because of the lucrative profits made shipping goods for others far and wide.  As commercial ventures this trade was unarmed, and the Dutch specialised in building ships with vast storage and no room for weapons, unlike the East Indiamen ships used by the British East India Company (BEIC).  To convert the Dutch trading ships to warships, they had to be rebuilt and no one would pay for that.  Ergo once the BEIC challenged by gun Dutch traders, they lost. But for a while the Netherlands had a global reach from Taiwan, to Korea, to Macau, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, Brazil, Aruba, St Maartens, and more.  

When the Golden Age flourished so did Dutch art and that became an established part of the culture that remains today in all those galleries and art students.    

When Arthur Wellesley (Wellington) broke the French attacks at Waterloo a quarter of the troops in the thin red line were Netherlanders in orange who are largely omitted by English history. 

At the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars a republican, greater Netherlands was regarded as too unstable and too unwieldy to survive. Instead it was divided into two, creating the Kingdom of Belgium and the Kingdom of Netherlands.  The House of Orange had dominated several of the nine Dutch provinces, after generations of asserting its primacy more generally, and it became the royal choice. The House of Orange was resisted by the burgers of Amsterdam because of its engrained animosity to Catholics and propensity to tax, both being bad for business. But their attitude was not decisive. 

Is this orange a connection to Northern Ireland protestants?  Yes,  it traces back to the William of William and Mary.    

That town hall in Amsterdam on the Dam had been built as a republican town hall, but during the Napoleonic ascendancy it was converted to a royal palace for Napoleon’s brother, Louis, who became King of the Netherlands.  By the way, Napoleon installed him to extract taxes, but once in place, this brother sided with the Dutch, and Napoleon then removed him after but four years. This was the first instance of a Dutch king. Après la guerre the town hall became the royal palace of the House of Orange, but because of the long hostility of Amsterdammers to the House of Orange, the monarch took up residence in Den Haag as neutral ground, making it the seat of government, though Amsterdam is still referred to as the capital. Confusing, no? Confusing, yes!   

Declaration of interest.  I spent a semester at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies years ago, and have returned to the country many times since. 

This book does not even mention, still less resolve, one of the mysteries of the Netherlands I encountered.  Walking from the Institute to my apartment in the evening, I went along quiet, darkened residential streets, where, invariably, in each house I passed the front curtains were open at all hours of the day and night.  Indeed it seemed the curtains were never drawn, and I saw many a Dutch family in the front room watching television or eating dinner as I went by.  Whence came this practice of public display of private life?   

Another enduring memory of the Netherlands came from the lunches in the common room, where the Dutch invariably ate sandwiches with a knife-and-fork. Yep.  Even a ham and cheese was cut and sliced.   

GoodReads meta-data is 339 page rated 3.61 by 103 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: Grüezi

Switzerland became a state with central government only in 1848, but it has never been a nation-state. The largest nation is German but there is also France, Italy, and Romansh in those mountains.  By the way, the Alps, unlike most other mountains, yield no metal. That is important because it meant no great power ever had an incentive to conquer them for gold, silver, iron, or anything else.  

In the early Fifteenth Century isolated alpine communities made defensive alliances against maundering intruders, like Magyars, Avon ladies, and Huns.  Schwyz was one of the first communities to do so.  This alliance expanded when larger threats loomed from France in the west and the Germany (Holy Roman Empire) in the east.  In time the alpine alliances added trade, and with trade came some standardisation, e.g., weights and measures, and some law to resolve disputes.  Neither language nor religion inhibited these practical agreements. Or so it seems.  

The Hapsburg dynasty started in Switzerland but moved east to richer pickings, and when the lords were gone, the vassals started to acted autonomously.  While Swiss mythology turns around William Tell and stout resistance to tyrants, the author suggests a more gradual change occurred largely due to the indifference of the Hapsburgs and the internal preoccupations among the French. Italians were so disorganised that they never posed a threat.    

Those who resided in what is now Switzerland were as riven by religious strife as elsewhere in Europe. Catholics enjoyed murdering Protestants, and when the Catholics were unavailable Protestants happily murdered each other over split infinitives.  All of this was justified by minute interpretations of disputed Biblical grammar. There was the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the unnamed war, and more.  

As long as these larger European conflicts raged, Swiss moderated their own internal disputes, and surprisingly did not try to draw in larger forces. Only when the pan European conflicts subsided did internal conflicts become more intense, proving they were quite capable of cultural suicide if given half a chance. 

By 2010 Switzerland remained insular but no longer isolated from broader currents in Europe and the world from AIDS to the GFC.  The world had come to Switzerland, leaving it little choice but to integrate itself more with the world in trade, finance, migration, defence, health, and more.  Watches are not enough, though the introduction of the Swatch was controversial in Switzerland for pandering to the market. Banking secrecy inhibits trade. The population is declining. The once sacred army is eating the budget to no discernible purpose. Swissair subsidies were bottomless. All of these have had to change.  

Swiss isolation was useful to the major European powers, making it a source of agricultural produce, mercenaries, leather goods, and so on.  Note that neutrality was a novel concept when it came later, and Switzerland more less invented it, and to affirm it worked hard at mediating conflicts among others and hosting organisations like the Red Cross, and later UN agencies and non-government humanitarian agencies.  

How Switzerland stuck together remains a mystery to me, when other polyglot countries like Belgium, Canada, and Czechoslovakia have had so much conflict along language lines. The Swiss say their country is Willed. Does that mean that the television talk shows hum with ponderous opinions on ‘What it means to be Swiss?’ the way they do with ‘What it means to be Canadian on the CBC?’  Willed, often OK, but surely not always, and not ever to a same degree among the dominant Germans and minority French and Italians.  The manifest expression of that Will are the numerous ‘votations’ (a term I had never come across before) in direct democracy and the concurrent majorities in the cantons, which they author does not spell out. The discrepancies in these votes show just how divided the country is just beneath the surface, but the author does not scratch this surface.    

There is an interesting sidebar here.  The Swiss became a state without ever having had a royal ruler.  One result of that absence was that the Swiss never had a queen, never had a queen who acted in public, never had a queen who mothered a king, never had a queen who acted as regent for a successor, never had a queen who succeeded a king even briefly, and so was one the few European countries in the Twentieth Century with no experience whatever of women near to or in a public and powerful position. That lacuna cast a long shadow over succeeding generations of women in Switzerland.  Even when in 1979 women got the vote in Swiss national elections, they were still denied it in the local elections of many cantons. When the first woman took a seat on the Federal Council (cabinet) some other members quit rather than serve with her, and she was subject to a very blatant and hostile media campaign for abandoning her family….  Think Pox News and you have it.  No blow is too low.  No lie is too old.  No distortion too fantastic.  

Personal disclosure.  I spent a fortnight in Switzerland a long time ago (1983) and found the smug complacence palpable.