Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
From the end of the 16th century, the city grew rapidly to become the largest and most powerful city in the Netherlands and the main centre of trade, commerce, finance and culture. The origins of the split between Amsterdam as capital city and The Hague as seat of government lay in the peculiar Dutch constitutional history.
In 1432, Holland became part of the Burgundian Netherlands and since 1477 of the Habsburg Seventeen Provinces. In the 16th century the county became the most densely urbanised region in Europe, with the majority of the population living in cities. Within the Burgundian Netherlands, Holland was the dominant province in the north; the political ...
In 1806 Napoleon transformed the Netherlands (along with a small part of what is now Germany) into the Kingdom of Holland, putting his brother Louis Bonaparte (1778–1846), on the throne. The new king was unpopular, but he was willing to cross his brother for the benefit of his new kingdom.
The Netherlands remained neutral during World War I, in part because the import of goods through the Netherlands proved essential to German survival until the blockade by the British Royal Navy in 1916. [102] That changed in World War II, when Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940.
On January 1, 1921, the city became 4x larger from 4,630-hectare (11,400-acre) to 17,455-hectare (43,130-acre) with 36,000 additional inhabitants and a strip of the Zuiderzee. [53] The municipalities Buiksloot, Nieuwendam, Ransdorp, Watergraafsmeer and Sloten were fully annexed. [53] The 1928 Summer Olympics were hosted in Amsterdam. [54]
The city is the cultural capital of the Netherlands. [25] Many large Dutch institutions have their headquarters in the city. [ 26 ] Many of the world's largest companies are based here or have established their European headquarters in the city, such as technology companies Uber , Netflix , and Tesla . [ 27 ]
An important factor in the growth of the Netherlands as an economic power was the influx of groups seeking religious toleration of the Dutch Republic. In particular, it became the destination of Portuguese and Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisitions in Iberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [5] and later, poorer German Jews. The ...
During World War I, the Imperial German army refrained from attacking the Netherlands, and thus relations between the two states were preserved. The 1914 Septemberprogramm authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg proposed the creation of a Central European Economic Union, comprising a number of European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, in which, as the ...