The Netherlands

A country built below sea level by people who organised to keep it dry, and briefly the richest place on earth. The Dutch revolt against Spain from 1568 lasted eighty years and produced a republic of seven provinces governed by merchants rather than a monarch, an anomaly in seventeenth-century Europe. Water management came first: polders, dykes and windmills required collective institutions - the water boards are among the oldest continuous democratic bodies in the world - and roughly a quarter of the country lies below sea level. The Golden Age followed, with the Dutch East India Company as the first joint-stock company with tradeable shares, the first stock exchange, the first central bank of a modern type, and a tulip bubble that is still the standard example. Amsterdam's tolerance drew Sephardic Jews, Huguenots and dissenting printers, and Spinoza and Descartes both worked there. The empire took Indonesia, the Cape, Ceylon and New Amsterdam, and ran a substantial slave trade. Germany occupied the country from 1940 and around three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered, the highest proportion in Western Europe. The Delta Works followed the 1953 flood. Amsterdam is the capital and The Hague the seat of government. The country has about eighteen million people and among the highest population densities in Europe. Dutch is official, with Frisian co-official in one province, and English is very widely spoken. It is the world's second largest agricultural exporter by value despite its size. Rotterdam is Europe's largest port. Cycling accounts for around a quarter of all journeys.

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