Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands

by Ben Coates

In the 1860s, steam pumps helped drain a huge lake south of Amsterdam, including a certain part known, on account of its many shipwrecks, as the ‘ship-hole’. The name survived at the airport built on the new polder – Schiphol – where planes could land and take off from an area that used to be several metres under water.

One consequence of this growing love of lactose was that the Dutch themselves grew incredibly tall.

The Dutch had gone from being among the shortest people in Europe to being the tallest people in the world.

In reality, however, after centuries of battling against the water, the Dutch tended to view Mother Nature not as a life-giving provider, but as a menace to be tamed. They even had a word for it: maakbaarheid, the capacity to remake and control the world around you.

It was perhaps not a coincidence that the Dutch word for ‘beautiful’ and the Dutch word for ‘clean’ were one and the same – schoon.

The Low Countries were the birthplace of the atlas, the globe and the principles of triangulation, and many Dutch nautical terms found their way into the English language – yacht, schooner, jib, skipper, bow, boom, sloop, cruise, deck, wreck, blunderbuss.

The country was enveloped in a brief craze for blue-and-white porcelain imported from China (used as a prop in many Golden Age paintings), until imitators in Delft mastered the technology and began to sell their superior knock-offs back to the Chinese.

Partly as a result of such actions, around 1 per cent of Jews in Denmark fell victim to the Nazis, compared to around 75 per cent in the Netherlands.

For the Dutch, being tolerant included respecting the right to be intolerant.