Abstract
Between November 2013 and September 2015, the Netherlands celebrated the two-hundredth birthday of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The very fact that these celebrations were spread out over two years, starting with the re-enactment of the landing of William Frederick, son of the last stadholder, at the beach at Scheveningen on 30 November 1813, and ending on 26 September 2015, celebrating two hundred years of ‘unity in diversity’ but no historical event in particular, indicates that the new-founded Dutch state had no specific founding moment. Not only is it difficult to pinpoint constitutional turning-points with precision, but the constitutional monarchy that came into being shared many aspects of previous regimes. The unitary Dutch state had been long in the making. Already from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, Enlightened commentators were ascribing the apparent decline of the Dutch Republic to the political fragmentation of its overlapping...
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | A History of European Restorations |
| Subtitle of host publication | Governments, States and Monarchy |
| Editors | Michael Broers, Ambrogio Caiani |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Pages | 159-170 |
| Volume | 1 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-7883-1803-7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |