Ben de Pater

Geography and Geographers in the Netherlands since the 1870s: Serving Colonialism, Education, and the Welfare State

More than the natural sciences, geography was and is a field of scholarship that is bound to a country and a linguistic area. Geography’s dependence on diverse national contexts explains why nothing much is ever written about the history of the field: geography is “a form of situated knowledge” (Livingstone 2000, 7) and “has meant different things to different people in different places” (Livingstone 1992, 28; cf. Heslinga 1978a and Taylor 1996).

The Netherlands in Europe and the World

The Netherlands keeps strong and extensive international economic and political relationships with other countries in the world and in particular in Europe. These have certainly contributed to its flourishing post-war economy and its relatively prominent international status. Prior to WWII, however, this international position was significantly more modest. The Netherlands faced rapidly increasing unemployment rates (from 6 to nearly 20% of the workers) since the 1929 economic crisis while the country was politically neutral and international trade was at a much lower level. That position changed fundamentally since WWII when the Netherlands became a NATO member and a founding member of the European Community. This chapter presents a review of the changing patterns of international trade, the international position of Dutch cities and Dutch foreign policy.

Culture, Religion & Politics

Since the end of the sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a country of Protestants – the leading religion – and Roman-Catholics. Around 1900 two other ‘pillars’ came into existence: the Socialists and Liberals. In the 1960s processes of ‘de-pillarisation’ and secularization began. Old political parties languished, new political parties presented themselves successfully to the voters. In international perspective, Dutch culture is a Northern European culture: the cultural distance between the Netherlands and the Nordic countries is small, between the Netherlands and South- and East-Europe comparatively large. The Dutch cultural pallet got more colors with the arrival of immigrants since the 1960s. But one characteristic remained constant during all this changes: the relationship between culture and water – a ‘delta culture’.