Dutch's history

In 1802 the Dutch Minister to the United States R. G. van Polanen presented his letters of recall.

The Kingdom of Holland and the French Empire (1806–13)

Starting with the 1810 abdication of Louis Bonaparte from the throne of the Kingdom of Holland, the Netherlands was annexed to the French Empire.

In 1813, a provisional government was created to gain power of the country back from the French.

The war with Belgium would last another eight years until the Treaty of London was signed between the Dutch and the Belgians in 1839.

Although it has been revised several times since, the constitution that was drafted in 1848 still stands as the basis for the operation of the Dutch government to this very day.

A convention regulating the rights, duties, and privileges of United States and Dutch consuls in the Netherlands and the United States respectively was signed at The Hague on January 22, 1855.

Finally, on July 1, 1863, slavery was abolished in the Dutch colony of Surinam.

On May 23, 1878, a Convention on the Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Consular Officers was signed in Washington, D.C., by the United States Secretary of State William M. Evarts and the Dutch Minister Resident in the United States Rudolph Alexander August Eduard von Pestel.

By 1900, 500,000 citizens resided in Amsterdam alone – 300,000 more than in the first half of the 19th century.

The Netherlands and the United States: Their Relations in the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, (The Hague: Martinus Nyhoff, 1935).

The United States legation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands was elevated to the status of an embassy when Minister Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. presented his new credentials as Ambassador to the government in exile in London on May 8, 1942.

The worst came just a couple of months after the Dutch Jews were forced to wear the “star of David.” Deportations to concentration camps began, and wouldn’t cease until September 1944.

Ambassador Stanley Hornbeck oversaw the return of the US Embassy to the Netherlands from London to The Hague on August 17, 1945.

In the southwest, the disastrous gales and spring tide of February 1, 1953, which flooded some 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of land and killed 1,800 people, accelerated the implementation of the Delta Project, which aimed to close off most of the sea inlets of the southwestern delta.

From 1970 there was a continuous immigrant surplus, and in the early 21st century, one-fifth of the Netherlands’ population was made up of residents born abroad or with at least one foreign-born parent.