Although the country was not well endowed with raw materials, especially those with industrial value, it occupied a strategic position astride the estuaries of major rivers and was surrounded by the large and expanding markets of Britain, Germany and France. Being inconsequential on the economic map during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Dutch nation was on its way to attaining commercial as well as cultural preeminence by the sixteenth century. Early in their “golden” seventeenth century, forever remembered as an era of fabulous profits, the Dutch possessed about three-quarters of Europe's mercantile tonnage and conveyed an important part of the trade in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, thus transporting the imports and exports of many countries. The United East Indies Company, the famous VOC, almost succeeded in duplicating this success in Asia; that is, it eventually obtained a sizeable share in the inter-Asian trade.

However, during the eighteenth century, the complacent colonial power faced a steady decline as other European countries developed economically and started to build up their own maritime interests. The French occupation of the country in 1795 only aggravated the downward trend of prosperity and the structural decay of the Dutch economy. Yet on the eve of the First World War, the Netherlands was once more the home of one of Europe's leading economies, with a fully developed, “modern“ industrial sector. The climacteric in the economic fortunes of the Dutch occurred during the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the development of Dutch sea transport — comprising the three related branches of shipping, shipbuilding, and the port industry (chiefly Rotterdam) — to provide, inter alia, an insight into how and why the transformation took place.

The nineteenth century was an era of contrasts for the Netherlands. The newly unified (with Belgium) kingdom stumbled into it without much luck. For decades after the Napoleonic Wars, when West European countries such as France, Belgium, and Germany were following the British model of modern industrialization, former Golden Age pioneer Holland seemed unable to do the same and drifted further back into commercial nostalgia and economic stagnation. Only during the second half of the nineteenth century, did the Netherlands modernize, leading to a remarkable reversal of fortunes.