Hype for the Future 50Y: Significant Dutch Influence on the World

Introduction

Dutch colonial history to the New World can be traced to both the West Indies and the East Indies, albeit with varied outcomes between success and failure. In the Western Hemisphere, the most notable of the Dutch colonial experiments were New Netherland in the modern New York area, as well as Suriname and Itamaracá, both in South America. Today, the island of Itamaracá is known as Ilha de Itamaracá and is located within the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. While Suriname is physically located within South America, much of the national population identifies with the Caribbean before ever identifying with the South American mainland.

In the Eastern Hemisphere, the most obvious Dutch colonization referred to the Dutch East Indies, now associated with modern-day Indonesia, a nation of only islands and the fourth-largest nation by population worldwide, only one rank below the United States of America. The Dutch had also settled the West Indies in the Western Hemisphere, resulting in such settlements as Oranjestad, Sint Eustatius; Oranjestad, Aruba 🇦🇼; Willemstad, Curaçao 🇨🇼; and Kralendijk, Bonaire 🇧🇶, just to name a few. Sint Maarten 🇸🇽, covering the southern portion of the island of Saint Martin, was also associated with the Dutch and remains a Dutch possession to this day.

Hype for the Future 50V: The Netherlands 🇳🇱

The Netherlands is notable in the modern European Union because of the significant legacy regarding access to the water as well as regarding the culture of land reclamation. While Amsterdam serves as the national capital, additional notable locations include Rotterdam and The Hague (Den Haag), as well as numerous smaller locations scattered throughout the nation. Regarding the smaller locations, Eindhoven and Maastricht are each located in the southeast, with Maastricht being the southernmost mid-sized national city in the Netherlands, at a latitude similar to Brussels further west and located within a province bordering the Walloon region of Belgium through Liège. Leiden is yet another locale identified within the Netherlands as a particularly formal location, largely because of the history of trade and access to the coast further south in the Netherlands.

Flag

The Netherlands matches the flag colors of numerous other flags across the globe, using the colors red, white, and blue. These three colors are also pan-Slavic colors as seen on the Russian flag; however, the Dutch flag colors are in the order of red, white, and blue, from top to bottom. For Russia, the colors are white, blue, and red from top to bottom, and for numerous other countries, such as Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Czechia, and Slovakia, these three colors are at least the primary colors of the national identity. In each of the immediately aforementioned cases, red, white, and blue are representative of Slavic pride and identity.