A confederation of seven sovereign provinces (1579/1588–1795) governed by a States General voting by province, provincial States dominated by urban regents, and stadtholders from the House of Orange. It became Europe's leading commercial power and a haven of relative religious toleration, but its unanimity rules and factional strife were notorious.
The Low Countries were inherited by the Habsburgs and, from 1555, ruled by Philip II of Spain. Heavy taxation, centralisation and the persecution of Protestants provoked the Dutch Revolt from 1566–1568, led by William of Orange. In the Union of Utrecht of 23 January 1579 the northern provinces agreed to defend one another, to coordinate taxation and war, and to leave religion largely to each province, while guaranteeing that no one would be persecuted for conscience. In the Act of Abjuration (1581) the States General renounced Philip II. After unsuccessful attempts to find another sovereign, the States General assumed sovereignty in 1588. Spain recognised the republic only at the Peace of Münster in 1648.
The republic was a confederation whose sovereignty lay with the provinces.
Holland supplied more than half of the republic's common budget, which gave it de facto leadership and made conflict between Holland and the stadtholder the central axis of politics.
The republic became Europe's leading commercial and financial centre in the seventeenth century: the Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602), the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (1609), large-scale shipping, fisheries and textile production, and drainage and land reclamation by water boards. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude describe it as "the first modern economy", a contested label. Provinces and towns provided poor relief, orphanages and schools, often through churches and charitable foundations. Public credit was strong; Holland could borrow at low interest. The VOC and the West India Company were also engines of colonial conquest and the slave trade.
The republic's founding document required unanimity on the most important matters, and the Federalist No. 20, written by Hamilton and Madison in 1787 as a warning to Americans, summed up the result as "Imbecility in the government; discord among the provinces; foreign influence and indignities". Religious and political conflict was severe: in 1619 the dispute between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants ended with the Synod of Dort and the execution of Oldenbarnevelt under the stadtholder Maurice. In the "disaster year" of 1672, when France and its allies invaded, a crowd in The Hague lynched Johan and Cornelis de Witt and William III became stadtholder. Courts were provincial and local; there was no federal court above them. Relative toleration attracted Huguenots, Sephardic Jews and dissident thinkers, though the Reformed Church was privileged and Catholics worshipped in tolerated but hidden churches.
The republic won independence, built a global trading empire and a culture of print, science and art, and showed that a confederation of merchant provinces could hold off great monarchies for two centuries. In the eighteenth century it declined relative to Britain and France. The Patriot movement of the 1780s demanded wider participation and was suppressed after a Prussian invasion in 1787. When French revolutionary armies arrived in January 1795, the stadtholder William V fled and the Batavian Republic replaced the old order.
A confederation of provinces with a unanimity-based States General won independence from Spain, became Europe's leading commercial and financial power in the seventeenth century, and maintained comparatively broad freedom of conscience and print. Its government was dominated by co-opting urban regents and the House of Orange, and its trading companies conquered colonies and traded in enslaved people.
Relative economic decline, rivalry between regents and the House of Orange, and the exclusion of the wider citizenry produced the Patriot crisis of the 1780s, ended by a Prussian invasion in 1787. In January 1795 French revolutionary armies and Dutch revolutionaries overthrew the stadtholderate and proclaimed the Batavian Republic, which adopted a unitary constitution in 1798.
In the Dutch Republic sovereignty lay with the seven provinces, each with one vote in the States General; the States General could make treaties, war and peace, raise armies and fleets and assess provincial contributions, but such decisions required unanimity and the sanction of the provinces.[1][2][3][4]
The Federalist No. 20 (1787) cited the United Netherlands as a warning, stating that in important cases 'not only the provinces but the cities must be unanimous' and summarising the results as 'Imbecility in the government; discord among the provinces; foreign influence and indignities'.[1]
The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was 'the first modern economy'.[1][2]