An engaging account of the Batavian Republic and its struggles to modernise the administrative machinery of government while grappling with opposing federalist and unitarist forces in achieving this. To add to the woes of Dutch Republic from 1780 to 1813 was the occupation, and then absorption, into the French Empire, a disastrous war with England, an economic blockade with debilitating demands for money and loans from France.
France treated the Dutch with disdain, imagining the country was the counting house of Europe, as it had once been during its Golden Century.
Schama gives due credit to Dutch values of persistence, thrift and self-management as the qualities that maintained the affiliation of the various parts of the Dutch Republic. At the heart of the struggle was a determination among its ablest politicians to reach a stage where a well managed unified Netherlands would emerge, even though it meant reduction in status as a department of France for some years, until Napoleon's megalomania was reversed in Russia and Prussia.