This book provides a comprehensive account of Dutch history in the "long" nineteenth century. In this fascinating and instructive period the country saw extremely rapid population growth, awesome death rates, staggering fertility, some of the fastest economic growth in the world, a uniquely large and efficient service sector, a vast and profitable overseas empire, and relative tolerance. This is the only single-authored book currently available on this crucial period of Dutch history, and it will be of central importance to Dutch specialists, as well as European historians more generally.