Significance and Consequences of the Continental System for Napoleonic Holland, Especially for Amsterdam

Abstract

The Continental System represented an important era for Holland in the Napoleonic period and for Dutch history generally. The founding of the Kingdom of Holland in 1806 was an unmistakable part of Napoleon’s imper- ial political, economic and military plans in the war against England, and Louis’s successive fall as king in 1810 was a direct result of his incapacity to meet the demands of his imperial brother in maintaining the Blockade. After Louis’s abdication, Holland lost its independence completely and became a part of the French Empire. During the period of annexation or ‘’incorpora- tion’, the T)utch Departments’ were administered separately by a general government under a French governor general. Furthermore, international trade, the mainstay of the economy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Dutch Republic, came to a complete standstill as a result of the Blockade. The subsequent decline in Dutch industry, large-scale impover- ishment of the people and an unprecedented de-urbanization in western Holland all illustrate the hardships wrought by the Napoleonic Blockade. The impact of the Blockade was particularly intense for Amsterdam; it lost its proud position as a leading international commercial and financial cen- tre and transformed during the Napoleonic years into a modest trade and commercial market of national and regional importance at best.