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Amsterdam became an international banking centre challenging in importance the City of London and the Paris Bourse. It houses such famous institutions as the Amsterdamsche Bank n. v., the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappy n. v., Mendelssohn & Co. (now defunct), whose proprietors will turn a guilder almost anywhere they can find one. They are still sorry that Spain's Dictator Franco turned down their offer to bank him last spring. After Adolf Hitler came to power, Amsterdam became a concentration camp for refugee money. The city's grain market is one of the biggest in Europe; its stock-market is a sensitive, if not completely reliable, seismograph of world conditions.
More remarkable was The Netherlands growth in manufactures. Lacking most of her food, forced to import almost all her industrial raw materials, the country nevertheless spurred its production of tiles and potteries, radio and electrical appliances, Diesel engines, chemicals. Amsterdam (and Antwerp in Belgium), are the largest diamond-cutting centres of the world, an operation carried on in plants similar to auto factories. Rotterdam developed into the continent's third biggest port for transshipment of goods and houses sizable shipbuilding yards.
Richer Abroad. The Dutch are today the largest holders of gold, foreign exchange, foreign and colonial securities of any continental European nation (about $6,000,000,000) and the largest foreign holders, next to the British, of U. S. securities (about $1,000,000,000). But the greatest wealth of The Netherlands is the wealth of the Indies.
Netherlands Beyond the Seas includes Curacao, in the Caribbean; Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana), in South America, and most important of all, the archipelago officially called The Netherlands Indies, known to the native inhabitants as Indonesia, called by old mariners simply The Indies. These islands, home of orangutans, Komodo dragons, hornbills and headhunters, producer of pearls, spices, rare woods, stretches 1,300 miles from North to South, 3,000 from East to West and are inhabited by 60,000,000 brown-bodied souls, not counting some 1,500,000 Asiatics and Europeans. Queen Wilhelmina has never visited her Eastern Empire (although one of New Guinea's highest peaks is named for her), but she can hardly fail to appreciate what a windfall came to her little country the day in 1602 when daring adventurers of the Dutch East India Co. set out on a five-year voyage to claim the islands.
Parallel. Just as today the fate of The Netherlands Empire leans on the fate of the British Empire, so the colonial history of The Indies roughly parallels that of British-owned India: a period of government by the Dutch East India Co., followed by The Netherlands Government taking over; ruthless suppression of native resistance; enforced labor as a "tribute" to the "Motherland"; a change of masters for eleven years during the Napoleonic wars when the British temporarily took the islands; institution of puppet native rulers who are always "advised" by a resident Dutchman; gradual, systematic improvement of colonial Government, bringing with it greater investments, wiser methods of exploitation, louder demands for native self-government.