Netherlands
A constitutional monarchy on the North Sea coast of western Europe, much of whose land lies below sea level and is maintained by polders and dikes. Amsterdam is its constitutional capital, while the government sits in The Hague.
The Netherlands once handed Manhattan to Britain over nutmeg. In the 1667 Treaty of Breda, the Dutch gave up New Amsterdam, now Manhattan, for tiny Run in Indonesia, then a source of nutmeg that rivaled gold in value. Britain got the future New York.
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In 1995, a trader who hid losses in a secret account and kept making reckless trades bankrupted 232-year-old Barings Bank of Britain. His losses totaled £827 million—twice the bank's capital—and the Netherlands ING Group acquired it for just £1.
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A war between Britain's Isles of Scilly and the Netherlands lasted 335 years, but both sides completely forgot about it—not a single shot was fired. In 1986, a historian discovered the oversight and wrote to the Dutch embassy, finally ending the war officially.
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The concept of jaywalking was invented by the USA automobile industry in the 1920s. The "jay" in jaywalking was a derogatory term meaning "rube," deliberately coined to shift blame for traffic accidents onto pedestrians. Dutch traffic law still has no concept of jaywalking.
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In the village of Baarle on the Belgium-Netherlands border, national borders cut through individual buildings. A building's nationality is determined by its front door location, and some doors straddle both countries. Medieval lords' land deals became today's border lines.
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