Not just "invented some tech", we started to proffesionally organise and work together to; protect our land at first and when that was succesfull we started to reclaim more and more from the rivers, lakes and sea. 40% of our country is above sealevel anyway, see it as a base of operations .^
We have the french to the south, Germans to the east, Vikings to the north and the cunt English to the west.... where you gonna go?
Reclaimed lands are very, very fertile and yield great crops so there is much profit to be made. You might see us as potsmoking farmers and fishermen, but we are traders above all. (The first stockmarket and stock was traded in Amsterdam) Many old polder projects, "land reclaimations" where private pojects where anyone from the public could buy stocks in to invest. (we where a republic back then without a king or queen. We became a monarchy only in 1851)
To put it into historical context;
NL is a "protestant nation" by nature officially but we never really took that to far. We have a large part of the population that was/is catholic and they never really suffered. We value coin, efficiency and production above faith.
Meanwhile France was actively persuing protestants (NL got many refugees during this, even some of my forefathers), England was tightening it's religious reign and Germany (Holy Roman Empire) was in a constant religious civil war amongst the catholic and protestant member states. During the 1600's the Dutch republic's economy was thriving and life was posperous in NL, they actually used propaganda campaigns to lure refugees to get more workers to NL as the economy needed that.
Live below the sea or on floodplains that you can protect when working together and prosper, or live under the rule of a king that tells you what to belief and what to do... easy choice
40% of our country is above sealevel anyway, see it as a base of operations .^
That is nothing to brag about.
How I earth did you not have a monarch until 1851? I guess anther way tho phrase it is, "why did you start then"?
We used to use wind/windmills back in the days, wich worked fine but took a lot of windmills to maintain.
Not for a while, but eventually (months/years) yes, about 40% of our country would permanently flood and another 20% would be tidewater/floodplains/swamps, this includes much of our highly populated"randstad" area including our mayor cities and economic areas, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht.
Our pumping stations do have emergency backup powergenerators and fuel to function for a while in case of calamity.
We dont fuck around with water and the sea cause we know the value of the land and the danger we are under. Hence we have our "waterschappen" - Dutch Waterboards wich originated back in the middle ages.
Sidenote here; Dutch infrastructure and power lines are way better in general then in US. We are a dense populated small nation so we have to be effecient. Power outages are very rare, usually only local (think neighborhoods) and rarely last more the 2-3 hours.
Think this problem is mainly in southern Cali? (LA, San Diego) Building multi million urban population centres without addequate water supplies nearby is not such a smart plan to start with tbh.