After the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a kingdom for the House of Orange-Nassau, thus combining the United Provinces of the Netherlands with the former Austrian Netherlands in order to create a strong buffer state north of France; with the addition of those provinces the Netherlands became a rising power.
Symptomatic of the tenor of diplomatic bargaining at Vienna was the early proposal to reward Prussia for its fight against Napoleon with the former Habsburg territory.
When Great Britain insisted on retaining the former Dutch Ceylon and the Cape Colony, which they had seized while the Netherlands was ruled by Napoleon, the new kingdom of the Netherlands was compensated with these southern provinces (modern Belgium).
After the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a kingdom for the House of Orange-Nassau, thus combining the United Provinces of the Netherlands with the former Austrian Netherlands in order to create a strong buffer state north of France; with the addition of those provinces the Netherlands became a rising power. Symptomatic of the tenor of diplomatic bargaining at Vienna was the early proposal to reward Prussia for its fight against Napoleon with the former Habsburg territory. When Great Britain insisted on retaining the former Dutch Ceylon and the Cape Colony, which they had seized while the Netherlands was ruled by Napoleon, the new kingdom of the Netherlands was compensated with these southern provinces (modern Belgium).
Belgian Revolution