EARLY BELGIAN COLONIAL EFFORTS - The University of Texas at ...

What did Belgium look like in the period 1830 to 1855? To understand
Belgium, in order to properly gauge its aspirations and identity, requires a little
history. 63 The Belgae as a people were referred to by Julius Caesar two thousand years
ago in his Gallic Wars. Belgium as a nation did not come into existence until 1830. The
area presently known as Belgium, from its conquest by the Romans, through its
absorption by the Francs and inclusion (until the ninth century) within the Holy Roman
Empire generally remained out of the mainstream of European history. During the ninth
to the fourteenth centuries it was composed of a number of archbishoprics, duchies,
counties, free towns, and principalities. The largest were Comté de Hainaut, Comté de
Flandre, Comté de Namur, Principauté de Liége, and Brabant. Between the fourteenth
and the fifteenth centuries the area was loosely unified under the Bourbons of France
and became part of France’s area of influence.
Later, however, this area, including both present day Belgium and Holland, was
able to achieve a semblance of freedom and unity known as the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant Reformation and the Eighty Years’ War (1566-1648) altered this picture.
For the next 300 years Belgium, under Habsburg rule after 1482, was first under the
slowly declining influence of the Spanish Habsburgs as the Spanish Netherlands (1556-
1713) and under the control of Habsburg Austrians as the Austrian Netherlands (1713-
1795). The Northern Netherlands, present day Holland, became an independent
Protestant country known as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands that rapidly
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Yves Manhès, Histoire Des Belges Et De La Belgique (Paris: Vuibert, 2005); Jean Stengers
and Eliane Gubin, Histoire Du Sentiment National En Belgique Des Origines Á 1918. Tome 1 (Brussels:
Racine, 2002) ; and Vincent Dujardin, Michel Dumoulin, and Emmanuel Gérard, eds., Nouvelle Histoire
De Belgique, 1830-1905, Questions À L'histoire (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 2005).
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