The challenge is to have the Dutch Republic stay the leading sea power in the world, survive Napoleon and keep being the greatest maritime power in the 1800s.
ISTR watching a documentary once that suggested a prime problem with the Netherlands staying at the top was a lack of coal native to the country. Now, please pull me up if I'm misremembering, but the suggestion was that the peat used by the Dutch couldn't reach temperatures as high as the coal used by other nations, allowing them to produce higher quality metal than the Dutch.
So perhaps the Dutch expand to snare some coalfields?
This would mean that the Netherlands has the coal supplies MrP claimed it needed and a larger population base.
The rulers of the Netherlands were the merchants in Holland and only interested in making a whole lot of money. They hardly cared for the rest of the country (I vaguely remember they even tried to sell it). Because they only cared for money they didn't bothered with things that cost money.
What else should they have cared about? It seems odd to me to say that the British didn't care about money, after all.
shortsightednessshortsightness (is this a word?)