The age of enlightenment brought together the knowledge and intelligence of disparate disciplines, and in the era of European colonialization, a concern with the collection and identification of the alien and then naming and classification of the exotic. By the end of the C19 that project was nigh complete, and Europeans relocating to distant climes bought with them their thinking. This is equally so for the practice and discipline of architecture. Architecture as discipline was omnivorous in its appetite to ingest all the achievements of its age – the products of industrialization and of styles, not only as an amalgam of many periods and places in Europe, but also incorporating those of the cultures of their colonies. The Netherlands, although in its waning years after four centuries as once the most powerful of the European trading nations, then of the richest Protestant nations, was still a cultural force at home and abroad. The Dutch, when citizens in distant climes, were not only those possessed of skill and talent, but of tenacity, resolve, the so-called ‘Protestant work ethic’ and a Dutch sense of frugality and lack of ostentation. So too their architects.