The Dutch city of Rotterdam began more than a century ago as a settlement on the stream Rotte, also written as Rotta. In part to combat regular flooding, people living in the area built dikes and dams, including the one giving the city its eventual name, in the 1260s.

The settlement grew in population and geographical size, its growth accelerated after the granting of city rights in 1340 and, a decade later, the completion of a canal link to northern cities. The city proved adept at maximizing the herring trade, and prosperity followed. The Netherlands overall in the 16th Century was a hotbed of religious dissent, as various sects of Protestantism spoke out against the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Spanish troops, in an attempt to keep the peace, looted the city in 1572; such casual violence hardened the hearts of Rotterdam residents against the occupying imperial troops, and Rotterdam joined other Dutch cities in fighting the Eighty Years War.

Rotterdam, with its busy, prominent port, became a focal point in the 17th Century for both the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company, spurring trade and commerce from around the globe and facilitating the exchange of money and goods throughout Europe. At the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Rotterdam leaders oversaw the construction of a canal to the North Sea, furthering the city's overseas reach.

World War I involved Rotterdam in two ways: as a refugee center and as a spy center. Many thousand refugees from neighboring Belgium, displaced by the German invasion of that country in 1914, found new homes in Rotterdam, as did many secret agents on both sides of the war effort.

The German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, in the early days of World War II left Rotterdam in ruins. The Allied liberation in 1944 paved the way for a restoration of the monarchy and then, in the next few decades, economic rebirth.