Belgium in "the long nineteenth century" the small duchies, princedoms and counties which had traditionally been the basic territorial units. Aside from Zeelandic Flanders, part of Luxembourg, and Northern Limburg, which were ceded to the Dutch to compensate for the loss of the rest of the territory, the outline of Belgium in 1914 was virtually identical to that established by the French in 1795. The three ceded territories had a total of 300,000 inhabitants at the time. The northern half of Belgium, which would come to be known as Flanders, was a largely agricultural area containing the important port of Antwerp, the city of Ghent and
Terminology of the Low Countries English. Many languages however, do have a cognate or calque derived from the Dutch adjective "Nederlands": Toponyms: The Low Countries () refers to the historical region "de Nederlanden": those principalities located on and near the mostly low-lying land around the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. That region corresponds to all of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, forming the Benelux. The name "Benelux" is formed from joining the first two or three letters of each country's name Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. It was first used to name the customs agreement that initiated the union (signed in 1944) and is now used more generally to