Meppel is the smallest municipality in the province of Drenthe by area, about 57 square kilometers, with a population of just over 34,000. It sits in the southwestern corner of the province, almost on the line where Drenthe meets Overijssel. For its size it has had a complicated political life: the bailiff of Drenthe granted city rights in 1644, Louis Napoleon granted them again in 1809 (apparently unaware of, or uninterested in, the earlier grant), and King William I issued city regulations of his own in 1815. Three different rulers, three separate confirmations that this riverside town was, in fact, a city. The third time finally stuck.

In the sixteenth century, Meppel got rich on a fuel: peat. From the moors all across Drenthe, dried peat blocks moved by barge along the Drentsche Hoofdvaart and Hoogeveense Vaart, converged at Meppel, then continued west along the Meppelerdiep to Zwartsluis and into the Zuiderzee. From there it could reach Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden, the brick kilns and bakeries and hearths of the urbanized west. In the 17th and 18th centuries so many bargemen settled in Meppel that the town's identity warped to fit them. The locals named three of its canals Heerengracht, Keizersgracht, and Prinsengracht, the same names as Amsterdam's three principal canals, and Meppel started calling itself Mokum van het Noorden, the Mokum of the North, borrowing the affectionate Yiddish-Dutch nickname Amsterdam claimed for itself.

Most of those canals through the city center were filled in during the 20th century, swallowed by roads. Drawbridges were replaced with fixed bridges. By the time the narrowing of the Hoogeveense Vaart at Oosterboer was completed in 2005, it had become impossible to sail through Meppel into the rest of Drenthe at all. Meppel kept its working harbor, though, the inland port still handles vessels up to about 3,000 tons on the Meppelerdiep, and cooperates with the harbors of Zwolle and Kampen downstream. Of Meppel's 250 Jewish residents at the start of the Second World War, 232 were deported and killed. Eighteen returned. The community that had once made Meppel feel like Amsterdam was, in a few brutal years, almost entirely erased.

On 1 October 1867, the railway reached Meppel. The station opened on what would become the Arnhem-Leeuwarden line, the Staatslijn A, and within a few decades the Meppel-Groningen line, the Staatslijn C, branched off from the same platforms. Today Meppel station is the fourth-largest in the northern Netherlands, after Groningen, Leeuwarden, and Assen, with about 6,500 passengers boarding or alighting on an average day in 2018. Intercity trains run from here to Rotterdam and The Hague without changing. Buses fan out in every direction. For a small Drenthe city wedged between bigger neighbors, Meppel has spent the past century and a half being the place a great many other places connect through.

Meppel has a long habit of producing notable people who then make their reputation somewhere else. Jan Jansen Bleecker, born here in 1641, became Mayor of Albany, New York. Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, born in 1843, became the art dealer who helped shape the collections of British and American museums; his brother Henry continued the family trade, and Joseph's son — Joseph Duveen, later Lord Duveen — became one of the most influential art dealers of the twentieth century. The geneticist Petrus Johannes Waardenburg, born in nearby Nijeveen in 1886, identified the rare syndrome that now bears his name and that affects pigmentation and hearing in roughly one in 40,000 people. More recently the painter Jan Mankes, the food scientist Louise Fresco, and the medieval-manuscript scholar Erik Kwakkel have all left Meppel for wider stages. The mosquitoes, the city likes to remind itself, also tend to drift.