VERMEER'S HAT, INDRA'S NET AND THE DAWN OF GLOBALISATION
Timothy Brook
Hachette
272 pages; Rs 499
A beaver hat is set at a rakish angle on the head of a laughing military officer, a bowl of fruit spills out of a delicate bowl made of Delft pottery, a young woman weighs gold and silver in a tiny jeweller's balance, a young black serving boy occupies centre stage in a painting of Dutch bourgeois domesticity. At one level, these are examples the famous Dutch interiors paintings of the 17th century universally admired for their careful lines, use of colour and, above all, the treatment of light. Subject to the curious scrutiny of an imaginative historian like Timothy Brook, however, they become windows to a fascinating world history at the dawn of globalisation.
The 17th century was as seminal a period in world history as the 21st. New-found mobility enabled by modern shipping technology were forging new contacts - Mr Brook describes it as a century of "second contacts", when "first encounters were becoming sustained engagements, fortuitous exchanges were being systematized into regular trade", just as the internet is creating new dynamics of communication in today's world. Climate change (this was during the Little Ice Age), currency and trade wars, religious conflict all figure prominently then as they do know. And as significantly, it was China, or rather the "quest to get to China", the country "that held a powerful place in popular imagination", that became "a relentless force that did much to shape the history of the seventeenth century".
Mr Brook explains the interconnectedness of this world through the Buddhist image of Indra's net, the second part of the book's title. "When Indra created the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has ever existed … every dharma in the language of Indian philosophy - is a pearl in Indra's net … and the surface of every pearl is reflected in every other jewel in the net."
This book is woven with so many pearls that it is impossible to describe all of them. Let's focus on the beaver felt hat of the title worn by an officer wooing a beautiful young woman (possibly Vermeer's wife Catharine) in Officer and a Laughing Girl. The painting is, writes Mr Brook, "an almost generic account of the new rules governing how men and women in polite Dutch society courted in the 1ate 1650s", when social mobility and gender relations were entering a new phase after the Dutch war of independence against Spain.
But it is a musing on the provenance of the hat that transports us to the Great Lakes where we meet Samuel de Champlain, leader of a French mission on the St Lawrence River in search of a north-west passage to the Pacific (and China). There follows a fascinating history of encounters between Champlain and native American tribes, whose weapons were no match for the arquebus, representative of the early revolution in weapons technology that enabled Europe to colonise the world.
Beaver fur plays a part in this story as a coveted item to feed the European haute couture industry. Canadian beaver became an alternative source once deforestation and overtrapping had virtually wiped out the beaver population of Scandinavia. Expertly trapped by natives in the thick forests of North America and cheaply traded (sometimes for forks and knives), the trade in Canadian beaver fur became a handy way to cover the costs of the mission (Champlain had negotiated a 10-year royal monopoly that was bitterly opposed by Parisian hatters).
Mr Brook writes with the light touch of someone who is at ease with his subject. By focusing on the mundane to build the bigger, exciting story of the interconnections that shaped our world he makes serious history fun to read. The account of Champlain's exploration contains detours into the evolution of European weaponry and fashion, and native American tribes and their customs. There is a delightful description of how one of Champlain's party, having reached the far shores of Lake Superior, put on a richly embroidered Chinese robe to meet a tribal chief whom he assumed to be the Emperor of China. This prompts another digression on how a Chinese robe could have reached Europe, then an exposition on the Dutch East India Company trade and so on.
This book was originally published in 2009 and reissued in 2014, a sensible decision by the publishers given the rise of wilful cultural antagonisms today. It remains a model of intelligent, non-polemical popular history writing that regretfully eludes most Indian historians. In any case, this kind of history is unlikely to pass muster in India under a dispensation that is determined to distort our past for its own purposes.
Timothy Brook
Hachette
272 pages; Rs 499
A beaver hat is set at a rakish angle on the head of a laughing military officer, a bowl of fruit spills out of a delicate bowl made of Delft pottery, a young woman weighs gold and silver in a tiny jeweller's balance, a young black serving boy occupies centre stage in a painting of Dutch bourgeois domesticity. At one level, these are examples the famous Dutch interiors paintings of the 17th century universally admired for their careful lines, use of colour and, above all, the treatment of light. Subject to the curious scrutiny of an imaginative historian like Timothy Brook, however, they become windows to a fascinating world history at the dawn of globalisation.
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The art of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), a moderately successful painter, may be an unusual starting point for a history of early globalisation. But in five paintings by him Mr Brook spots clues to the surging expansion of global commerce following the European voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. Mr Brook relies on three other works of art for this entertaining history: two by fellow Delft artists Hendrik Van der Burch (a pale imitator) and Leonaert Bramer, and a wonderfully eccentric painting on a Delftware pottery plate. By teasing out the seen and unseen links in these works, all set in the port town of Delft, he covers an astonishingly wide canvas: from the pottery factories of China to the frozen fastness of the Great Lakes, from the silver mines of Potosi in the Bolivian Andes to the Christian missions to Asia, from why hatters went mad (from inhaling noxious hat-making chemicals) to the beginning of the global addiction for tobacco (a native American plant traded by Europeans).
The 17th century was as seminal a period in world history as the 21st. New-found mobility enabled by modern shipping technology were forging new contacts - Mr Brook describes it as a century of "second contacts", when "first encounters were becoming sustained engagements, fortuitous exchanges were being systematized into regular trade", just as the internet is creating new dynamics of communication in today's world. Climate change (this was during the Little Ice Age), currency and trade wars, religious conflict all figure prominently then as they do know. And as significantly, it was China, or rather the "quest to get to China", the country "that held a powerful place in popular imagination", that became "a relentless force that did much to shape the history of the seventeenth century".
Mr Brook explains the interconnectedness of this world through the Buddhist image of Indra's net, the second part of the book's title. "When Indra created the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has ever existed … every dharma in the language of Indian philosophy - is a pearl in Indra's net … and the surface of every pearl is reflected in every other jewel in the net."
This book is woven with so many pearls that it is impossible to describe all of them. Let's focus on the beaver felt hat of the title worn by an officer wooing a beautiful young woman (possibly Vermeer's wife Catharine) in Officer and a Laughing Girl. The painting is, writes Mr Brook, "an almost generic account of the new rules governing how men and women in polite Dutch society courted in the 1ate 1650s", when social mobility and gender relations were entering a new phase after the Dutch war of independence against Spain.
But it is a musing on the provenance of the hat that transports us to the Great Lakes where we meet Samuel de Champlain, leader of a French mission on the St Lawrence River in search of a north-west passage to the Pacific (and China). There follows a fascinating history of encounters between Champlain and native American tribes, whose weapons were no match for the arquebus, representative of the early revolution in weapons technology that enabled Europe to colonise the world.
Beaver fur plays a part in this story as a coveted item to feed the European haute couture industry. Canadian beaver became an alternative source once deforestation and overtrapping had virtually wiped out the beaver population of Scandinavia. Expertly trapped by natives in the thick forests of North America and cheaply traded (sometimes for forks and knives), the trade in Canadian beaver fur became a handy way to cover the costs of the mission (Champlain had negotiated a 10-year royal monopoly that was bitterly opposed by Parisian hatters).
Mr Brook writes with the light touch of someone who is at ease with his subject. By focusing on the mundane to build the bigger, exciting story of the interconnections that shaped our world he makes serious history fun to read. The account of Champlain's exploration contains detours into the evolution of European weaponry and fashion, and native American tribes and their customs. There is a delightful description of how one of Champlain's party, having reached the far shores of Lake Superior, put on a richly embroidered Chinese robe to meet a tribal chief whom he assumed to be the Emperor of China. This prompts another digression on how a Chinese robe could have reached Europe, then an exposition on the Dutch East India Company trade and so on.
This book was originally published in 2009 and reissued in 2014, a sensible decision by the publishers given the rise of wilful cultural antagonisms today. It remains a model of intelligent, non-polemical popular history writing that regretfully eludes most Indian historians. In any case, this kind of history is unlikely to pass muster in India under a dispensation that is determined to distort our past for its own purposes.