Vermeer's hat: the seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world

Abstract

This short, evocative book uses a selection of paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) as vantage points from whence to observe the emergence of the modern, interconnected world.Vermeer's Hat owes its title to a prominent object in the painting entitled "Officer and Laughing Girl," one of the many "doors" that Brook describes.The author finds his other entries in works such as the "View of Delft," "The Geographer" and "Woman holding a Balance."Most important for Brook are the depictions of everyday commodities and household items included in these landscape and genre paintings.These objects, he contends, are representative of the paradox which has come to serve as one of the key identifiers for the present globalized age: they are at once ordinary and exotic.The beaver hat shown in one painting, the American silver pieces in another, and the Chinese fruit bowl in a third were items that became routine components of European life in the mid-seventeenth century despite their distant provenance-so routine as to be depicted in a casual manner in Vermeer's interiors.As such, Brook argues, it was not the first contacts between peoples at the corners of the earth which produced the "global world" but rather the span when such encounters became predictable occurrences at some point roughly fifteen decades after the voyages of Columbus and da Gama.Vermeer's Hat fits into a trend in recent scholarship aimed at popular audiences.Over the past decade, specialists in pre-modern history have tried to cast the notion of globalization as one with a historical pedigree.Their efforts have much to do with the current fixation on the novelty of our interconnected world, as well as with the appeal of "world history."But scholars of world history have tended to focus either on large-scale events such as the migrations of peoples or the spread of ideologies and empires in the past two centuries, saying little about the period between late Antiquity and the Enlightenment.Fully aware that global interconnectedness had its origins before the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brook and others have offered a different vision of world history.China specialists seem to have a particular gift for this, with important contributions coming from Kenneth Pomerantz (The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2000), and John Wills, Jr. (1688: A Global History, 2001).Brook is also a specialist in Chinese history and has written extensively on trade and religion during the Ming Dynasty .The principal motor behind the enthusiasm for this subject comes from the desire to see China described as a force in modern world history on par with Europe.Brook's study, as well as Wills's and Pomerantz's, offers a needed counterweight to the heft of the Eurocentric tomes that discuss the advent of modernity in world history as if it was synonymous with the spread of European ideals of progress, egalitarianism and justice.Such an emphasis leaves out competing visions of modernity and does little to show how other cultures developed outside of European influence.The case of China is particularly challenging for world historians of the "spread of ideas" school, since China had its own vibrant intellectual traditions and exported them across Asia over the centuries.In order to redirect the debate, Brook turns toward a different period and uses trade flows and objects, rather than ideas as the unifying concept for his world history.In the seventeenth century, he contends, critical masses of consumers at different points on the globe created sustained markets for goods that needed to be transported over great distances.There is nevertheless peril in such a focus on commodities.For one, it places strong emphasis on the role played by inanimate objects rather than by individual actors, such as the painter Johannes Vermeer.Also, it reduces the

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