Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was a German-Swiss painter who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. One of his most famous paintings – “The Ambassadors”(1533) – hangs today in the National Gallery in London. It is rich in symbolism of life in the late Renaissance. The two ambassadors stand in front of a table filled with notable objects from the time period, each with symbolic meaning related to science, exploration, and religion.
Timothy Brook, a China scholar at Oxford, does the same thing for the seventeenth century using mostly the works of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Brook is mainly interested in trade and commodities, and the effects of both on common people. He says that the seventeenth century was when the sites of first European contact with the outside world turned into places of repeated meeting in the interest of commerce. (Brook notes that climate change [the sustained temperature drop known as the Little Ice Age] and the recurrence of bubonic plague also played important roles in the geopolitical events of the period, but he devotes almost no time exploring them.)
A combination of technical innovations (all Chinese in origin) propelled Europeans around the world in the 1600s: the magnetic compass for long range navigation, paper for keeping accurate records, and gunpowder to overwhelm and overawe the natives. The upshot to the combined effects of these three innovations was an explosion in global trade. For instance, in the first decade of the seventeenth century the Dutch sent 59 ships to Asia, the English just 20. During the next decade the Dutch sent 148 and the English 53, an increase of roughly 250 percent. It is estimated that the Dutch East India Company (better known by its Dutch acronym VOC) alone was sending 40,000 people per decade from the Netherlands to Asia by the mid-seventeenth century. Brook says that there were no grand designs behind these activities; rather the seventeenth century was the age of profit-driven improvisation.
Brook says that the sinuous trade routes that emerged around the world in the seventeenth century were analogous to Indra’s Web, an ancient metaphor from Indian Buddhist philosophy that illustrates the concept of interconnection and the interdependent nature of reality. Indra’s Web emphasizes a holistic view of the world, which is a vision that only became truly imaginable in the seventeenth century, Brook says.
The author uses the Vermeer painting “Officer and Laughing Girl” (1660), currently on display at The Frick Collection in New York, to showcase the importance of the beaver hat, the must-have consumer product of the early seventeenth century. In 1600, a beaver hat was rare, exclusive, and expensive. Consequently, it soon acquired high cultural value. The underfur of the beaver made the best felt in the world, which in turn made the most desirable hat. The retail price of a beaver hat in Western Europe in 1610 was ten times that of the best wool felt hats. The New Word, especially New France, stimulated demand for beaver hats because of the rich supply of the wood-chomping rodent. A basket of basic consumer goods purchased in Paris for one livre could be traded with the Native Americans for beaver pelts worth over 200 livres. Fierce competition and disregard for the monopoly rights of national corporations like the West India Company eventually pushed prices down by over half. (Brook says there was one thing even more attractive than beaver pelts to Europeans conquering the New World – the prospect of finding a northwest passage to China.)
Next, Brook looks at “Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window” (1657), now housed at the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, to highlight the dramatic popularity of Chinese porcelains in the seventeenth century. Chinese wares surpassed European competition in fineness, durability, style, and color. It wasn’t until 1708 that European craftsmen were able to recreate the technique, which required kiln temperatures of 1,300 degrees Celsius. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to acquire Chinese porcelain when they established their presence in Goa in 1510. In 1600 Chinese porcelain was the sort of consumer product that only the very wealthy could afford; Chinese dishes soon started showing up in the paintings of leading Dutch painters. Brook says that the Dutch looked on Chinese dishes as “totems of their good fortune” and “symbolic of a positive relationship to the world.” Over the first half of the seventeenth century, VOC (Dutch East India Company) ships alone delivered over three million pieces of china to Europe. Just as had happened with the beaver, Chinese porcelains started flooding the European market and prices dropped considerably.
Vermeer’s third painting explored by Brook is “The Geographer” (1669), currently at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Unlike the first two paintings, which were about the drive to acquire culturally valuable consumer products, “The Geographer” captures the European’s desire to understand the world – and conquer it. “The two impulses – knowledge and acquisition – worked together,” Brook says. Maps were constantly being updated and revised in the seventeenth century. Europeans dominated the major sea lanes of the world, but Brook says that half of the people on board European ships were some mix of Asian or African. The Portuguese established a base in mainland China at Macao; it was also “the financial and strategic heart of the Jesuit enterprise in the East,” according to Brook. The main Spanish base in Asia was Manila.
Johannes Vermeer never painted anyone smoking, which is a shame because Brook thinks that the global spread of tobacco was as economically significant as the relentless hunt for beaver pelts and porcelain dishes. Tobacco originated in the Americas and quickly spread around the world traveling the trade routes established to carry furs and china. “Wherever tobacco showed up,” Brook writes, “a culture that did not smoke became a culture that did,” an amalgamation process that Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz termed “transculturation.” China tried to ban tobacco in 1640 to no avail. England’s King James I had tried something similar in 1604 when he raised the duty on imported Virginia tobacco by 4,000 per cent, but with similarly disappointing results. Many European leaders despised tobacco because of its association with witchcraft and Native American rituals. They sought to limit tobacco usage by taxing it heavily, which only resulted in higher prices that drove additional production and encouraged smuggling. Brook says that three main commodities of the age – silver, tobacco and slaves – were intimately interconnected. Slaves were used to mine silver and harvest tobacco, while the silver paid for the slaves and the purchase of tobacco.
Brook returns to the oeuvre of Vermeer to discuss silver. “Woman Holding a Balance” (1663), currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, captures the importance of New World silver in seventeenth century Europe. The painting is plainly allegorical. The woman, likely Vermeer’s wife, is weighing silver while in the background hangs a painting of the final judgment when all souls will be weighed by the All Mighty. Brook tells us that silver was “the single most important global commodity of the time.” The so-called silver century (roughly 1570 to 1670) resulted from the relentless exploitation of New World silver mines by imperial European powers. Massive amounts of silver specie lubricated the burgeoning global trade routes. No source of silver was more important than Potosi, a remote mine in modern day Bolivia situated 12,000 feet above sea level and over 300 miles from the Pacific coast. Indians first showed the Spaniards the mine in 1545. Virtually overnight the isolated mountaintop became the largest city in the Americas with an estimated population of 120,000, a figure New York City wouldn’t achieve until 1820.
Not only did silver provide desperately needed hard currency to complete trade transactions, it also gave Europeans tremendous purchasing power advantages in their commerce with China. In Europe, the value of silver to gold was pegged at 12 to 1. In China, silver was relatively more valuable and traded against gold at 6 to 1. Therefore, silver coming from Europe could buy twice as much in China as it could in Europe. Furthermore, the Chinese desired very little in the way of European manufactured goods. All they wanted from Europe was silver. Between 1610 and 1660 the Dutch East Indies Company shipped 500 tons of silver (50 million Dutch guilders) to Asia to import spices, textiles, tea, and coffee. “A river of silver linked the colonial economy of the Americas with the economy of South China,” Brook writes, “the metal extracted on one continent paying for goods manufactured on another for consumption on a third.”
Imperial headquarters in Europe demanded more and more silver, but they struggled to manage the flow of their own currency as higher profit margins pulled more and more silver across the Pacific from the mine at Potosi to the port at Acapulco and then on to Manila, “the nexus where the European economy hooked up to the Chinese economy.” (The amount of silver that was officially registered for export at Acapulco was roughly three tons a year in the 1590s and exploded to twenty tons by the 1620s, and that doesn’t take into account smuggling.) Moreover, much was lost at sea. Only a handful of Spanish galleons made the long and harrowing 7,500 mile journey between Acapulco and Mania each year. All told, 15 galleons were lost sailing west from Acapulco and 25 went down sailing back from Manila, meaning that nearly one in five ships were lost. The loss of one of these treasure ships could grind global commerce to a halt.
Next, Brook looks at “The Card Players” (1660) by Henrik van der Burch, now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. What makes the painting unlike anything Vermeer produced is the presence of an African boy, likely a slave. However, Brook doesn’t use this chapter to explore the notorious slave trade West Africa to the New World, but rather to emphasize how distant cultures intermixed for the first time in history. Not only were black Africans suddenly seen in homes in Amsterdam, but the reverse was sometimes happening. Brook tells the story of a shipwrecked Dutchman named Jan Weltevree who found himself marooned in Korea and went on to live, marry, and ultimately thrive there for nearly forty years. Meanwhile, Franscican and Dominican monks strove to embed themselves in Japanese and Chinese culture, often paying for their forwardness with their lives. Brook notes that paintings of the Magi from this period often serve as metaphors for life in the tumultuous seventeenth century – “people of different cultural origins who have banded together to journey through a dim landscape toward the promise of a future that remains unrevealed.”
In closing, the seventeenth century was a tumultuous time in world history. Dutch culture, in particular, was rocked by profound changes. The Dutch were rapidly transitioning from monarchy to republic, from Catholicism to Calvinism, from small merchants to giant corporations, from war to trade. The time of Vermeer may have represented the first instance of genuine globalization, an interconnected web of common humanity. Brook says that Europeans looked to China with promise and delight, and as a source of inspiration. China, on the other hand, looked at the Europeans in only one way – as a threat – and they did everything they could to keep everything European (people, products, ideas) out of China. Their colloquial names for foreigners were menacing – Red Hairs (Dutch), Dwarf Pirates (Japanese), Black Ghosts (Africans) – and extended contact only reinforced those deeply hostile impressions. From the perspective of the early twenty first century, it feels as thought little has changed.
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