Vermeer’s Hat: The 17th Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook
Profile, £18.99
TIMOTHY BROOK uses Johannes Vermeer’s paintings from the mid-17th century as doors to open up recognition of the burgeoning trade that led to the first globalization and the emergence of capitalism in Europe. Looking with 17th century eyes Vermeer gloried – in seeding his canvases with the new, the fashionable and the innovative – in the wealth and power of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company) and in particular its Delft chamber. The VOC, the world’s first large joint stock company, was the precursor of corporate capitalism and its unannounced presence broods over Vermeer’s only landscape, View of Delft.
Officer and Laughing Girl opens with the officer’s grand beaver fur hat centre stage, the drive fashion and fad put behind the exploration of North America to supply the demands of emerging gentile society as commerce began to trump combat as the route to a fair maiden’s marriage bed if not necessarily her heart. Thus the civil wars of Native Americans became more bloody as commercial imperatives and European guns increasingly played their part.
Young Woman Reading a Letter has in the foreground a blue and white Chinese dish from Jingdezhen. The first Chinese porcelain to reach Europe in 1596 amazed all who saw it. It came from techniques that Europe was unable to emulate for more than a century. Vermeer’s painting of 1657 was on the cusp of the cascade that brought Chinese porcelain to infest Europe’s middle class homes.
The problem was the flood of imports from China required paying for. Europe produced nothing the Chinese couldn’t better themselves, save armaments. The answer was addiction. So the Dutch – and the Spanish – introduced the Chinese to the habits of Native Americans. A tobacco epidemic swept across China, infecting men, women and children in its wake. Initial resistance made the actions of the Labour government in introducing the smoking ban in July 2007 – effectively destroying the institution of the village pub – look mild. In 1640, the Emperor Chongzhen had a man convicted of selling tobacco beheaded. But it was as futile as America’s prohibition of alcohol from 1920-33. Opposition was swept aside with the Dutch pioneering a new triangular trade relationship – a trinity of tobacco, silver and slaves, the last to harvest the first and mine the second.
Woman Holding a Balance has Vermeer blessing the new capitalism as his protagonist weighs her wealth. Yet there was a downside. Already in the 1640s China had been devastated by crop failures, military spending and consequent inflation because of the over-abundance of silver in the economy.
Europe solved its later problems using its military superiority and opium – an even more addictive addition to tobacco’s hold on human physiology – to underdevelop China. The first globalization, as Timothy Brook outlines, did Europe proud. Now with the second globalization leaving Europe and, in particular, America struggling to pay for the goods our populations crave from China the question is what do we have that Beijing wants, as the wheel threatens to turn full circle, save military technology? This time Washington may be at the wrong end of the stick.
Glyn Ford
