Globalization In Timothy Brook Vermeer's Hat

“Vermeer’s Hat” is the title of Timothy Brook’s book. However, the hat is not the main topic of this book. What this book mainly talks about is revealed in its subtitle—the seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world. Brook uses Vermeer’s paintings to illustrate and analyze the seventeenth century’s globalization and global trade. The seventeenth century is a period in which global trade was flourishing. During this period, a great number of people and commodities overlapped and interacted with each other around the globe. Among those commodities, three of them really played a significant role in global trade: furs, tobaccos and silvers. When it comes to the seventeenth century’s global trade, furs have to be mentioned. Furs were

Based on Brook’s description in his book, tobacco originates from America. Tobacco can induce strong psychotropic effects, so it has religious properties, and for this reason Shamans used it to induce trances and peer into the future. Besides, it also has medicinal properties because it can relieve patients’ pains. In addition, tobacco was a crucial medium of sociability that could help native Americans improve relations with each other. Therefore, tobacco was an important part of native Americans’ daily life (Timothy Brook, p.124-125). With the development of the global trade, tobacco moved along the webs of the commence and finally reached its first destination—Europe, and gradually changed the whole European society. Fernando Ortiz called this process transculturation. Transculturation is “A process by which habits and things move from one culture to another so thoroughly that they become part of it and in turn change the culture into which they have moved” (Timothy Brook, p.126). Hence, a great number of people in Europe began to smoke, it giving rise to the increasing demand of tobacco. However, China nor Europe was the foremost smoking country in the seventeenth century. As Brook describes in his own book, “Tobacco traveled to China by three routes: an eastward Portuguese route from Brazil to Macao, a westward Spanish route from Mexico to Manila.

As Brook depicts in his book, silver can help people acquire nearly whatever they want. (Timothy Brook, p.156). For this reason, there was a considerable demand for silver around the world in the seventeenth century, especially in China. From Brook’s book we can see that most of the silver in the seventeenth century came from Potosi, Bolivian, which was the most productive city in the first half of the seventeenth century. (Timothy Brook, p.157). Potosi was discovered by the Spanish; they got a great amount of silver from Potosi and transported it to other parts of the world. For instance, as Brook writes “The great portion went to Europe by two different routes, the official and the ‘black door’. The official route under the control of the Spanish crown ran west over the mountains to the port of Arica on the coast, and finally across the Atlantic to Cadiz, the center of the world silver trade. The back door went south down to Argentina and Portugal: Though the silvers arrived at London and Amsterdam.” Whereas, those silvers’ final destination was China. (Timothy Brook, p.159). Silvers flowed to China through two routes: east from Potosi to Europe, and then from Europe to Asia. More importantly, however, is in which silvers were transported first to the coast and then up to Acapulco, from where it crossed the pacific to manila in the Philippines. At Manila, the silver was traded for Chinese