Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

"This was written quite early on in the global history initiative. Tim Brook is also a historian of China. He has written on Chinese cities and has done a lot of work on the Ming Dynasty. He’s not an art historian, but a cultural and social historian of China. This book was a kind of entry for him into global history. He chose the perspective of writing about some of Vermeer ‘s paintings, taking a microscopic look at those paintings and the objects depicted in them. He then followed out from those objects to tell a story of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially 17th-century global history. Each chapter starts with a different object. There’s a beaver hat, there’s smoking, porcelain, Turkish carpets. It’s a book written for a wide audience. It wasn’t intended as a scholarly work. But it told the wider reading public about this whole new approach to writing about the world. It’s beautifully written, and starts off with him falling off his bicycle in Delft, and then his entry into discovering this wide world of objects. It’s very much an object-based entry into global history."

"He takes a series of paintings, most of which are by Vermeer — or by his contemporaries — and he tells the story of what’s in them. He pulls apart the fact that there’s a piece of China plate in one image to tell the story of the Chinese porcelain industry. He discusses the appearance of a map of the Dutch republic, and what the appearance of cartography in the seventeenth century means. The eponymous hat is from The Officer and the Laughing Girl, it’s a beaver hat, and Brook tells the story of how traders in Canada are bringing back beaver fur. He discusses how that tells us that trade and maritime exploration in the seventeenth century are bringing the world closer together. The seventeenth century is the first age of real globalisation. In the sixteenth century you see little prods, but the seventeenth century sees everything pulling together, for Europeans at least.Vermeer’s Hat, for me, is a really clever, engaging, brilliantly written book. It’s a real page-turner. He’s not really saying anything drastically new, he’s trying to tell global history in an engaging way. Historians of the early modern period have become slightly obsessed with global history recently. I think that’s right, it’s very important, but it’s often hard to tell that story to a wider audience. The genius of Vermeer’s Hat is that he finds a clever and engaging way to do it. I don’t know that they would have thought about ‘globalisation’ as such, I don’t know that they wouldn’t either. I think part of what Brook is suggesting is that these interiors — the Turkish carpets, the porcelain — are put together for a specific reason, which is that they show a cosmopolitan world view, which is particularly indicative of the cultural world of the Dutch middle class in this period. You could apply it to the middle class in London as well, or even to some English provincial towns. That world view is increasingly globalised, it’s increasingly showing knowledge of the rest of the world, an interest in commodities. In the late seventeenth century, in England, it becomes much more common in gentry houses to have cotton curtains, which were made in India. This causes all kinds of consternation among the wool industry in England because they’re worried about the competition. It shows that the world of at least some people is becoming increasingly globalised. The trouble with a lot of this stuff is that you are looking at elite history. Vermeer’s interiors are not those of Dutch peasants. These are the Dutch, urban middle classes. But the fact that the world in this period is becoming more interconnected did have an impact on people quite far down the social scale. People around Bolton and Manchester — pretty backwards places at that time — started to manufacture cotton in the early eighteenth century. Cotton doesn’t grow in England, they were getting it from Turkey and Syria. That means that by the early eighteenth century the peasants of Lancashire were in competition with the peasants of Bengal for global cotton markets. The reason I said Brook was micro-history is that he’s doing something again which is slightly different. You’ve got Natalie Davis who takes an individual set of court cases, you’ve got Darnton who looks at cultural events, Wrightson and Levine do a very local English history, reconstructing it from wills and inventories and manorial records, you’ve got the gossip of Myddle and Gough. What Brook does is he looks at paintings and analyses them in detail. Again, this is a way of unpicking particular remnants from the past — in this case fantastic paintings — and looking at the bigger picture that they tell."