Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Donne’s imagination in 1623 fixed on other timely images as well. One he employs in the same meditation is the image of translation. He declares that death is not a loss but a translation of the soul into another form. “When one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke,” Donne writes, “but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated.” Death comes in many forms, and so “God emploies several translators”; not only that, but “God’s hand is in every translation.”

  Donne’s point was theological, but he was a poet who thought in images that rose to his attention from the age in which he lived. The translator was one of those images. Within the space of Donne’s own life, the English and Dutch had organized East India companies, the EIC and the VOC, to mount trade expeditions all over the globe. Wherever their ships and people went, as Bontekoe put it on arriving at Madagascar in 1625, they had to “have speech with the inhabitants.” Fortune, even survival, depended on someone on board knowing how to speak to the local people. Donne declares that God employs many translators; so too these trading corporations had to hire many translators to interpret between the needs of one side and the demands of the other, and often to move among several languages at once. The number of translators can only have increased as networks of trade expanded and their experience of trading in disparate locations deepened. By the 1650s, over forty thousand people were departing decennially on VOC ships for Asia. Thousands more were leaving on other ships. Many of them picked up at least one form of local pidgin in the places where their travels dumped them. Many of them became translators.

  Sometimes the accidents of travel forced a sailor such as Jan Weltevree to become fluent in a foreign language without his ever being given a choice in the matter. Others actually chose to study a foreign language so that they could translate themselves into new contexts. When the Italian missionary Angelo Cocchi crossed from Taiwan to Fujian at the end of 1631, he took a Chinese translator with him. Cocchi had studied Chinese in Manila, but he anticipated the cost of failing to communicate his message once he got to China, which was, at a minimum, expulsion from the country. For translation is not just about knowing the right words for things in another language; it is about transposing ideas between languages, and knowing how to shape the expectations that words create.

  And what about Cocchi’s Chinese translator? How did he come to study Spanish? Was he a long-term resident of the Parián who picked up the language by virtue of living in the Spanish colony of Manila? Did he convert to Christianity and learn Spanish in the course of his contact with missionaries? Did he actually study the language, or was it something he acquired through daily use? However he mastered the language, he ended up translating into Chinese, not for a Spaniard but for an Italian, who in turn had learned that language while at seminary in Salamanca. By 1631, no trading company and mission could do without “several translators,” many of whom were adept at shifting among multiple languages.

  There is one other metaphor in Donne’s seventeenth meditation that stands out to readers today. Donne was a man obsessed with his own sinfulness, which he sought to use as a goad for climbing to faith. To work this transmutation, he advises himself and his readers to reverse the values they normally assign to things like contentment and affliction. “Affliction is treasure,” Donne tells us, and the more one has of it, the better. But it must be properly channeled to be of any use. And here he interprets this unsought treasure as silver. “If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into currant Monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travells. Tribulation is Treasure in the nature of it, but it is not currant money in the use of it, except wee get nearer and nearer our home, Heaven, by it.” The only thing that convinces us to convert the silver bullion of our affliction into the coin of religious understanding, says Donne, is the sound of the tolling bell, the prospect of death.

  How intriguing that Donne should turn to the relationship between bullion and coin for a metaphor for tribulation and redemption! Silver was constantly swapping forms as it moved through currency zones around the globe. In some zones, such as China, bullion was the form in which silver was wanted. In other zones, silver by law had to circulate in what Donne calls “currant money.” In Spanish America, it had to be in the coin of the realm, the real. In the Dutch Republic, as we have seen, the coin of several realms could circulate, from the real to the guilder, depending on supply. In the trading zone of the South China Sea, silver could be traded in a mixture of bullion and Spanish reals. When Willem Bontekoe asked two Chinese on the Fujian coast to bring pigs to his ship on 8 April 1623, he gave them 25 reals and they willingly took the coins. Bullion would have been fine too, for all they wanted was the silver, but Bontekoe had none. Like most European states, the United Provinces banned the use of unminted silver so as to control the volume of money in circulation. If you wanted to use your silver as money in Europe, you had to have it in coin. Beyond these historical particulars, though, there looms the simple fact that in 1623, when Donne was in search of images to express the accumulation of afflictions that might provoke the sinful to piety, that infinitely accumulatable substance, silver, was what suggested itself to his fevered mind.

  Silver and translation. Isolated islands and linked continents. Donne had no idea he was installing doors to his century when he composed his text, but there they are: casual openings onto corridors leading us back to his world. Like Vermeer, I suspect, Donne was so absorbed in making sense of his own existence that he had no reason to try imagining what people in later ages might like to look for in his work. Both men were struggling with the present, and that was more than enough burden. Neither was preparing a dossier for the history to come. Of course, we are no different. We are just as absorbed in the present, and just as oblivious to the doors we are leaving behind for those who come after us and might want to make sense of their world—a world we cannot imagine—by thinking about where it came from.

  If Donne in 1623 was excited to discover that no person was an island, it was because, for the first time in human history, it was possible to realize that almost no one was. No longer was the world a series of locations so isolated from each other that something could happen in one and have absolutely no effect on what was going on in any other. The idea of a common humanity was emerging, and with it the possibility of a shared history.1 The theology underpinning Donne’s sense of the interconnectedness of all things is Christian, but the idea of mutual interconnection is not exclusive to Christianity. Other religious and secular logics are capable of supporting the same conclusion, and equally effective at provoking an awareness of our global situation and our global responsibility. As across Donne’s continent, so in Indra’s web: every clod, every pearl—every loss and death, birth and coming into being—affects everything else with which it shares existence. It is a vision of the world that, for most people, became imaginable only in the seventeenth century.

  The metaphors that have surfaced in traditions all over the world are needed now more than ever, if we are to persuade others, and even ourselves, to deal with the tasks that face us. This is one motive for this book: knowing that we as a species need to figure out how to narrate the past in a way that enables us to acknowledge and come to terms with the global nature of our experience. It is a Utopian ideal—an ideal we haven’t realized and might never attain, and yet pervades our daily existence. If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world, then there is no part of the past—no holocaust and no achievement—that is not our collective heritage. We are already learning to think ecologically in this way. Indeed, global warming in our era mirrors to some degree the disruptive impact of global cooling in Vermeer’s, when people recognized that changes were afoot, even that these changes were affecting the entire world. Late in life, the shipwrecked Dutch gunsmith Jan Weltevree reminisced to a Korean friend about his childhood in Holland. He told him that w
hen he was growing up, the elderly had a saying for foggy days when the cold damp got into their joints: “Today it is snowing in China.” Even as climate change was turning the world topsy-turvy, people were sensing that what was happening on the far side of the globe was no longer happening just there but, now, here as well.

  THE STORIES I HAVE TOLD in these pages have revolved around the effects of trade on the world, and on ordinary people. But between the world and ordinary people is the state, which was powerfully affected by the history of trade and had powerful effects in turn. Trade and movement during the seventeenth century strengthened the state. At least in Europe, the private realms of monarchs, who once commanded the loyalty of their fief lords, were turning into public entities serving the interests of firms and populated by citizens earning private wealth. The formation of the Dutch Republic is but one example of this transformation. Even in countries that remained monarchies, such as Britain, violent civil war intervened to transmute the absolute ruler into a constitutional monarch respecting commercial interests. Polities could not resist drawing on the immense new economic power of corporate trading, thereby becoming stronger themselves—and more fractious.

  The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which conventionally marks the emergence of the modern state system, involved several treaties that brought an end to the long-running wars among the newly powerful states competed across the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, including the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Netherlands (one of which banned the Dutch from entering the port of Manila). The new system established norms of state sovereignty that are regarded as underpinning the world order today: that states are the fundamental actors in the world system, that each state enjoys inviolable sovereignty, and that no state has the right to intervene in the affairs of another state. States were no longer the domains of monarchs now but public entities that concentrated and deployed resources for national ends. We have the global transformations of the seventeenth century to thank for this new order, if thanks are due.

  The states that rose to global power after Westphalia were well positioned to take advantage of global trade, and none more so than the Dutch Republic with its powerful array of well-regulated monopoly corporations. And yet, by the end of the century, the Dutch were being pushed aside by the English as the leading global trading power. There are many reasons for this eclipse, among which is the French invasion of the Netherlands in 1672. Jealous of Dutch overseas trade, the French dispatched a land army into the Low Countries far larger than anything the Dutch could field. The ultimate Dutch defense was to open the dikes, but it was a Pyrrhic victory from which the Dutch Republic was not able fully to recover. That defeat helped prop open the door for British imperial expansion, enabling Britain to surpass the Netherlands as the dominant global trading power in the eighteenth century.

  The growth of the British Empire was due to many factors, not least of which was the creation of the opium trade, through which the English East India Company linked its territorial control of India with markets in China where it was buying tea and textiles. The Company’s success must in turn be linked to the leadership vacuum on the subcontinent around the death of the great Moghul empire-builder Aurangzeb in 1707. With no one of his persistence and personality to hold the Moghul empire together, the EIC was able to maneuver itself into a hegemonic position in India and, from there, to dominate the trade with China. Imperial conquest and trade monopoly went hand in hand through the eighteenth century to give the British an unrivaled position in global trade. The VOC lasted until the end of the century, but the Dutch were never able to recover the leading position in the world economy they had held in the seventeenth century. Britain’s victory over France at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 completed the ascendancy of Britain at home—and banished Napoleon to St. Helena long after sailors needed it as a stopping point in the South Atlantic.

  The history of the state followed a different course in Asia, though a similar intensification of state operations can be seen. Both the Tokugawa regime in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China strengthened their bureaucratic administrations, exerting a tighter control than previous dynasties. Indeed, Europeans were so impressed with the Qing administration that they regarded China as a model of state bureaucratization—which is why the word that the Portuguese borrowed from Sanskrit to refer to Chinese officials became the universal term for powerful state bureaucrats, “mandarins.” Japan responded to the rise in global trade by closing its borders to all but a few specially designated Dutch and Chinese merchants, otherwise pursuing an autarkic economic model. Qing China allowed limited maritime trade through Canton (upriver from Macao), but the Manchu rulers were drawn more to continental expansion than to maritime power. The British and Chinese empires held each other at bay with limited monopoly trading positions until the nineteenth century, when EIC traders undercut China’s political economy by bringing to Canton boatloads of Indian opium, draining vast amounts of silver out of China and tilting the balance of payments in British favor. A shift in military power followed. It has taken China most of the last two centuries to recover from the collapse of its own imperial pretensions and begin to reconstruct itself as a world power.

  LET US CLOSE THIS BOOK by looking back at three of the characters we have met along the way and asking what happened to them: Manila governor Sebastián Corcuera, Treatise on Superfluous Things author Wen Zhenheng, and our painter and guide throughout this book, Johannes Vermeer.

  Governor Corcuera believed that his victory over the Chinese in Manila in 1640 should have bought him enormous credit, not just to his position as governor but to the royal finances that were his responsibility. It didn’t. For four years before the uprising, Corcuera had been locked in a battle with the entire ecclesiastical establishment in the Philippines, and with none more fiercely than the archbishop of Manila, whom the governor regularly banished and by whom he was just as regularly excommunicated. At the heart of the struggle was the silver trade. Despite the river of privately traded silver that flowed into the colony, the governor ran a hugely expensive administration that was hopelessly underfunded. The problem, from Corcuera’s perspective, was the enormous financial privileges that the Catholic Church enjoyed in the Philippines. Reducing these privileges, Corcuera reasoned, would reduce his deficit. King Philip warned him against making any changes—possibly recalling that a previous governor had been assassinated by the priests for meddling with the Church’s expectations for income.

  The clergy was not willing to treat Corcuera’s suppression of the Chinese insurgency as a justification for giving in on his fiscal demands. Rather, they went on a counterattack by insisting that he was responsible for the uprising in the first place. The reason the farmers of Calamba rose in rebellion was entirely due to Corcuera’s desire to increase royal revenues, they reported back home. If he hadn’t been pushing so hard on revenues, the farmers would have not been in such desperate straits, and the other Chinese would not have had the grievances that drove them into open revolt. The governor’s priestly enemies were not content to say that he was overzealous in doing his job. They insisted that this was all for Corcuera’s own benefit, and that his campaign for fiscal responsibility was an elaborate tactic to hide the fact that he was the biggest embezzler of all.

  The cost of the suppression obliged Corcuera to press even harder for revenue. One device he used was doubling the price that Chinese merchants had to pay for trading licenses. The plan was to punish Chinese traders for supporting the insurrection, but it backfired when the Chinese passed the increase in their fees on to their customers. As a result, prices went up all over Manila. “Where shoes were worth two reals before, they are now worth four,” or half a peso (piece-of-eight), the king’s fiscal agent in Manila complained in 1644. “It now costs four or five pesos to have a garment made where before it cost two. The same thing is true in everything else,” he complained. “It all originated and proceeded from the year of 1639, with the increase of their
burden for the general license.” Corcuera had put himself in the unfortunate position of making the Spanish pay for his victory, not the Chinese.

  Unable to break the opposition against him, Corcuera asked to retire from his post. This he could not do until his replacement arrived, as it was up to the new governor to review his predecessor’s books before allowing him to depart. And as the Church had filed fifty-nine charges of impeachment against him, Madrid decided in 1641 that Corcuera should be held in prison pending the full review. His replacement did not arrive until 1644, which meant that Corcuera was under comfortable house arrest for three years awaiting judgment. After a year investigating his case, the new governor found him guilty on some counts (the loss of the Spanish toehold on Taiwan to the Dutch was added to his crimes) and innocent on others. He referred the case to Madrid for final judgment. Corcuera had supporters at home, and they issued a fresh round of countercharges against the Church to further complicate matters. His case was no closer to resolution.