[ Music ]
>> I'm a historian of China
and you may be now sitting
there wondering, "Well,
I've come to a lecture
on Vermeer,
what is a China historian
doing in the room?"
And there's no secret
there, but it's just part
of the excitement of
being an academic.
I didn't start off, of course,
as a historian of China.
I started out as a kid growing
up in the city of Toronto.
I went to university and was
studying English literature
and had no notion that China
would ever interest me.
But I gradually started
drifting in that direction
for complicated reasons we
don't need to go into that,
but I had other interests
at the time too.
I was very interested in art.
I've never studied art.
I'm not an art historian, but
I was in Delft one summer.
There-- Actually, there are no
Vermeer paintings left in Delft.
So you can't go to Delft, his
hometown, and see any Vermeers.
But being there somehow
increased my interest.
And recently, I was going
through some of my old books
and I discovered that a
friend of mine in 1972,
and at that point I was 21
years old, you can do the math,
had given me a book
of Vermeer's paintings
and I had forgotten he'd given
me the book and I opened it
and said-- no, it's inscribed
1974, so I was 23 at the time.
And I somehow have forgotten
some of those memories
and then they came back when
I ended up doing the project
that resulted in this book.
Now, I asked my students
yesterday-- two days ago.
I was doing a lecture
on China-European
contacts during the 16th
and 17th centuries.
And so I was using some of
the material in my lecture
and I asked them, "Does
Vermeer mean anything to you?"
Now, I look around me
and I see we're all
of a certain age in this room.
Some of us more certain
than others, probably.
But for my generation growing
up, Vermeer was the great kind
of discovery of the 1970s.
Before that, if you
thought about Dutch art,
you tended to think
about Rembrandt
and then you'd look
forward to van Honthorst
or something like that.
But Vermeer was a
kind of minor painter.
But in the '60s and '70s,
he suddenly became the
iconic figure of Dutch art
and continued that
way for some decades.
So when it came time to
put a title on this book,
I figured Vermeer would do well
because most readers would
be familiar with Vermeer.
When I asked my student
who are--
they're all first and
second year students.
I said, "Does Vermeer
mean anything to you?"
And they all sat there and
sort of shook their heads
which I found interesting.
You don't need to
know any of this,
but tastes change what we
value in art and what we value
in history keeps changing.
And I found that I was having to
explain Vermeer to them in a way
that I don't think I'm
going to have to explain
to this crowd here
today, which is great.
So I'm not an art historian,
but I am a historian.
And as a historian, I feel
I've got a set of tools
that will allow me to do things.
I happen to work on China,
spent many years there,
learned Chinese and most
of my work is actually
on Chinese materials.
But it was in the course--
actually, this is
some two decades ago,
of teaching first
year world history
that I put this painting up.
Actually, let me give you
the full painting here.
I put this painting up on
the screen and I gave it
to my students because I was
trying to get them to think
about how their experience--
this was at the University
of Toronto at that point.
I was trying to get them
to think how does their
experience growing
up in Canada relates to
the history of China.
And other than seeing
Chinese people on the streets,
there's no reason
that they should think
that there's a connection.
And so I showed them a series
of paintings in which signs
of the outside world were
leaking in around the edges.
And Vermeer for me became
the painter for whom
that leakage is subtle
but extraordinarily wide.
So if there are secrets
in Vermeer,
there are secrets
about world history.
Not so much about Dutch
history, but Vermeer has much
to show us about Dutch history.
But there's a great deal
that a historian sees looking
at these works of art and I'm
going to share some of the--
I'm not sure that
they're secrets
because they're secrets
in plain sight.
If you lived in the
Netherlands in the 1650s,
you would read these
paintings much differently
than you do sitting here
in Arizona in the 2010s.
So, I'm going to take you
through these five paintings.
All of them extraordinary
works of art.
I've tried to scale them
relative to each other.
I haven't got it quite right.
I found with Vermeer that
when you go to galleries
and see the painting, they're
never the size you think they
should be.
They're either bigger
or smaller.
Because you just
have this idea, well,
this is what the
painting looks like.
And then the view of
Delft is this enormous.
It's his biggest canvas,
the big one in the middle.
And then the woman
holding the balance
down in the bottom right, which
is in the National Gallery,
just shocked me the
first time I saw it.
It's so small and I thought
it was a much bigger painting.
I'm going to use these paintings
and we're going to look at them
as historians, not
as art historians.
And I want to start
with this one.
And this one particular--
has particular appeal to me.
It's now in the Frick
Collection in New York.
It's a painting of a young
woman and a young man courting.
And the effect of the
painting is a very warm one.
The man is a somewhat
somber imbruting presence.
The young woman is a very
warm and inviting presence.
You know that the-- an intimate
conversation is taking place.
But there's a map on the wall.
What's that map doing there?
Well, I've learned than an
art historian will tell you
that she is in-- to be
a little but clunky,
she is kind of mapping out their
relationship with each other.
[ Laughter ]
And also, it makes a really
interesting backdrop instead
of just a blank wall, although
Vermeer became the expert
of the blank wall, but he's
filled the wall with this map.
Now, this map was published
in Amsterdam in 1620s
by Willem Blaeu based on a
model by-- let me just see.
Yes, based on a model by
Floris van Berckenrode
who is a Dutch engraver
and mapmaker.
And I just filled in the spot
so you can see what
we're looking at here.
It's all kind of
tilted differently
than we would draw it today.
The north is kind of off
to the upper right corner.
So we've got Amsterdam
in the middle, the--
Well, I just-- The
Zuiderzee is here.
Texel is-- the ships would
come in from the North Sea
through Texel into Zuiderzee.
Amsterdam is the main center
of the Dutch trading economy.
Delft is over there
towards the Rhine River.
It's quite an accurate map.
But for me it's a-- it's also
an invitation to start thinking,
well, what's the map doing?
And in fact, we don't have an
exact original of this map.
We only have copies of this map.
But if you look at the way
Vermeer has painted them,
it's full of ships.
So there is another message
going on here, not that just--
that she's mapping out a
relationship of the young man,
but that they're in
a very mobile world.
People are coming and going
and he's dressed as a soldier.
He comes and goes, too.
So it's a very unstable world
they live in and the excitement
of the meeting is an
excitement of the moment.
But for me as a historian, I
got all interested in the hat.
And I think the reason I did
is that I grew up in Toronto.
We get a lot of history of
the Eastern North America,
the arrival of the Europeans,
and the fur trade is a major
component in what we learned
in high school about how--
why Europeans were in Canada.
There is a more recognizable
beaver.
This is an 18th century
beaver down here.
So, I got thinking about
this and got asking--
I started asking myself
the question, well,
why is he wearing a beaver hat?
And what is a beaver hat?
Well, a beaver hat is made
from felt that's taken
from the under fur of beavers.
By the 16th century, beavers
have been pretty much trapped
out of Europe.
The only market was in Russia.
And even in those days,
the Russian market
was unsustainable--
unreliable, let's say.
And so the discovery of North
America and the discovery
that there were beavers
everywhere was a sudden windfall
that enabled the French
fur trade to take off
and make an extraordinary
amount of money.
Now, the man who was leading the
fur trade was Samuel Champlain.
He was going up to St.
Lawrence into the Great Lakes
and intersecting
with preexisting trading
patterns among the native
peoples of the Eastern
Woodlands.
So the map there shows you
some of the trade routes
in the Eastern Woodlands.
And beaver fur plays a great
deal, plays a large part there.
The Europeans were willing to
pay top dollar for the fur.
It was sent back to France,
boiled down, turned into felt
and hence these marvelous felt--
beaver felt hats that gentlemen
of the 17th century wore.
If you look at a painting
from 100 years earlier,
nobody is wearing that hat
because beaver felt
was too expensive.
So if you had a beaver hat,
it would be quite a small hat.
But by the 17th century, there
was beaver felt everywhere
and you could have this
lovely extraordinary hat brim.
This is an unfortunate moment
in European native relations.
1609, Champlain opens fire
on a group of Mohawks.
He steps into a lot
of intertribal competitions
in the region.
He's trying to play one off
against another in order
to get beaver for the
best possible price.
And at one point is
thrown into a war
between Algonquian
and Mohawk people.
And it's-- in a sense, it's the
opening shot in the massacre
of native peoples in the
North Americas, and I'm sorry
to introduce that note,
but it's a background
to what we're seeing here.
Well, OK, enough
about beaver hats.
Why was Champlain in North
America in the first place?
This is a famous map
of 1570 by Ortelius,
Abram Ortel is his actual name.
And it's a-- you can-- I don't
need to explain the map to you.
But if you look over here,
this is where Champlain is.
He's in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence making his way
into the North American
continent.
And if you noticed that the
St. Lawrence River just keeps
going on.
It just keeps going
and going and going.
There's a little spot here
where there are some hills.
It's not clear whether Ortelius
thought the water was open all
the way through, but it meets
another river that flows
down in Baja, California.
And look, there are some
ships out there in the Pacific
because those ships are plying
the trade between Acapulco
and Manila to bring Chinese
goods back and forth.
So why was Champlain
in Eastern Canada?
He was trying to get to China.
He had no particular
interest in Eastern Canada.
The beavers were a windfall.
They made it possible
to fund the exploration.
It's a very expensive thing
to explore new territory,
so the beaver furs provided
an income to Champlain
so that he could cover his cost.
But the whole point
of being there was not
to go to the Americas.
Canada and the United States are
basically accidents on the way
of the Europeans going to China.
And the entire expansion,
the entire settling
in North America-- North
America is basically a barrier
in the way of the China trade.
That's why Europeans were there.
Now, this is a Chinese copy
of an Italian copy
of Ortelius' map.
And on this copy--
oops, I'm so sorry.
On this copy, you can see
that the cartographer
just open up the channel.
I mean, to heck with mountains
and rivers and whatever,
there is a direct route
straight across North America
that will get you to China.
Otherwise, of course,
famously you have to go
down around South America, the
Spanish are controlling that.
You have to go down around
Africa to get to China,
the Portuguese are
controlling that.
The English is sort of playing
around with the Northwest
Passage up here.
But the end of the 16th
century was the coldest period
in global climate of
the last thousand years,
so you weren't going to ever
get through the ice up there.
The English were also
trying to make their way
up this way around, what was
called the Northeast Passage
around Russia, but that was
also not going to happen.
So here is Champlain's
first map of the part
of Eastern North America
that he was exploring.
And he's-- oops, sorry.
He's-- He shows you
the St. Lawrence River.
There's Lake Ontario.
And then there's another
little river there.
And then there's a
huge body of water here
on the left-hand
side of the map.
That was Champlain
being hopeful.
[ Laughter ]
He figured, I just keep
going along the Great Lakes
and eventually I'm going to find
the way to the Pacific Ocean,
eventually I'm going
to get to China.
In fact, there's still a
municipality outside Montreal
called Lachine.
And to most Quebecois, they
don't realize that means China.
But it means China.
It's called Lachine.
This is a later map
he did in 1632.
By this point, Champlain knows
a lot more of his geography.
He still hasn't figured out that
there's really a Lake Erie yet,
he hasn't done that.
But he's got Lake Huron here and
he's also now got Lake Superior.
But, again, the map ends with
water on the left-hand side.
So this is a cartographic
representation of the new world,
but it's also a kind of
statement to his backers as much
as to say, I'm getting there.
We're getting across.
There's water on the other
side and eventually we'll get
to China and we'll all
become extremely rich.
So, that -- I shared this story
with my students two days ago
and they came back absolutely
baffled because still
in high school in
Canada you learn
about the French fur trade,
but you have no idea why
the French are there trading
in furs at all.
They-- This message still
hasn't got through, but I'll--
you know, I'll keep trying,
I'll keep talking about it.
All right, let me move from
Vermeer's hat to then thinking
about the global context in
which Vermeer is painting.
Because, again, as a historian,
as an art lover, you can look
at Vermeer paintings and marvel
in their extraordinary beauty
and the incredible skill that
Vermeer used to paint them.
I should note by the way that
all the paintings I'm going
to show you today were
painted between 1657 and 1665.
Vermeer was born in 1632, so
he was doing all his best work
in his late 20s and
his early 30s.
So if there are any arts
students in the room,
you can start feeling
discouraged now.
And he's a man about--
which very little is known.
There is-- There are
no letters from him.
There's no documents from him.
He's named in a few contracts,
but he's left no explanation
of who he was and why
he did what he did.
The best document we have
about him comes from his wife
after he died suddenly.
He was about 52, I
think, at the time.
He died bankrupt and so she had
to file bankruptcy documents.
And there we learned
a little bit
about him, but not much at all.
So, he's a bit of a
mysterious person.
We don't know for sure
who he studied with
or whether he ever Holland.
There seems a chance he
might have gone to Italy
but we don't really know.
So, Vermeer suits me
very well in one sense.
He's a blank slate and I can
write on him anything I want to.
I'd like to have him as a more
concrete figure but, you know,
you work with what
you work with.
And there turns out to be
a great deal to work with.
This is his one-- he did
two outdoor paintings
and this is his one landscape.
Landscape painting
was a great genre
of 17th century Dutch painting,
but Vermeer just didn't do
much, but he did this one.
It's possible, and if you ever
go to Delft, and you if you're
in Netherlands, everything
is just five minutes
from everything else.
So if you go to Delft,
buy a copy of the postcard
and you can stand where
this painting was painted.
Here's a map of Delft from
roughly the same period.
So, you're standing roughly
where that arrow
is looking north
on a slight angle
up to the city.
The two women down here on the--
at the edge of the harbor
would be standing right there.
And then you're looking
up this way into the city,
so following that direction.
Now, I've always--
well, I should say
when I was publishing this book,
my editor said this is my
favorite painting of all times.
And if you buy the
hardcover edition,
it's on the inside
flap on-- of the cover.
But as a historian, I
started thinking about it
because I've been to Delft.
I've been a couple of times
to Delft snooping around.
Well, those buildings
over there look just
like a nice Dutch skyline.
But in fact, if you go and
start looking at the buildings,
you can take-- I've got a
photograph I took above.
This is-- I've gone--
there's a canal here.
Excuse me, there's a-- the
entrance to a canal here
and the canal is sort
of running up diagonally
between those buildings.
So this is-- the
photograph was taken
on the face looking
at the canal.
There's an 18th century
engraving of the building.
But if you look at the-- both of
these versions of the building,
you see there's a crest in the
middle and this is the crest.
It says 1631 and it says VOC,
Vereinigte Ostindische
Compagnie,
the United East India Company.
So what Vermeer has done here
is he's painted a portrait
of the Dutch East India Company.
It looks like a painting
of Delft.
It is a painting of Delft.
There are other things in these
painting, but the block of--
the left-hand side of the
painting is a portrait
of the East India Company.
This was a company
formed in 1602.
It was formed from seven
chambers all around Holland.
Amsterdam was the chief
chamber and Delft was one
of the other chambers as well.
So Delft in the 17th
century is actively involved
in the trade with East Asia.
There's another site I
want to point out here.
It just peeks up right-- Well,
I've circled it with a red box.
It's a spire.
That just peeks up
in the distance.
It's the Oude Kerk,
the Old Church,
and there it is marked
on the map as well.
This church was much
painted at the time
and I've chosen this particular
painting, it may be difficult
for you to see, but
this is a painting
of a grave being open up.
In the 17th century if
you had enough wealth,
you wanted to be buried
under the floor of a church.
Poor people got buried
outside of the graveyard,
but rich people found a
place under the floor.
And this is a painting
showing the grave has--
a grave has been opened up here.
And I mentioned this first
of all because this is
where Vermeer was buried.
His mother-in-law was a
successful businesswoman
and so she bought a
plot inside the church.
So when he died bankrupt, he
was still able to be buried
under the floor of the church.
That's the stone as I saw it
when I first went
to Holland in 1971.
This is what you see
now if you go to Delft
and it's a disappointing
improvement in my view.
But people kept coming
to Delft and say, well,
where is Vermeer buried?
And so the city council decided
they needed a better grave
for him.
But I'm not interested in
Vermeer's grave, I'm interested
in this grave and there
are many more like it.
And if you'll bear with me,
I really don't know Dutch,
but I can make my
way through it.
It says, here lies buried
Mr. Johan van der Chys
who in his life sailed
ships from this city
for the East India Company.
He is here buried in 1652.
His son, Ustus, was
buried in 1650--
1675 and his wife buried
in 1692 at the age of 83,
which was truly remarkable.
This is what you did in
the 17th century in Delft
if you were a rich person.
You became a merchant of
the East India Company.
And through teasing around
the sources, I've been able
to determine that the
Vermeer family had connections
in the company.
His uncle-- well, his uncle was
a felt hat maker as a matter
of fact, but his grandfather
was almost bankrupted
by speculating stocks
early on in the company.
So the company dominates
the business life
of the city of Delft.
Vermeer is not himself involved
in any of this directly,
but his paintings are
shaped by the fact
that Delft was a major
center of the trade
between Holland and China.
So, here is an early
painting at 1657,
'58 probably, "A Maid Asleep".
It's in the Metropolitan Museum,
in a gift that means it
can never leave that room
in the Metropolitan Museum.
So if you ever want to see the
painting, don't wait for it
to circulate, you have to
go to the Met to see it.
A marvelous painting and all
kinds of interesting art,
art historical things are
going on, but the part
that interest me less are the
objects that Vermeer has put
on the table in front
of the maid.
There is a jug, very
much in a Delft style.
And behind the jug, there is
of course a Chinese plate,
I shouldn't say of course,
but you'll see just peeking
up behind-- the food is sitting
in what's called a klapmuts.
It's a sort of a flat
soup bowl that became one
of the major export items of
the Chinese porcelain industry
to Europe in the
1620s, '30s, and '40s.
So, Vermeer has put a
Chinese dish on the table.
Well, what's so great
about that?
Well, here it is
again, and this is
in "A Young Woman Reading
a Letter by an Open Window"
and you'll see the same bowl
is here also filled with fruit
and the bowl is situated
right in the foreground.
Now, if you were a Dutch and
this was 1660, when you looked
at these paintings, you'd
be looking at the porcelain.
Porcelain from China was
still expensive enough
that not everybody could
buy it, but cheap enough
that a moderately wealthy
family could get a few pieces.
Chinese porcelain first
arrives in the Netherlands
in the first decade
of 17th century.
People go wild over it
and you have to just think
about the difference between--
well, I don't know what you feed
your dog on, but your dog's bowl
and your plate at dinner.
Europeans before the
17th century ate off wood
or sometimes tin.
They had-- They didn't have
anything nice to eat off of.
That begins to change
in the 16th century
when Italian potters
start going north.
And in fact, it's
Italian potters
who get the Delft
pottery industry going.
But the idea of eating off
something gleaming and beautiful
like a piece of porcelain,
that's entirely a 17th
century invention.
And at this point by 1660,
roughly, Maria Thins,
his mother-- Vermeer's
mother-in-law,
had probably acquired
a few pieces.
So, Vermeer made sure he
positioned these pieces nicely
in his paintings.
Here's another example.
This one is really hard to spot.
And whenever I show this to my
students, they can never get it.
But if you look over there,
you'll see the faint outlines
of a sort-- some
kind of ginger jar.
So he's-- Vermeer is tucking
these beautiful pieces
of porcelain in around
his paintings.
Now, for Vermeer, I
think the pleasure
of painting porcelain
was that it's curved
and reflects the light
extraordinarily well.
European porcelain
of the 16th century,
no light reflects off the
surface, but the glaze
on the porcelain is so glass
like that it gives an artist
like Vermeer the chance
to do these little bits
of highlighting, as the
light comes in from the room
in front of the subject.
So esthetically, it's a
wonderful object work with.
But for me as a historian,
this gives me something--
actually it started
out something I could show my
students to say, China felt--
China may have seemed like a
long way away, it may have seem
as those China was
off in its own zone.
But in fact in the
17th century Europe,
China is becoming
present everywhere.
It's doing this because of
the Dutch East India Company,
the English East India Company,
the Portuguese and the Chine--
and the Spanish as well.
These trade networks
are all getting set up.
So for the Dutch, you have
the big shipyards in Amsterdam
where the East India
Company built its ships.
And here down Batavia, which
is now Jakarta on the Island
of Java down in the
bottom left--
bottom right-hand corner of
the map, you've got a picture
of the Dutch ship building
yards there as well.
This was a major enterprise
and hugely expensive.
This is why England and
Holland created these East
India Companies.
No individual merchant could
survive in this business.
It was extraordinarily
expensive.
Let me tell you a quick story
here of something that happened
on St. Helena, which
is an island, what,
150 miles off the Africa
Coast, it's out on the middle
of a ridge in the
South Atlantic.
It's-- the story has to do
with the ship called the
Witte Leeuw, the White Lion.
In 1613, four Dutch and two
English ships were sailing
in convoy from Asia to Amsterdam
in London with--
loaded with spices.
And spices were the top trading
commodity of the 17th century.
They're light.
Spices at the beginning
of the century arriving
in Europe are worth their
weight in gold quite literally.
So this is what everybody--
everyone wanted to trade in.
Well, the six ships stopped at
St. Helena for a bit of rest,
recreation, and water
and some repairs.
And on the morning
of June the 1st,
five of those ships set sail.
One of them, the
British ship, the Pearl,
is not yet ready to sail.
Half the men on board
are still on sick list.
So they're going to take
another day or two and then try
and catch up to the fleet.
The fleet leaves first thing
in the morning and then later
than morning, two enormous
Portuguese cargo ships come
around the south point of the
harbor and are heading in.
So, John Tatton, who is
the commander of the Pearl,
sees these ships that
are bigger than he is.
There's no way he's going
to tangle with them.
So he takes off immediately,
leaves a bunch of his men
on the island, takes
off immediately
after the five ships
that have gone ahead.
It takes him all day to get--
to catch up to the other ships
and say, there are
two Portuguese ships.
They are loaded with
goods from China.
Let's go back and cease them.
So the Dutch commander
says, great idea.
So he commands the ships
all to turn around.
Two of the ships
don't get the signal.
So, one carries on
to the Amsterdam
and the other British
ship carries on to London,
so only four of them
are going back.
But they figure they have
the element of surprise.
It takes them a good
two days to get back
because they're fighting
the currents
and the wind, but
they do get back.
The Portuguese had move in
the harbor at St. Helena.
The smaller ship is kind
of parallel to the--
I should have showed you a
map of the bay, Jamestown Bay,
but one of the ships is
in parallel to the shore
and then the other one, the
larger ship is beside it.
So-- But it's a kind
of protective position
they've taken up.
And any ship that's going to
come in to harbor is going
to get a broad side from
the Portuguese ships.
Well, Lam [assumed spelling],
Captain Lam who is running
the attack knows what to do.
So he sends two of his ships
in an angle towards the bow
and the stern of the big ship.
And when you're coming
in an angle,
the Portuguese ship
doesn't have much firepower,
it can't protect
itself very well.
So they come in and they
start doing some damage
and then he sends his main
ship straight at the side
of the Portuguese ship once
that some damage has been done.
One of the dock ships is called
the White Lion and the commander
of the White Lion whose
name I'm going to give you
because he didn't
survive the experience,
Roelof Bloem is his name.
He manages to puncture
the port--
big Portuguese ship
above the waterline,
which is what you
want to do, of course.
If you puncture it below the
waterline the ship is going
to sink.
You don't want to sink the
ship, you want to cease it.
So, everything is going well.
He's coming and he does that.
He cuts their cables
and then he gets
in between the two
Portuguese ships
and then the White
Lion explodes.
And there are various
explanations
for the explosion of the ship.
One is that the other
Portuguese ship got a direct hit
on the powder store,
which is held below decks
on the White Lion.
The other is that one
of the Dutch cannon's misfired
causes the ship to explode.
For whatever reason, the
ship goes down in a couple
of minutes, it's gone.
Some of the men survived and
are eventually repatriated back
home, but it will be a long--
that will be a long
experience for them.
So at this point, Commander Lam
decides this is not working out.
He's lost one of his
ships and it's not clear
that losing another one is
going to succeed in the capture,
so he decides to give up.
So he withdraws.
The two Portuguese ships are
left there badly damaged.
They leave home-- They
have to destroy their ships
after they get back to
Portugal, but they get back.
And there are wealthy cargos of
silks and porcelains and spices
and whatever else
is happily unloaded.
Lam doesn't do so well.
One of his ships sinks as it's
trying to come in to Amsterdam.
It's all a bit of a
disaster at the Dutch side.
However, it's a great event
for historians because in 1976,
a team of archeologists
decided to excavate the ship.
It's in about 100 feet of
water, so it's a little deep
and the water is cold.
But this is a photograph
of the excavation.
What the-- the Dutch are
great record keepers.
So we have the loading
list of everything they put
on their ship in Jakarta
on its way back to Europe.
So we have the list, we know
exactly what's in the haul,
mostly spices and diamonds.
So the spices will have
rotted and disappeared
and the diamonds, of
course, are scattered
in the floor of the sea.
So, there was no hope of
getting any of the cargo.
The hope was to recover
the cannon,
which were particularly
desirable objects
for this archeological team.
So here's another photograph
of them bringing the cannon
up from the bottom of the sea.
But then one of the divers
came up with Chinese porcelain.
And once they started
looking around,
there was an enormous load
of Chinese porcelain
all over the seabed.
Now, this was a puzzle
because there's no porcelain
on the lading list.
So, all of this porcelain
is being brought back
if you like quietly.
The East India Company
has no record of the fact
that there are thousands
of pieces of porcelain.
And the way you could
get away with it is,
as your ships commanders,
you needed ballasts
in the bottom of the ship.
And you usually used river
rocks or bricks sometimes.
But what the commander had done,
Roelof Bloem, we have his name,
what he had done is he
got rid of his balast
and he filled the bottom of his
ship with Chinese porcelain.
Chinese are great at wrapping
this stuff so it doesn't--
so, you know, it doesn't
break and there it is.
Now, the reason this
is so wonderful
for a historian is
just think about it,
if the White Lion had gotten
back and they had unloaded all
of that porcelain
and people bought it
and then they were having
Cheerios in their bowl
and they dropped it and the
cat broke it, and one thing
and another, there
would be nothing left
of the shipment of 1613.
But we got the entire
shipment sitting at the bottom
of the Atlantic and it's
all been brought up.
So for a historian, this is
a snapshot of what Europeans
in 1613 were buying from China.
Now, some of it is a little
beat up and has pieces missing,
but some of them-- this was the
vase I put beside the Vermeer
painting a little bit earlier.
It's an extraordinary collection
and it's got a time stamp on it.
We know exactly when
it went down.
So this is a wonderful thing
for a China historian to see
and that's why I became so
involved in trying to make sense
of the porcelain trade.
OK, I'm going to do one more--
take one more detour here
with another painting
and another secret that
ties into this story.
If you want to buy porcelain,
you need to have
something to buy it with.
You need goods to trade
or you need money.
What did the Dutch have?
They didn't have much to trade.
What was Holland exporting
to Asia at this point?
Tin and iron goods,
maybe some wool.
There's not a lot that
the Chinese economy wanted
from Holland.
So what was-- what the Dutch
had to do was find some way
to raise revenue that-- so
that they could send cash
to China to buy the porcelain.
Well, we've got a
nice hint of it here
in this marvelous painting,
"Woman Holding a Balance".
It's in the National
Gallery of Art.
As I said, this was the one
that when I first saw it,
I thought oh it's too small.
It should be much
bigger than that.
Now, from an art
historical point of view,
there's a very clear
Christian message here.
She is holding a balance.
The-- Your virtues and your
sins are being balanced
against each other.
And if you're not
getting the message,
Vermeer has painted a big
painting in the background,
the judgment of heaven and hell.
So in case you're missing
this, he's giving you--
and he often did this.
He often put a painting
in the background
and then sometimes just
painted it out when he figured,
oh, I'm being too clunky.
I'm being too obvious.
But he left this one in here.
Now, this painting
used to be called
"A Woman Weighing Pearls".
And the title was chosen
because there's a string
of pearls there.
She's got a jewelry box
of some sort or some kind
of valuables box on her table.
There's pearls there.
There's also pearls
lying right there.
So this used to be
thought of a picture
of a woman weighing pearls,
but I don't think so.
If you look on the
desk there, she's--
there are three little gold
coins marked in yellow,
and then there's one
silver coin marked in white.
Europeans were only allowed
to exchange precious
metals that had been coined.
The Chinese economy
is the exact opposite.
In this period in China,
you traded high values
by trading raw silver.
So there were no
silver coins being made
in the Chinese economy, you
just work with raw silver.
In a way, that simplifies
everything because you think,
OK, this is going to cause
me 40 ounces of silver,
you go to the silversmith in the
market and you say, cut me off.
You have silver with you,
cut me off 40 ounces worth.
And he'd do that.
He'd stamped it to say,
this is 40 ounces of silver
and you would go and give it
to the person you're
buying whatever from.
It's cumbersome in a way, but
in another way it's also simple.
Europe was flooded with coins
all different denomination,
prominence, quality.
The Spanish kept a very
high level on their silver
into the 17th century, but
not everybody was keeping
up to Spanish standards
on their silver.
So when you were a
householder as this woman is,
you had to weigh the-- check
the weight of your coins,
because coins could be clipped.
That is bits of silver
taken off the edges.
You had to be sure of the exact
value of the coin, which suggest
that Europe hadn't quite got
to the idea of fiat currency.
That is currency that
is declared to be
of a certain value like the
dollar bill in your pocket.
I mean that piece of paper
is not worth a dollar,
but it's declared to
be so and is accepted
as a form of exchange.
Well, in Europe, coins
were still somewhere
between being precious
metal and becoming coins.
And at this point in the Dutch
economy everything is measured
in guilders.
But in fact, the
coins were ducats.
And between guilders and
ducats is a difference
of about 30% in weight.
So managing your money was
really complicated and you had
to be very careful about your
coins, you had to weigh them.
So that's what she
is doing here.
Now in art historical terms,
this is not about
weighing money,
this is about weighing
your sins against your--
against the good things
you have done in your life.
That's the point
of the painting.
The point of the painting is not
that she's measuring
gold and silver.
But as a historian,
I have to say well,
Vermeer needed some way
to indicate moral value.
Money is floating
around, why not do that?
Why not have her
measure coins as a way
of thinking about value?
So economic value and
religious value are occurring
at the same time.
Well, as a historian, I ask
myself, well, what is that coin?
Vermeer did not make
that coin up.
So it is a silver ducat, I'm
giving you an example there.
My next question
as a historian is
where did the silver come from?
Well, by the middle of the 17th
century, the major world supply
of silver is coming
from the Americas.
Mexico, Peru and
particularly a place here
in what was then called Peru.
It's now part of Bolivia,
I believe, called Potosi.
Potosi was literally
a mountain of silver.
The Spanish seized control
of it and used slave labor
to extract that silver.
So they're getting a
high value precious metal
at very low production cost.
In late 16th century,
the production of silver,
the chemical production
has improved greatly.
And so the Spanish
are just scooping
up silver from South America.
Some of it they're
shipping back to Europe.
They're spending as
if there's no tomorrow
and eventually the
Spanish Economy crashes
at the end of the 17th century.
But the other half of the
silver, they're sending
across the Pacific to
Manila in the Philippines
and it's traded to Chinese.
And so the silver
from South America,
most of it ends up inside China.
Now, as I said, China works with
silver as a form of exchange.
You don't need to coin it.
You just do it by weight.
It's perfect.
It's a match made in heaven.
The Spanish arrive with unminted
silver, the Chinese buy it
by weight, and then things
like those beautiful dishes
you just saw start coming out.
Well, when the Dutch get into
this trade in the 17th century,
they get into trade
with the Spanish.
They need to acquire
silver from the Spanish.
They do so often by stealing it
from Spanish and
Portuguese ships.
And then that silver then
becomes the lubricant
of this entire emerging
world economy.
It's flowing out of
South America and Europe.
It's flowing from Europe--
well often from Seville
up to Amsterdam.
Then from Amsterdam, it's being
carried around to Java back
up to the Philippines
into China.
The Dutch are doing
the same thing coming
in the other direction.
The English are getting
into the trade.
Everyone is getting into
it because they are flushed
with a currency that everybody
recognizes and can use.
So if we turn the map
around, instead of looking
at the world this way and
seeing Europe as the connector
between the Americas and Asia,
I think we get a lot
further historically
by looking at the map this way.
And that the connector
is this connector
between Acapulco and Manila.
That's what's holding the
world economy together.
Without that-- if that were
broken, the level of trade,
the level of economic
and cultural interaction
between Asia and Europe would
have been much, much less.
And this is the center of the
activity, the South China Sea.
So you've got China, Vietnam,
the Philippines, Borneo,
Sumatra, Java, Malaysia,
all of these regions are
an active trading zone
into which the Europeans
have come and from
which they had learned
to benefit.
And to also sort of just add
this note that it's not--
17th century world trade is
not simply a European story.
All of the merchandise
coming out of China had
to come out on Chinese ships.
Foreign ships were not
allowed to load goods in China.
That all had to be done
by Chinese merchants.
So the emerging world economy
of the early 17th century is
a Europe-China co-production.
It's-- This is not
Europeans going out
and somehow discovering
the world.
There was nothing to
discover, it was already there,
and everybody there
already knew it.
It was a much more
interactive process.
So I've taken you through
the top three maps,
excuse me, paintings.
We have come around to
the one with the balance.
I'm going to finish off
with one more painting.
It's an iconic painting
of Vermeer's.
It's in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam, "The Milkmaid".
This is again painted
in the same period,
quite unlike his
other paintings.
The other paintings, I've
showed you, it's either his wife
or his-- one of his daughters
are posing in those paintings.
Here it seems that he did get
the servant girl in the house
to pose for him to
do his painting.
And everything here is
the complete opposite
of what I've showed you
of the ladies upstairs
with their Turkish rugs and
their Chinese porcelains
and their beautiful clothes.
We're down in the kitchen.
This woman is dressed
in homespun.
She's got very rough local
pottery to work with.
There's no sign of this
wealthy Bourgeois world
that is emerging upstairs.
But for the historian,
there is a very curious
and interesting site.
OK, so what's going on in this
painting is that the only sign
of something else are these
tiles that are along the floor.
You will probably
all be familiar
with these Dutch tiles,
blue and white tiles.
Well, I was able to-- the
closest tile to this one
down here, which
is blown up here,
the closest one I
could find is this.
It's pretty close.
It's a cupid in blue and white.
Now there's nothing Chinese
about that, except, if you think
of the blue and white aesthetic.
Blue and white was not
a European aesthetic
in the 16th century.
It's something that Europeans
begin to develop in response
to the arrival of
Chinese porcelains.
Europeans had now way to produce
anything of this quality.
But they quickly got tinkering.
So those Italian artisans who
were starting to produce pottery
in the Netherlands in the early
17th century did everything they
could technically to try
and reproduce the
look of Chinese stuff.
So they take a rather
badly thrown plate
and then they would create
different kinds of glazes
on the surface to try
and emulate what a
Chinese plate looked like.
These little tiles were just a
sort of knock off that they did.
Blue and white kind
of reminiscent
of the Chinese Aesthetic made
nice tiles along the bottom
of your floor.
And then of course Delft
potters get into this.
And so in the 17th century,
we get all these Delftware.
Well, Delft potters, this
is not true porcelain,
in the lower pictures.
It's a kind of substitute
that they come up with.
It's got a so-so glaze on it.
It's got a bit of a sheen.
The quality is not great.
And Europeans, it'll
be the Germans
who actually make the
breakthrough on how
to produce real porcelain.
But for the time being, this
is what the Dutch are doing.
And to me, it's yet
another way that just sort
of caps off the argument I'm
trying to make with you today,
which is that in a-- well,
in the particular sense,
Chinese objects were
coming into Europe.
It was a sign of greater
contact between China
and Europe, but more than that.
That the world was really
a much more connected place
than we perhaps think.
We think of ourselves as living
in an entirely globalized world.
We do, we are, and it is
utterly unprecedented.
But the beginnings of that kind
of circulation of information
and goods and awareness
is already starting three
or four centuries ago.
And we can see it here in the
paintings of Johannes Vermeer.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
To conclude, I've got a
passage that I'd like to read
from the book, but I'll do it
at the very end and we're going
to do questions and answers
and then I'll read you a
little passage at the very end.
Apparently, if you want
to ask a question you have
to write it on a card.
But we could-- we could
begin, why don't we just begin
with the hand in the air?
>> The young woman who paid
for two packs of silver,
how did she pay for that?
>> The young woman who--
>> Bought two packs
of [inaudible] silver
coins, how did she--
>> Well, the coins are just--
the coins on the woman's
table are just the currency
that people are using.
The point I was trying to
make here was not so much
that coins were rare, coins
circulated but you had to be,
you had to check their value.
The point of coinage is that
you should be able to-- it's--
we use that expression
today, face value.
Face value means what
it says on your coin.
So-- But you couldn't trust face
value in the 17th century yet.
Money was not quite that fixed.
You could in the
18th, more or less.
But in this period, you
had to be aware that--
well, there wasn't
a common coinage.
So you had to be constantly
checking the coins.
Now that's-- I mean the
silver is coming into Europe
because it's being
brought by the Spanish.
And then through the process
of trade through Europe,
the silver slowly seeps up
into the rest of the continent.
But a century earlier,
she probably--
she wouldn't have had
those coins on her table.
Not that much currency was in
circulation a century earlier.
Yes?
>> Was all the Chinese
porcelain blue and white?
>> It's a good question.
Was all the Chinese
porcelain blue and white?
No. Much of it was.
And if you've got a minute, it's
sort of an interesting story.
Blue and white is not
originally a Chinese aesthetic.
Chinese start seriously
making blue
and white porcelain
in the 13th century.
And they're doing it
to sell to Persia.
Because the blue and
white aesthetic is
in fact the favorite
aesthetic of--
for Persian ceramics
in the 13th century.
So Chinese potters
are making objects
that they think will
sell in Persia.
These then become the objects
that Europeans first see
because a few of those
objects drift their way
into the Mediterranean world.
So there's-- I think the first
experience that Europeans have
of Chinese is going
to be the blue
and white thanks
to the Persians.
So when European buyers
start going to Asia,
they want the blue and white,
that's what they asked for.
Chinese do-- work well in
every other color as well,
but the blue and white
became somehow the sign
of Chinese porcelain.
It's what people wanted.
And so-- And blue and white
has accordingly dominated the
history of European
ceramics ever since.
And I should say also that you
need cobalt to do the blue.
China has cobalt and
it's not very good.
So they had to import their
best cobalt from Persia in order
to produce the plates in China
that they were then
selling to Europe.
And this is the 17th
century we're talking about.
Yes?
>> This early on, was tea
not a huge element in the--
a big factor in the trade?
>> Tea. The first shipment
of tea reaches London in 1609
and it's a bit of an oddity
because they discovered
Chinese drinking tea,
but Europeans haven't the
faintest idea what tea is.
So that market really
doesn't start taking off
until about the end
of the 17th century.
But it does so that in
the 18th century, these--
the paintings of ladies in their
comfortable surroundings are
often going to include
tea cups and tea pots
because tea then takes off.
But it's going to
take tea a while
because tea is not
intuitively obvious
when you first look at it.
A bunch of green leaves, what
are you going to do with those?
But it picks up.
And then it becomes of course
the-- I shouldn't say of course,
but it becomes the
major export from China
at the end of the 18th century.
And the British have to
find something to pay--
to use to pay for it, and so the
British start importing opium
to China in order to pay for
the tea that is buying in China
and bring them back to Europe.
And that then is a
whole other history,
Asia's relation to Europe.
Now, this question is from
somebody who's read the book.
>> Your book mentions that China
closed its silver mines in order
to control people
and imported silver--
anyway, could I expand on it?
Yes. The-- It's-- The--
A classic problem of monarchical
government is the monarch wants
to control everything.
So silver is a--
is the substance through which
the economy is lubricated
and moves and circulates.
If people are privately digging
silver out of the ground,
that means the monarch,
the emperor has not
access to this wealth.
It's all in private hands.
And this makes emperors nervous.
They don't like wealthy people
because wealthy people
have a way
of defying political authority.
So, China doesn't have
huge silver deposits
but they did close down
their few silver mines
because of this anxiety that you
couldn't exert political control
over this wealth.
Now, silver starts
flooding in on these ships.
What's the government
going to do?
Well, by that point, it sort
of given up on this question
of controlling private wealth.
And frankly, how are you
going to-- well, no, I'm--
let me back up on that one.
When the Europeans first arrived
in Chinese waters in 1510s,
they behaved atrociously.
They don't do what their Chinese
counterparts ask them to do.
They assert sovereign
claims on Chinese territory.
They exchanged cannon
fire with Chinese ships.
They behave atrociously.
And so, in 1525, China
closes its maritime border.
No one is allowed out.
No one is allowed in.
They just shut the country down.
And this lasted for
42 years-- 45 years.
It's badly timed
because this is just
as the European buyers
are arriving
with their silver wanting
to acquire Chinese goods.
The Chinese says no.
You're a bunch of pirates.
We don't want to deal with you.
But the pressure from the
coastal community is huge.
They can't change the law
until the emperor dies,
which he does in
January of 1567.
And within a month, they've
gotten rid of that rule
and the ports open up again.
The question is how do
you control that flow?
You put in customs
offices at every port
that is-- are be used.
But those customs offices
really can't keep up.
There is an extraordinary
amount of corruption which goes
on to prevent the
customs officers
from actually checking how
much silver you're bringing in
or you can get the
silver off the ship
on an offshore island before
you actually pull into port.
So, all of these games
are being played.
The court knows this is
all going on but they kind
of throw their hands
up in the air.
They can't control it very well.
As a result though-- I mean one
of the challenges for thinking
about this in economic
history terms is,
did the silver really matter
to the Chinese economy?
Spain in-- I used to be
able to do the statistics.
Let's say Spain in 1620
had 8 million people.
China in 1620 had a
120 million people.
So these are economies on
vastly different scales.
A huge influx of
silver into an economy
of 8 million people
caused chaos.
Its effect on 120 million
people is much, much less.
Estimates are that
foreign trade never--
has never accounted for more
than 5% of the Chinese economy.
The economy is-- The
domestic economy is so big
that the silver went into
pockets of some people,
some people got very
rich along the coast,
but it didn't have a big impact
on the economy as a whole.
And this is more than this
question wanted to know
but it's right at this time that
the Chinese government is giving
up collecting grain and
wants you to pay in silver.
So as the silver comes in,
the government says, "Wait.
I, you know, I don't want
eight bushels of rice from you,
I want that converted
into silver and I want
to collect the silver."
So the government is moving over
to silver as its unit of account
and getting away from
grain, which is all part
of what's happening in
the commercial economy.
So in a way, it benefits
the government too.
So that original anxiety
about private wealth is
beginning to fade as a result.
All right, I'm going to take as
long with every other question,
so you're for a while.
Were the blue and white
porcelains the inspiration
for the blue and white
tile work in Portugal?
Absolutely.
Yes, yes. The Portuguese
are the first
to bring Chinese
porcelains home.
The Spanish are close
behind them.
And so these porcelains tended
not to be used so much as dishes
but as presentation pieces.
And they could be glued
onto church walls,
used as votive objects.
They weren't much used in sort
of everyday life in the way
in which they are
in the next century.
So yes, that blue
and white is all part
of that, part of that history.
Here's a terse question.
Tulips as currency?
Yes, famously the tulip
industry in Dutch took off.
It took off as crazily and
rapidly as it did I think
because Holland was becoming
a much wealthier place.
Foreign trade was
transformed in the country.
A lot of money was
coming into the country.
And so people were looking
for hot investment items
to put their money in.
Tulips became one of this
investment items and it--
then it was boom
and bust scenario.
People poured money
into the tulip trade
and then eventually the
tulip trade collapses.
There's too many
people in the trade.
There's too much
money in the trade.
The trade can't support that
volume of economic activity
and so the tulips collapse.
However, oh, I can add
one more story to that.
European buyers started sending
designs into the Chinese to say,
I want this picture
on my plates.
And does anybody know when
did the tulip market collapse?
Do you know-- 1630--
I should know this.
Let's say 1634.
Let's just say 1634.
I may be off of a
couple of years.
Well, the year before the
market collapses, the Dutch send
in an order for tens
of thousands
of plates with tulips designs.
Because tulips are now hot.
By the time the plates
are delivered,
the tulip market has collapsed.
So that was a bad
investment decision.
What-- Yes.
I've been a little bit
hard on art historians.
So the question here is
what do art historians think
of your historical analysis?
I have to say that they've
treated me very pleasantly.
In fact, it's been a kind of
entrée for me into the world
of museums because Dutch art,
people know of me
because of the book.
And so I've sort of
moved a little bit
into the museum world
as a result of this.
And I think it's not that
I'm the historian over here
and the art historians
are over there.
In fact, there's been kind
of confluence going on.
Art historians are now much more
interested in the entire sort
of physical historical
processes linked
to the creation of artworks.
And so, in fact, art history
and history are now living
quite heavily together.
I only got one grumpy
review for the book
from an art historian
in England.
So I figured one grumpy
one review isn't too bad.
So, I think they also
maybe condescend to me
as well they should because I'm
not a specialist in Dutch art.
I'm seeing this entirely
as a global historian.
But I see lots of things that
maybe they hadn't bothered
to notice before but
we get along, I think.
Pearls. I don't know much
about the pearl trade.
Pearls are produced in many
locations around the world.
I believe the first sources
of really nice pearls
in Europe is the Indian
Ocean, but I could--
I stand to be corrected on that.
One thing you need to know is
that most of the pearls you see
in paintings in the 17th
century are not pearls.
They are manufactured
substitutes.
That is little balls of
whatever coated with a kind
of glossy white enamel in
order to look like pearl.
So that famous painting
which I haven't showed today,
the girl with the pearl earring,
that's not a pearl on her ear.
That would cost the
maharaja's fortunate
if that were pearl on her ear.
That's a manufactured item,
a bead intended to
look like a pearl.
China is a producer of pearls.
In fact, Chinese
were-- In this period,
Chinese were experimenting with
underwater breathing devices,
not-- they didn't have air
tanks, but these long hoses.
And so the pearl divers would
go down with a long hose
in their mouth so that they
could breathe when they went
down to take the pearls
out of the pearl beds.
There was some trade
in pearls but beyond
that I'm afraid I
can't tell you anymore.
A question about when
was the new plaque
for Vermeer's grave installed?
This I don't know.
I think it was about
10 years ago, roughly.
But I rather miss the old
one, but there you go.
It's a tourist industry and
they needed to satisfy it.
I understand that--
the house Vermeer used
to live in, no longer exists.
It was recreated virtually
in a digital format.
And I understand that
they're in the process
of rebuilding Vermeer's house,
which would be very nice
because we know it very
well from his paintings.
Almost all of his
paintings were done upstairs.
We can figure out
the architecture.
He was very careful
about perspective.
We know dimensions.
So, if it's ever completed,
it will be a wonderful
thing to see.
Did you say last?
[Inaudible] No, no.
OK. All right.
Do you think the paintings trade
and the current findings are
still embedded in the colonial
and orientalist discourses?
How would we critically respond
and rethink this discourse.
All right, this is a tough
question and it's one
that I work with all the time.
I'm going to have to--
sorry, this is going to be
a bit of a mini lecture.
I'm going to have
to backup and kind
of explain the terms
of the question.
How we look at China, and
I'm going to use the we here
for the west loosely framed.
How we look at China has been
very much shaped by the history,
the imbalanced history of power
between the West and China
over the last however
many centuries.
China in the 20th century was--
well, suffered badly under
Japanese imperialism.
Under the 19th, it was back
footed by British imperialism,
to some extent American
imperialism.
These scales back further
into the 18th century.
So this has bred a
certain habit of--
or certain attitude of how
western culture looks at China,
which is to say in a
condescending fashion of China
as backward or unable to match
the cultural development,
scientific developments
of the west, so forth.
And fairly so, it
sometimes blinds us
to seeing China on
its own terms.
So one of the challenges I
had in writing this book is
that I didn't want
to write another sort
of condescending account of
the China-Europe relationship,
that is give all the
agency to the Europeans,
let the Europeans tell the story
and the Chinese are just
there in the background.
That's rather what I've
done today in this lecture.
But in the book, what I've tried
to do is find every Chinese
voice I can in every chapter
to respond to what the
Europeans are doing
so that we can see this
relationship from both sides
and not just from the
European point of view.
I would say kind of the old--
there's a bit of, if you like,
orientalism still floating
around today in the way
in which journalists,
particularly
in this country,
write about China.
China is always a menace
or a threat or inscrutable
or all those other annoying
clichés that get dragged
up when the journalist
can't think
of something more
intelligent to write.
China is very much an active
presence in the world today
and all of us have to be able
to deal with Chinese as equals
and to deal with them as
fairly as we possibly can
and not resort to this kind
of stereotypes of what's wrong
with China, which
has been a kind
of overwhelming cultural problem
for how the west
has looked at China.
When I started studying
Chinese in 1972,
nobody was studying Chinese.
It was a very odd thing to do.
And I have no idea whether
my original instincts were
orientalist or not,
I think they were.
I was actually interested in
take the culture furthest away
from my own and understand
how do they think,
what do they think, what
are their leading ideas,
how do they deal with problems,
how do they deal with life.
I was just intrigued
by the idea of China
as an alternative to my life.
I don't think that
was condescending
so much as just curious.
And then I've gone from
that curiosity to try
and wherever I can find a
very measured way of thinking
about China's place
in the world.
It hasn't all been good.
But then neither has the
British or the American
or the Spanish presence in the
world all been good either.
We need to be able to see
all of these from both sides.
And, in fact, there's a
passage that I wanted to read
from the end of the book
that touches on this.
May I do so?
This is where I was having sort
of last thoughts
along these lines.
The last chapter is called
"No Man is an Island,"
and I take the quote
from John Donne,
which many of you
will be familiar with.
He wrote an essay called
"For Whom the Bell--
Ask Not, For Whom
the Bell Tolls."
He's reflecting on
his coming death.
And through those reflections,
he makes the statement
that no man is an island, we're
all connected with each other.
So here's a few thoughts
I had on this passage.
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 location so isolated
from each other that
something could happen in one
and have no effect, whatsoever
on what was going on in another.
The idea of a common
humanity was emerging
and with it the possibility
of a shared history.
The theology underpinning
Donne's sense
of the interconnectedness
of all things was Christian,
but the idea of mutual
interconnectedness is not
exclusive to Christianity.
Other religious and
secular logics were 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 across in Indra's web,
this is a Buddhist image I
used earlier in the book.
Every clod, every pearl, every
loss and death, every birth
and coming into being
affects every thing else
with which it shares existence.
It is a vision of the world
that for most people
became imaginable only
in the 17th century.
The metaphors that have
surfaced in all traditions all
over the world are needed
now more than ever if we are
to persuade others
and ourselves to deal
with the task 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 such a way that enables us
to acknowledge and come to terms
with the global nature
of our experience.
It's a utopian ideal, an
ideal we haven't realized
and might never obtain 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 world,
then there is no part of
the past, no holocaust,
no achievement that is not part
of our collective heritage.
We're all ready to learn--
learning to think ecologically
in this way and global
warming in our era mirrors
to some degree the disruptive
impact of global cooling
in Vermeer's when people
recognize the changes
were afoot.
A Dutch man who was shipwrecked
in Korea got back to the--
got back to Amsterdam and
was able to tell his tale.
And he was reminiscing
to a Korean friend.
He told this when he got home.
He reminisce to a Korean
friend that there is a saying
in Amsterdam that the
old people used to say.
Today it is snowing in China
and it's a phrase that they used
when anytime their
joints were hurting
and they were-- it
was cold and damp.
So in the 17th century,
the old folks
in Amsterdam were thinking,
I'm feeling the weather,
it must be snowing in China.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
[ Music ]
