2009 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Timothy Brook
Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury)

Judges’ Citation

In Vermeer's Hat, Tim Brook plays a dazzling game of extrapolation, looking closely at the domestic accoutrements in half a dozen paintings and demonstrating that Vermeer's ostensible subject-the provincial Dutch city of Delft-was actually a window through which we can today perceive the rise of international trade during the 17th century and the dawn of global commerce. Whether the broad brimmed hat of the title, which was made of pelts from Canadian beaver, or a porcelain bowl from China, or a coin of silver mined in Peru, Brook latches on to particular physical details in the domestic life of Vermeer's subjects and traces the threads of maritime commerce that brought them to Delft, illuminating in the process a vast and intricate economic web and demonstrating that centuries before the concept of "globalization," merchants and traders had knit the distant corners of the planet together. From the spread of firearms and tobacco to the global cooling that drove herring to migrate south and in so doing enabled the rise of the Dutch East India Company, Brook employs the delicately rendered details in each painting as prisms through which to show us the wider world.

In masterfully erudite, lucid prose, he follows each commodity to its point of origin and argues, persuasively, that in the global world of the seventeenth century there was "no place that was not implied by every other place." Vermeer's Hat is a bold, original, and compulsively readable work of history, a true virtuoso performance.

Bio

Timothy Brook completed this book while a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. He holds the Shaw Chair in Chinese at Oxford University and is the author of many books, including the award-winning Confusions of Pleasure.

Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Richard Bernstein, Maya Jasanoff, and Patrick Keefe.

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