Way back in 1983, the art historian Svetlana Alpers brilliantly demonstrated (The art of describing) how painting in the Dutch golden age, under the influence of a new science, aimed to obtain an objective knowledge of the world through an accurate description of it as it appeared to the senses. Exploring the foundations of this new science, one of the foremost historians of science and medicine today argues that its rise in the Dutch world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stemmed not from disinterestedness but from an active engagement with the material world, made possible by an unprecedented expansion of its overseas trade. Advocates of this new philosophy were concerned with detailed and exact descriptions of natural things, as comprehended by the mind and body, rather than with their design and purpose as determined by a superior entity.

Mercantilist motivations necessitated a thorough knowledge of the myriad objects of nature discovered in the new lands, and this could not be achieved without a wide range of actors being enlisted, who included both intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Sociologists of science, in particular Bruno Latour, have shown how cooperation between heterogeneous actors is attained through a process called ‘translation’, whereby scientific authorities or entrepreneurs enlist or enrol ‘allies’ and reinterpret their concerns in such a way as to become ‘obligatory passage points’. Cook has put Latour's actor-network model to good use in demonstrating how, through the creation of a network of individuals and institutions across a wide spectrum of society, useful and authentic data from the East and West Indies were transported easily to the Netherlands and their credibility established. Following eminent naturalists, surgeons, physicians, the social elite, colonial governors, merchants, women scholars, craftsmen, technicians, and the natives of the far-off colonies, through episodes that straddle metropolitan, provincial, and colonial micro- and macro-worlds, he constructs a densely textured account of the making of knowledge in the Dutch golden age.

If early modern commerce relied on credibility and a rigorous accounting system prior to commitment, so too was natural knowledge subjected to a thorough evaluation to minimize error. By the 1630s, Dutch merchants had created a state that resembled a vigorous commercial firm. Commerce valorized certain ways of knowing the world; values such as mobility, credibility, clarity, commensurability, and the material embeddedness of practice united the worlds of merchants and practitioners of science. The cabinets of natural curiosities established by adventurous naturalists in the commercial centres of north-western Europe attracted not only intellectuals, aristocrats, and women, but also the merchant elite, magistrates, and the ordinary people. Thus, contrary to the view that the rise of new science in the United Provinces was due to Protestantism, Cook argues persuasively, using the example of Carolus Clusius, the most famous naturalist of the Low Countries, that it was linked to the emerging values of commerce and to the urge to liberate oneself from the reins of religion. Clusius's method involved the investigation of nature through precise descriptions of phenomena encountered during his travels in the East and West Indies, rather than through speculations about their causes. Particulars mattered much more than any generalization about the natural world. As allied sites for the practice of science, the botanic gardens, the anatomical theatre, the chemical laboratory, and the clinic remained unconstrained by either political or religious conflicts of the time, and were solely guided by the Renaissance values of objectivity and taste. The book (the result of over two decades of painstaking research) also illustrates how the use of new investigative technology in the production of natural knowledge in the 1650s–1670s, such as the single-lens microscope and advances in the preservation of specimens, arose not from universities but from apothecaries, chemists, lens grinders, and the local dyeing and bleaching industries.

In an elegantly structured chapter that begins with a discussion of Rembrandt's painting The anatomy lesson of Dr Nicolas Tulp (1632), Cook sets up Barlaeus, a wealthy libertine magistrate of the chief commercial city of Amsterdam, against Tulp, a Calvinist moralist physician who institutionalized medicine in that city. He demonstrates how, despite their religious differences, the two were akin in the value they placed on exact clinical and anatomical descriptions. The common ground that connected patients, apothecaries, surgeons, physicians, and chemists in the Dutch world was the meticulous study of nature, something that was seldom experienced in contemporary London or Paris. The medical marketplace became the meeting point of commercial interests and the knowledge of useful matters of fact. That the Dutch moral philosophers of the period were compelled to view the world as governed not by reason but by the passions comes as something of a surprise when the case in point is René Descartes, a long-time resident of the Netherlands, to whom theory was of great importance. Descartes appears before the reader as a thorough empiricist, the author of works on human and animal physiology, anatomy, chemistry, optics, meteorology, and music, and as a philosopher who was convinced that even the mind depended so much on the passions. Although simple principles could be used to explain the world, he believed that only accurate descriptions of things helped in eliciting them. Cook goes on to show how Descartes's understanding of the problematic relation between reason and the passions was informed not only by his physiological researches but also by his philosophical dialogues with a woman scholar, the young princess Palatina Elizabeth. The book's conscious attempt to recover the voices of women scholars and collaborators in the making of Dutch science makes it particularly enriching.

The episode in the book that relates to the Dutch East India Company's concerted effort to transport specimens, medicines, and information to the Netherlands from its colonial territories in the latter half of the seventeenth century will be of special interest to scholars of South Asia. Although primarily mercantilist in its aims, the activity led to the publication of copiously illustrated multi-volume works on natural history, such as the Hortus Malabaricus. The earliest known systematic and collaborative study of the flora of Malabar, it was the brain-child of a military commander, Hendrik Van Reede tot Drakenstein, who enlisted the services of local scholars (Malayali Ezhava and Konkani Brahmin) and a Cochin-based Carmelite missionary (Matthew of Saint Joseph) for its realization. For this reason alone, the Hortus has attracted much scholarly attention. In his discussion, Cook objects to one historian's unsubstantiated proposition that it exemplified the assertion of an Ezhava classificatory system,Footnote ¹ and instead suggests, on the basis of Heniger's in-depth study of the same,Footnote ² that it was fundamentally European in inspiration. According to Heniger, it was Matthew's Viridarium Orientale which served as a model for the first draft of the Hortus. However, it must be acknowledged that even the Viridarium had predecessors, however small in scale, as evidenced by new research that has unearthed an illustrated work on South Indian flora commissioned by an English factory in Masulipatnam, which predates the Hortus by at least four decades.

Cook's basic argument – that commerce and science shared common epistemological origins – is most definitely a persuasive one, but his refusal to acknowledge the relevance of Michel Foucault's path-breaking work, The order of things, to his conclusions is inexplicable. Can Foucault's brilliantly argued thesis that ‘the analysis of wealth obeys the same configuration as natural history and general grammar’ in any given culture and at any given moment be so easily forgotten? Nevertheless, Cook's magnum opus, with its depth and range of scholarship, written in a style so evocative of the very philosophy it speaks about, will for a long time remain a standard reference work on the history of science and medicine in the Dutch golden age.