Timothy Brook is a respected and much-published historian of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with special interests in commerce, consumer culture, and Buddhism; and of other work taking up important themes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the way to Tian’anmen Square in 1989. In this delightful, erudite, and instructive book he goes both global and personal. On page 1, twenty-year-old Tim Brook, on a bicycle adventure from Dubrovnik to Ben Nevis, slips on the muddy verge of a road on the outskirts of Delft and finds a refuge for the night. This is the beginning of a long fascination with this small historic city and especially with the light that can be shed on the changing world of its great age in the seventeenth century by the luminous paintings of Delft’s own Johannes Vermeer. The second pole of the web of connections that he builds up is another prosperous place with much water and almost no hills: the lower Yangzi region around Shanghai and Suzhou, which has been central to his research on the late Ming.

Brook’s alert looking at these wonderful paintings, nicely reproduced in the volume, finds in them commodities with distant origins, which open doors to tracing the connections that brought them to Delft. He notes Vermeer’s fondness for reflections on round objects, such as the great pearl in Girl with a pearl earring. Brook the student of Buddhism is reminded of the teaching of Indra’s Net, in which everything that exists or can be thought is reflected in the pearls at the knots of the net of the universe. Brook’s pearls are objects in Vermeer’s paintings that show how the world of the seventeenth century was more interconnected, especially by objects moving in trade, than at any earlier time.

The first painting to receive sustained attention is Officer and laughing girl (c.1658). Brook’s gaze settles on the young officer, mostly in shadow, his back to us, wearing a very fine, large, beaver-felt hat. This is Brook’s first open door into a distant connection – the whole complex story of the pursuit of the beaver and the relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the north-east of North America. Reading widely in primary sources and modern scholarship, Brook explains the use of the under-fur of the beaver pelt to make the glossy and durable felt that was the preferred material for men’s hats. He shows the great differences of mentality and approaches to warfare between Natives and Europeans, the Natives’ constant interest in dreams, and their desire to take living prisoners to replace the young men they had lost in earlier wars. The dreadful story of trade, disease, and Native alliances with and against the Europeans leads from Champlain’s first battle in 1609 to a Huron last stand in 1649–50 on Christian Island in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron). ‘I spend my summers on Christian Island’, Brook writes, and, when he walks near the Native burial places, he thinks of the networks of connection that linked the Huron to the world with such devastating effect (p. 53).

In Young woman reading a letter at an open window (c.1657), Brook’s gaze fastens on a bowl of fruit on a table; it is a piece of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, of which there was quite a lot in the Netherlands. Brook’s earlier work on late Ming consumer culture comes into play here, as he expertly explains the origins of blue-and-white porcelain, its adaptation for export, and the attitudes of fastidious late Ming consumers toward porcelain. In the refinements of late Ming taste-mongering, occasional awareness of foreign objects can be found but much less excitement about them than in Europe; what was important was the evaluation of Chinese products in relation to the country’s intricate great traditions. For the Europeans, distant lands were a source of wealth; for the Chinese, mostly a threat.

Brook is less impressed with Vermeer’s The geographer (probable date 1669), but I find it a compelling image of intensity of the pursuit of new knowledge, in the maps, the folio volume on the floor, the globe, the callipers in the geographer’s hand, and his gaze out the window, noting (I suspect) the height of the sun at a particular time and season. This leads very quickly to a remarkable piece of geographical knowledge hazardously acquired, the account by Adriano de las Cortes S. J. of the wreck near the Guangdong–Fujian border in 1625 of a ship sailing from Manila to Macao. I wish that Brook had made more of the remarkable visual memory shown both in the text and in the illustrations of this work, which gives it such a distinctive place in the archive of European knowledge of China. The story of the Jesuit China mission’s early elite converts, especially Xu Guangqi, is nicely told, but I wanted a bit more of Brook’s own understanding, as a scholar of the late Ming and the place of Buddhism in it, of the extraordinary intellectual and moral leap that these men made.

Tobacco has to take its place among the commodities that linked the continents in the 1600s. Brook doesn’t have a Vermeer image, but finds an odd Dutch bowl, imitating Chinese blue and white, with a figure smoking. His reading on smoking coming to China and on ambivalences toward it is extremely rich and alert. One kind of smoking led to another, as people began smoking mixtures of tobacco and opium and then ‘smoking’ (vaporizing and inhaling) pure opium. Imports of opium to China increased rapidly in the late 1700s, not just after 1800 (p. 148).

Vermeer’s Woman holding a balance (c.1664), a luminous portrait of a woman, probably his wife and very probably pregnant, standing in the light from the same window as in the paintings mentioned above, opens a door on one of the most important weavers of Indra’s Net in the seventeenth century – silver. The discussions of the nature of currency in seventeenth-century Europe and China and of Chinese elite attitudes toward the growing silver economy are expertly done. Much has been written about the dynamics of China’s long transition to silver, and a few more sentences suggesting Brook’s take on these larger themes might have been welcome. The tense co-dependency and occasional violent conflict of the Chinese and the Spanish in Manila, key to the flow of American silver to China, are laid out in dramatic detail. A story of greed and madness in Potosí in the Andes ends the chapter at a nice remove from the serene weighing of the Vermeer picture.

Indra’s Net frays a bit in Chapters 7 and 8. A painting by Hendrik van der Burch of a soldier in a red coat and beaver hat playing cards with a young woman shows that the theme was popular with lesser painters than Vermeer, and opens a door, by way of the African boy pouring the wine, into the enormous transformations that the slave trade was bringing about in West Africa and from Brazil to Virginia, but Brook does not take us to any of those places. Chapter 7, ‘Voyages’, is a fascinating collection of adventures of Europeans on voyages or after shipwrecks, in southern Africa, on the south China coast, and in Korea. I was particularly struck by the adventures of some Dutchmen in a harbour on Madagascar, including two who decided to stay, and Brook’s intelligent reflections on the roles of ‘women in between’ in many such connections, including with the Huron (p. 209). A final chapter focuses briefly on political conflicts around a governor of Manila who had suppressed a China uprising in 1639; on one Chinese aesthete’s experiences of the disasters of the fall of the Ming in 1644; and on the death of Vermeer in 1675, in straitened circumstances following the French invasion and political upheaval of 1672. The two editions of the book listed above are identical except for completely different items for the eighth plate, neither one very securely related to the themes of the book, and reference notes to them in the text.

Indra’s Net is infinite, but books (and reviews) have to come to an end. Despite my suggestions, I think that Brook was wise to be wary of even quick summaries of bigger themes and historiographies, and that the polar interplay between Shanghai and Delft, with stunning digressions to Potosí, Manila, Madagascar, and Christian Island, does a marvellous job of keeping our sense of the seventeenth-century world decentred and rooted in individual visions and memories.