Vermeer's Hat (31 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
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.
Of the fifty-nine charges laid against Corcuera, one was that he had purloined objects of precious metal belonging to the
king and shipped them back to Spain to build his personal fortune. Included in the list was a solid gold plate and ewer set,
intended as a gift from the king of Spain to the emperor of Japan in the hope of opening trade relations. The gold plate and
ewer somehow disappeared, and Cor-cuera was charged with having sent the set back as his personal property on the
Concepción
, the outbound ship that sank in the Marianas in 1638. He vigorously denied the charge, and nothing came to light, as he had
prevented a thorough manifest from being compiled. Eventually, the authorities in Madrid threw up their hands and declined
to find for or against Corcuera. All charges were dismissed, and Corcuera resumed his service to the Spanish empire. He was
appointed magistrate of Córdoba, and ended his career and his life in the prestigious post of governor of the Canary Islands.
No gold plate and ewer ever surfaced at the time to stand as evidence against Corcuera. But 350 years later, it did. When
marine archaeologists in the 1980s surveyed the coral bed where the
Concepción
went down, they found on the ocean floor the rim of a gold plate—the best evidence yet that Corcuera was guilty as charged.
WEN ZHENHENG, THE CONNOISSEUR OF superfluous things, might have risen to high office like Corcuera, had he been able to pass
the state examinations. He succeeded in passing the qualifying county exams in 1621, but couldn’t seem to discipline his writing
into the formulas that examiners liked and that he needed to imitate if he were to proceed toward an official appointment.
The 1620s was not a propitious decade to seek official advancement anyway. Notoriously corrupt eunuchs around the throne effectively
throttled and bled the administration, and anyone who sought a post in government had to go along with this state of affairs
or face impeachment, or worse. After failing the prefectural exams again in 1624, Wen stepped out of the examination rat race
and turned his attention to the things he loved: playing music, staging operas, and building gardens in Suzhou, the center
of high culture and consumption in the late Ming. The family’s immense wealth allowed him to live the life of the aesthete
that he had championed in his
Treatise on Superfluous Things
.
Wen had a talented brother, Zhenmeng who passed the highest exams in 1622 and pursued a bureaucratic career that brought renewed
honor to the Wens, but political calamity to himself, when he opposed the eunuch faction. He died in 1636, leaving the responsibility
of leading the family to Zhenheng. After the obligatory year of mourning, Wen Zhenheng felt he had to follow his brother’s
example. He secured a minor post in Beijing, where he soon got on the wrong side of court politics and ended up briefly in
prison. Two years later, he was appointed to serve with one of the armies defending the northern frontier of the Ming against
the Manchus. This was 1642, the worst year of the dynasty, with Manchu forces massing on the border and making lightning raids
into Chinese territory, and plague crossing from Mongolia and devastating much of north China. It was a disease episode of
extraordinary virulence; in some places struck by the plague, entire villages died.
Wen managed to evade the appointment and found an excuse to retire home to Suzhou in the south. He was engaged in building
a new garden for himself when the Manchu conquerors reached Suzhou in 1645. He died during the takeover of the city. What
place would a sixty-year-old man of his temperament have had in the new order?
Wen Zhenheng’s biography is but one of any number that could be told for Chinese scholars who got caught in the collapse of
the Chinese world in the mid-seventeenth century. Yang Shicong, the vice-minister who noted the appearance of tobacconists
on every street corner of Beijing, lived a similar fate. Yang did not quit the capital when Wen did in 1642. He remained right
up to the time a rebel army captured the city in the spring of 1644, when the last emperor tried to kill his daughters rather
than allow them to fall into the rebels’ hands and was later found hanging from a tree behind the palace. Yang’s daughter
and two concubines followed the imperial example and committed suicide, but Yang’s servants prevented him from taking his
own life and smuggled him out of the fallen capital so that he could join the resistance. He returned home, but had to flee
farther south when the Manchus invaded. The armies did not catch up with him as they did with Wen, but agents of the Manchus
eventually did, approaching him to abandon his loyalty to the Ming and serve the new regime. He rejected their offer and died
shortly thereafter in self-imposed exile in the south.
For people such as Yang Shicong and Wen Zhenheng, the seventeenth century may have been bringing the world together, but its
effects on their place and time were more than they could bear.
JOHANNES VERMEER, TOO, FACED HARDSHIPS in the last years of his life. The family had never been prosperous, but they had managed
to survive on Vermeer’s painting and his art dealing, along with Maria Thins’s properties and investments. When France invaded
the Netherlands in 1672, the art market on which Vermeer relied for his financial solvency collapsed. Dealing in art was a
line of business that did well when the economy flourished. The abundance of cash in the Dutch economy favored the production
of these wonderfully superfluous things. Householders were mad about hanging paintings on their walls and through the mid-seventeenth
century bought art as never before—which is one of the reasons art museums all over the world have so many seventeenth-century
Dutch paintings. The disappearance of surplus cash from the Delft economy in the 1670s was catastrophic for artists such as
Vermeer, whose survival depended on sales. When purchases and commissions dried up, the only way for him to support his family
was to take loans. The last loan on record, contracted from a merchant in Amsterdam (who may have been buying painting futures
by offering it), was for a thousand silver guilders, an enormous and unrepayable sum. The pressure of these hardships muted
his muse. Of the three paintings that survive from these later years, all of which show women self-consciously playing musical
instruments, only one begins to match the brilliance of the earlier work.
Suddenly on 15 December 1675, at the age of forty-three, Vermeer died. In a petition to the Delft municipal authorities for
support a year and a half later, Catharina testified that his death had been due to the financial collapse brought about by
“the ruinous and protracted war.” Her husband had found himself “unable to sell any of his art and also, to his great detriment,
was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in, as a result of which and owing to the very great
burden of children, having nothing of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart
that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” The suddenness
of his death suggests that a deadly infection laid him low. Despite her elaborate explanation, Catharina was probably right
in believing that his depressed condition sapped his resistance. If so, then what killed Vermeer may well have been the same
thing that gave him his career in the first place: Delft’s place in the economic networks that stretched around the world.
When those networks flourished, Vermeer’s carefully crafted masterpieces earned him the means to support his family and the
time to take as long as he liked to finish a painting. When it collapsed and the only way to get silver was to borrow it,
desperation and death ended both his life and his work.
