Summary Of Vermeer's Hat

“Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World”, by Timothy Brook shows how Europe got a hold of the commodities that is porcelain and tobacco. Porcelain has traveled through many countries over many years. It first originated in China but was then traded into India. It was sent to Persia because of restrictions in the Koran forced people to find other things to serve their guests. The porcelain was mostly in Europe because of the need to show how wealthy(or could just say because of greed) they were and because of curiosity. Tobacco’s origin seems to be unknown, no one could find where exactly it had come from, just that there have been multiple reports of it being used in the past. It was traded from country to country
In China, there was no significant meaning of the porcelain itself, it was just used as everyday dinnerware. However, in Europe, the porcelain was seen as a show of wealth and many people would strive to have it. These foreign goods were seen as beautiful and rare heirlooms that had to be shown to the world. Instead of keeping their wealth to themselves, people feel the need to buy things to show how wealthy they are. So because of the need to be recognized as better than everyone else, people would buy tons of porcelain to be put on display. The Europeans also saw porcelain as good luck so they tended to have it around them. The Europeans were willing to do whatever they had to do to get porcelain, including attacking ships to get their hands on whatever pieces of porcelain that they could find. Brook explains this when he says, “For Europeans, on the other hand, it was worth no little danger and expense to get their hands on Chinese good. Which is why, four years after the sinking of the White Lion, Admiral Lam was back in the South China Sea looting Iberian ships and seizing Chinese vessels in the hope of acquiring more”(83). The greed of the Europeans was causing them to consistently attack Chinese ships in order to gain access to porcelain. This was dangerous to the Chinese because all of their ships were being attacked, whether they had porcelain or not. Unlike porcelain, tobacco had different meanings and different uses. For example, the native Americans had used tobacco as a way to interact with spirits. Brook explains more about what the native Americans did when he said, “Burning or smoking tobacco was a way of propitiating the spirits if they were in an ugly mood-- as they so often were-- and inducing them to bless your enterprise”(125). Tobacco was used to calm down spirits to make them easier to communicate with. Tobacco seemed to be associated with