Vermeer's Hat

Brook pivots from Vermeer’s paintings and instead considers an illustrated blue and white plate on display in a museum in the Netherlands. The plate is Dutch-made; though it seeks to imitate the craftsmanship and design of Chinese porcelain, there are several giveaways that it did not come from China. First, one of its illustrations features a man smoking, something a Chinese artist in the 17th century would never have depicted because it was seen as improper behavior. However, a Dutch painter decided to include a Chinese smoker on a plate—possibly because the artist had access to knowledge of Chinese tobacco use, and because Europeans had few social stigma around smoking. This cultural intersection highlights how tobacco was bringing the world closer together.

Tobacco was outlawed in Beijing and other provinces; growing or owning it was a capital offense. Historians speculate that the root of this ban is in part linguistic: Tobacco was initially rendered in Chinese as chi yan, or “eating smoke”—a phrase that could be construed as destroying Beijing, the seat of power. Even coincidental threats were seen as serious at a time when Manchu armies were attacking the northern border and domestic rebels attempted to provoke disunity.

The history of tobacco in Europe differs significantly. Tobacco most likely arrived in Europe from North America via Portuguese sailors, who witnessed Indigenous peoples use tobacco in sacred rituals as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds, for healing, and for more practical purposes such as keeping warm. Brook calls the adoption of tobacco by European cultures as transculturation: a process describing aspects of one culture moving into another. This movement can often be violent, with original cultural touchstones being overturned. For example, when Europeans began smoking, the religious associations that Indigenous cultures attached to this practice did not carry over.

Once tobacco spread, demand for it grew until European powers wanted to eliminate the Indigenous middlemen and maximize profit. To this end, Netherlands founded the Dutch West India Company (WIC) to traffic enslaved people from Africa to the Americas to work on tobacco plantations. Slavery allowed European nations to connect to other continents violently; the development of the tobacco industry eventually reached China via three trade routes: from Brazil to Macao, from Mexico to Manila, and from East Asia to Beijing (ironically, traveling through Manchuria—China’s enemy at the time).

While Europeans rejected tobacco as a sacred substance, some aspects of supernatural association did continue. Tobacco was at first seen as a component of witchcraft and helped to fuel the craze for witch hunting. In 1609, King Henry IV of France began an inquisition into witchcraft. When tobacco use spread to the clergy, the pope forbade smoking in church due to the mess and stench. Similarly, European monarchs, such as the English King James I, initially saw smoking as a form of barbarism. However, once they saw the enormous profits—and resulting taxes—of importing and selling tobacco, monarchs repealed earlier bans.

Even in China, widespread use of tobacco meant rulers soon had to relax their views; smoking entered daily use and then became an aesthetic act for the Chinese elite, who followed a set of complex smoking customs to distance themselves from the poor masses. Tobacco use thus became an important marker of social standing, and addiction was seen as a sign of nobility. However, the introduction of opium to a society that saw substance use as positive meant that this much more deleterious drug quickly got a strong foothold, as artists and members of the elite extolled the glories of opium.

Pleasure and smoking are now thought of as separate, but in the 17th century, smoking brought people together. The commodification and dissemination of tobacco, despite its initial use by people who had no intention of making it into a commodity, demonstrates the early European drive for enterprise and global trade.

Brook turns to Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, a painting created eight years after both Officer and Laughing Girl and Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window. In the painting, a woman, possibly Vermeer’s wife Catharina, is older and pregnant. The room is dark, unlike the earlier paintings. The woman has a serene, composed look on her face, and holds a scale for weighing money in her hands. Behind her is a Flemish-style painting of the Last Judgment. Typically, the motif of women weighing gold is allegorical: Painters use it as shorthand to admonish greed. However, Vermeer’s painting shows the woman in a positive light, suggesting that heaven approves of her moral discrimination. Brook uses the silver coin on the table in the painting to begin his discussion of capitalism and enterprise.

Vermeer lived during the age of silver, which was virtually unavoidable in everyday use. As Silver became available in unheard-of volumes, it influenced every facet of life. China became the main destination for silver, which it needed for its inadequate coinage: China relied on small bronze coins but needed silver for larger transactions, and to supplement local economies. By the 16th century, prices in China were calibrated by silver weight. In the first half of the 17th century, China was importing five thousand tons of silver from Japan and South America. This meant that the purchasing power of silver was far higher in China than in Europe, so Europeans used silver to buy Chinese goods, such as spices, textiles, tea, and coffee, which were resold in Europe for a high profit. Supply and demand, as seen in this drive for silver, built the 17th century’s global economy.

Much of the Netherlands’ silver came from Japan, as the Dutch were the only foreigners allowed to deal with that self-isolating country. This silver did not make its way into Europe, so the silver ducat in the painting had to have come from elsewhere. Though there were silver mines in Europe, Brook places the coin’s origin in what is modern-day Bolivia—in Potosí, the most productive mining city of the first half of the 17th century. Indigenous people thought of Potosí as uninhabitable; they mined the silver but did not have much use for it. However, when Spanish conquistadors were shown the silver mines in 1545, Potosí grew into the largest city in the Americas. Spanish colonists first used a volunteer Indigenous labor force but eventually enslaved the population to meet silver demand. Potosí enriched Spain and allowed it to consolidate its hold on South America.

China’s silver also came from Spain’s silver mines in places such as Potosí, though it often took a circuitous route to get to Asia. As there was not much that China needed or wanted from the outside world, aside from firearms, silver was the country’s most notable import. The key silver trade route into China went through the city of Manila, in the Philippines, the world’s most important port at the time and the place where East and West met for trade.

In 1570, Spanish traders tricked Manila’s ruler, Soliman, into giving them a large territory in the city; later Spanish forces assassinated Soliman and vanquished his people. Spain at first hoped to use its colony in Manila to invade and overtake China, not realizing how large that country was. Once it was understood that it would be near impossible to conquer China, Spain relented and decided to deal with China through trade.

The Spanish rebuilt Manila as a fortified city and created the most famous of several Parián, or ghettoes (like the Jewish ghettoes of Europe) for poor Chinese workers, who were instrumental in rebuilding the city when it burned down (as it often did). The Spanish were harsh with Parián; the resulting civil unrest led Manila’s government to kill thousands of Chinese people. China’s ruling Ming Dynasty wanted to respond to this attack but was embroiled in its own problems, such as a failing economy, epidemics, and conquering forces. Many people blamed the dynasty’s fall on silver.

Shipwrecks also affected Manila, a port city that could come to a standstill when the trade that depended on cargo was disrupted. During one such lull, civil unrest led the Spanish to massacre all of Manila’s Chinese population to prevent rebellion. The few Chinese residents who escaped the slaughter were allowed to stay in the Philippines, as the colony needed them to rebuild Manila’s infrastructure. Brook notes that the woman in the painting is unaware of all of this turmoil and bloodshed as she poses with the silver ducat.