Vermeer's Hat

Vermeer’s Hat (2007) is a work of nonfiction by Canadian historian Timothy Brook. The full title of the book, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, indicates Brook’s comprehensive outlook—positioning Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter from the city of Delft in the Netherlands known for his use of light and the textual clues that abound in his artwork within the context of his contemporaries and the larger world. Brook uses five of Vermeer’s paintings to explore themes of Transculturation, The Movement of People, Paintings as Gateways, and, especially, the Impetus Toward Globalization. Through Vermeer, Brook highlights how interconnected the 17th-century world was, an interconnection that can be glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings if one looks closely enough.

Plot Summary

Brook begins his study in Delft, the Netherlands—the place of Vermeer’s birth, life, and death. Considering five of the artist’s paintings—Officer and Laughing Girl, View of Delft, Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, The Geographer, and Woman Holding a Balance—as puzzles imbued with clues, Brook highlights commerce, industry, and nation building in the 17th century. Zooming out of the narrow focus on Vermeer, Brook also uses works by other artists, such as The Card Players by Hendrik Van der Burch, to explore the start of globalization.

One of the large-scale 17th-century trends Brook addresses is the movement of people, whether by force or volition, for purposes of trade and knowledge-seeking. For Brook’s this is a multifaceted process. On the one hand, in Europe, understanding and improvisation soon outshone conflict as nations, in seeking to understand other parts of the world, became more willing to accept difference. At the same time, while contact with the wider global sphere ended in new knowledge and new trade routes for Europeans, they also brought enslavement, dispossession, and isolationism for peoples on the African, American, and Asian continents. In particular, Brook contrasts the different approaches to trade taken by European countries, which tried to reach everywhere and affect everyone, and China, which resisted interdependency as much as possible.

Brook is also interested in the interplay of transculturation—the way mores or traditions pass from one culture to another—and sovereignty. The most notable example of this in the book is tobacco and smoking. Indigenous people in the Americas developed the practice of smoking for religious and secular rituals. After Europeans like Columbus observed the use of tobacco, smoking made its way into Europe, and then to China. In this process of cultural adoption, some aspects of the original practice were transplanted, though the religious origins of smoking often were not. Meanwhile, as tobacco became a crop that generated profits, the sovereignty of its original developers was increasingly threatened by the colonial powers that took over production and distribution.

Finally, Brook uses important markers of the 17th century, including the rise of the use of silver, the production of tobacco, and the practice of enslaved labor, to highlight the implications of globalization.

Brook argues that positioning the painters he centers as active participants in this new style of economy allows for a better understanding of the world in which the paintings were created, and the world they foreshadow, a connected world with shared humanity and history.