February 11, 2001|By Michael Pakenham
I am not a historian. I am, however, a lifetime subscriber to George Santayana's sage chestnut (I avoid cilantro chestnuts): "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Beyond being instructive, the past is the greatest of all moral forces. Every emergence from natural savagery has been on a staircase of awareness of what came before.
Thus, I am deeply distressed by illogical academic fads that declare history to be arbitrary and inconsequential. So I'm nigh on ecstatic to find a book by a distinguished academic that both explores and celebrates humane values. Such a volume is "1688: A Global History," by John E. Wills Jr. (Norton, 352 pages, $27.95).
It begins on January third, 1688, and stays entirely within that year, except for matters of context. The opening pages look at Tokyo and Manila -- prosperous, advanced cultures. There is a glance at the northwest coast of Australia, and at Beijing. Like the morning sun, the narrative moves westward -- to Mecca, to Venice and on to Mexico. It is a tiny, flitting tour of a handful of points on earth vastly different but also almost eerily similar in their religious intensity, bellicosity and the appearances of great privilege and power contrasted vividly to illiteracy, poverty and anonymity.
This book as a whole is not a portrait of the world, of course, but a series of sharply focused glimpses of peoples, cultures and civilizations that in the main knew little of each other -- populations who had scant senses of place and time.
Wills is a history professor at the University of Southern California, author of a number of esteemed academic works, with particular attention to China. This book is never pedantic, consistently accessible -- or, in publishing parlance, "a good read."
Much about the period is baroque, in the many uses and abuses of that term. A test of -- and testament to -- Wills' elegance of language and personal culture is his early definition:
"The word 'baroque,' originating as a Portuguese term for the peculiar beauty of a deformed, uneven pearl, suggests a range of artistic styles in which the balance and harmony of the Renaissance styles are abandoned for imbalance, free elaboration of form, playful gesture and surprising allusion, through which the most intense of emotions and the darkest of realities may be glimpsed, their power enhanced by the glittering surface that partially conceals them."
What was going on in 1688?
In the Western Hemisphere, the Spanish were expanding their empire, while the French mostly bumbled as colonizers. Manila was a hundred-year-old, small, fortified Spanish city and, as in the Spanish-presence Americas, there was much missionary activity -- Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian.
In the upper Congo, Portuguese influences and religious conversions were already significant. French traders were active on the west coast of Africa, often as slavers. English were also trading there -- but far less than they would a half-century later. Danish and other interests competed, reaching for treasure and slaves. The Dutch were active in East Asia and already well established in South Africa, becoming Afrikaners.
Exploration was going on all over the world -- daring, risky, immensely profitable stuff. Amazingly good records were kept. Among the most impressive were those of the Dutch East India Company, a cooperative corporation through which the Dutch controlled their far-flung Asian empire. In the 1680s, Wills reports, 15 to 25 large folio volumes of copies of records of sales, relations with local powers, orders, shipping data and compacts were copied by hand and sent from Jakarta to Holland every year. They are now beautifully preserved in the General State Archives in The Hague.
Wills is an immensely respectful and diligent researcher with a lyric writing voice. His command of the intricacies of civilizations that were complex, highly nuanced and existed more than 300 years ago is extraordinary. He has a marvelous eye for, and command of, the use of the long illustrative anecdote -- a great storyteller.
A lot of these passages are four- to eight-page sketches of individual lives. Many are luminaries -- Isaac Newton, John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz each was at the height of his intellectual power and influence. Others are obscure but just as real.
In England, 1688 was the year of the Glorious Revolution -- arguably the opening of the development of modern constitutional government even as its empire continued to expand. While less successful than others in colonizing, domestically, France was at the apex of imperial glory, with the court of Versailles at its peak. The rest of Europe was in various states of disquiet, instability, prosperity and foreign adventure. Amsterdam -- very tightly in the grip of militant Calvinists -- was an immense trading center, one of the great cities of the world, and certainly of Europe.
In September of 1688, "Confusion of Confusions," by Joseph Penso de la Vega, an Amsterdam Sephardim, became the first book ever published on stock market speculation and manipulation. It is as sophisticated, Wills says, as much of such stuff being written today about Wall Street.
A third of the way through his book, Wills writes of his craft, his aspiration: "The historian seeking to sketch a world seeks not to be confined by any style, any set of questions but to follow hunches, to let one thing lead to another. ... He hopes to avoid system and to put before his reader many pictures of a world, reflecting the unconfineable variety, splendor, and strangeness of the human condition."
That Wills does, in this enchanting and learned volume, with grace and wit and modesty and -- above all -- with a firm conviction that history matters for everyone.
