Jeffrey Wasserstrom: East Meets West ... For centuries books were a major transport on the now busy route between
[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at UC Irvine, a participant in the 2007 St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading and the author, most recently, of China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times.]
It was a bumper year in 2007 for newspaper reports about the flow of people and objects between China and America. We read about tainted toothpaste coming here, Hollywood film crews going there to film the latest Survivor and Yao Ming crisscrossing the Pacific to marry in Shanghai and shoot baskets in Houston.
With the 2008 Olympics set to take place in Beijing in August, international tourism to China is likely to reach an all-time high.
That road runs both ways. On a recent Sunday, the Los Angeles Times ran two stories about new developments in East-West tourism. One predicted that changed visa rules would bring record numbers of Chinese travelers to the L.A. area to visit Disneyland, shop for brand-name luxury goods and stay at hotels where Mandarin is spoken. The Travel section's lead story was "Revved Up for the Silk Road," an account of a motorcycle tour through terrain Marco Polo first made globally famous.
Such increasing East-West connections have inspired scores of breathless commentaries about the future. But as 2008 begins, it's worth trying to catch our breath and use some recently published books to look over our shoulders and ask: What can we learn from past moments when East-West exchanges proliferated?
A good starting place is Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, in which Timothy Brook treats the objects appearing in the Dutch artist's paintings - tobacco and beaver pelts from North America, silver from South America, fine porcelain from China - as doors that open to reveal the surprisingly global dimensions of the 1600s.
Just published, this elegantly crafted book sheds light on everything from art to colonialism, but its biggest payoff has to do with fakes.
In Vermeer's time, Brook notes, European-made faux Chinese porcelain pieces were more common than Chinese imitations of Western goods....
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It was a bumper year in 2007 for newspaper reports about the flow of people and objects between China and America. We read about tainted toothpaste coming here, Hollywood film crews going there to film the latest Survivor and Yao Ming crisscrossing the Pacific to marry in Shanghai and shoot baskets in Houston.
With the 2008 Olympics set to take place in Beijing in August, international tourism to China is likely to reach an all-time high.
That road runs both ways. On a recent Sunday, the Los Angeles Times ran two stories about new developments in East-West tourism. One predicted that changed visa rules would bring record numbers of Chinese travelers to the L.A. area to visit Disneyland, shop for brand-name luxury goods and stay at hotels where Mandarin is spoken. The Travel section's lead story was "Revved Up for the Silk Road," an account of a motorcycle tour through terrain Marco Polo first made globally famous.
Such increasing East-West connections have inspired scores of breathless commentaries about the future. But as 2008 begins, it's worth trying to catch our breath and use some recently published books to look over our shoulders and ask: What can we learn from past moments when East-West exchanges proliferated?
A good starting place is Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, in which Timothy Brook treats the objects appearing in the Dutch artist's paintings - tobacco and beaver pelts from North America, silver from South America, fine porcelain from China - as doors that open to reveal the surprisingly global dimensions of the 1600s.
Just published, this elegantly crafted book sheds light on everything from art to colonialism, but its biggest payoff has to do with fakes.
In Vermeer's time, Brook notes, European-made faux Chinese porcelain pieces were more common than Chinese imitations of Western goods....