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Excerpt from The Dawn of British Trade: To the East Indies, as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1599-1603, Containing an Account of the Formation of the Company, the First Adventure and Waymouth's Voyage in Search of the North-West Passage The original manuscript from which this volume is printed, is preserved in the India Office, London, where it is known as the first volume of the Court Minutes of the East India Company; and consists of 120 leaves foolscap folio, written in the old court hand of the Elizabethan period. Some few years ago it was sent, with other documents, to the Public Record Office to be calendared, and there fell under the notice of my late father, Mr. Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, ever watchful for new materials for history, especially American, immediately recognised its importance. Finding that only a very small portion had ever been quoted, he determined with the sanction of the Authorities of the India Office, to print it in full, and forthwith employed an expert to transcribe it exactly with all its peculiarities of spelling and contraction. This proved a work of time and of considerable difficulty, as the handwriting is extremely illegible in places, and in some cases several opinions were required to decipher certain passages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.