Timothy Brook

Newly revised resources for understanding the Rape of Nanking

Documents on the Rape of Nanking

In one painting, a Dutch military officer leans toward a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. In a third, fruit spills from a porcelain bowl onto a Turkish carpet. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There - with silver mined in Peru - Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelain so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Vermeer's haunting images hint at the stories behind these exquisitely rendered moments. As Timothy Brook shows us in Vermeer's Hat, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually open doors onto a rapidly expanding world.

The seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world

Vermeer's Hat

the 17th century and the dawn of the global world

Vermeer's hat

The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

Associate Professor of History Timothy Brook

China's Last Empire: The Great Quing William T. Rowe --

The Troubled Empire

Examines China's relationship with the world at large for the first time, from the Yuan through to the present, by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met, and continues to meet, the world

China and the World

Great State

Investigating the discovery of an extraordinary map of China in Oxford's Bodleian Library that was delivered in 1659 by Mr. Selden, the author travels halfway around the world to reveal unexpected historical connections that offer insight into the power and meaning a single map can hold.

Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer

Mr. Selden's Map of China

Mr Seldon's Map of China

Il cappello di Vermeer. Il Seicento e la nascita del mondo globalizzato

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world. Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and visionaries: this is a history of China as no one has told it before.

Jérôme Bourgon

Gregory Blue

In Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin became one of the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi, called by Western observers "death by a thousand cuts." This is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the 10th century until lingchi's abolition in 1905.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the centre of the world. The author examines the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of Ming (1368-1644).

Commerce and Culture in Ming China

The Confusions of Pleasure

This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines the relationship between the present day state and society in China.

The Chinese State in Ming Society

In 17th and 18th century China, Buddhists and Confucians alike flooded local Buddhist monasteries with donations. As gentry numbers grew faster than the imperial bureaucracy, traditional Confucian careers were closed to many; but visible philanthropy could publicize elite status outside the state realm. Actively sought by fund-raising abbots, such patronage affected institutional Buddhism. After exploring the relation of Buddhism to Ming Neo-Confucianism, the growth of tourism to Buddhist sites, and the mechanisms and motives for charitable donations, Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China

Praying for Power

In 2009 werd in de beroemde Bodleian Library te Oxford een Chinese kaart gevonden die anders was dan alle kaarten die men kende. De kaart was er in 1659 terechtgekomen uit de erfenis van John Selden, advocaat, politicus en Engelands eerste oriëntalist, en vervolgens 350 jaar vergeten. Toen historicus Timothy Brook de kaart onder ogen kreeg, besefte hij meteen dat hier een puzzel lag die erom smeekte opgelost te worden. De kaart laat een China zien dat rond 1610 niet was afgesneden van de wereld, zoals iedereen denkt, maar nauw was verweven in een wereldomspannend netwerk van maritieme handelsbetrekkingen hetzelfde netwerk dat de opkomst van Europa zou aanblazen. Dat geeft aanleiding tot talloze vragen. Hoe kwam John Selden in de 17de eeuw aan de kaart? Waar kwam de kaart vandaan? Wie keek op deze manier naar de wereld? En vooral: wat vertelt de kaart over de wereld die erop staat afgebeeld? Als een detective gaat Timothy Brook op zoek naar antwoorden, van de Gobiwoestijn naar de Filippijnen, van Java naar Japan, van Londen tot diep in het hart van China. Brook neemt ons mee op een ontdekkingstocht naar een wereld die al eeuwen geglobaliseerd was voordat de term in onze tijd in zwang raakte.

China, de specerijenhandel en een verloren zeekaart

De kaart van mijnheer Selden

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013. A fascinating work of history, biography, cartography, and literary mystery, Mr Selden’s Map of China unlocks the secrets behind a recently discovered map of China like no other of its time. In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP, and the city’s first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive reader. When Timothy Brook saw it in 2009, he realized that the Selden Map was “a puzzle that had to be solved”: an exceptional artefact so unsettlingly modern-looking it could almost be a forgery. But it was genuine, and what it has to tell us is astonishing. It shows China, not cut off from the world, but a participant in the embryonic networks of global trade that fuelled the rise of Europe — and now power China’s ascent. And it raises as many question as it answers: How did John Selden acquire it? Where did it come from? Who re-imagined the world in this way and, most importantly, what can it tell us about the world at that time? Like a cartographic detective, award-winning author and historian Timothy Brook has provided answers. From the Gobi Desert to the Philippines, from Java to Tibet, and into China itself, Brook uses the map to tease out the varied elements that defined this crucial period in China’s history.

Mr Selden's Map of China

De tableau en tableau, du Mongol Kubilaï Khan, qui aimait à chasser en compagnie de guépards dans son palais de Xanadu, au traître Liang Hongzhi condamné à mort pour collaboration avec le Japon pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, en passant par la princesse bleue que Marco Polo conduisit de Chine jusqu’en Perse et par Zheng He, l’amiral chinois qui, au cœur du XVe siècle, sillonna l’océan Indien bien avant les Européens au cours de sept voyages, Timothy Brook continue d’arpenter les routes de la mondialisation à partir de la Chine. À travers l’histoire de treize personnages, souvent inattendus mais emblématiques de leur époque – empereurs, aventuriers, marchands, eunuques, pirates, missionnaires, orfèvres, soldats.. –, il nous dépeint un Grand État qui, loin d’être replié sur lui-même, n’a jamais cessé d’être connecté au reste du monde, que ce soit ses proches voisins ou les puissances impérialistes d’Europe. Une fresque ambitieuse sur huit siècles (XIIIe-XXe siècle) servie par une érudition époustouflante et un grand talent narratif.

Une histoire mondiale de la Chine

Le Léopard de Kubilai Khan

In one painting, a military officer in a Dutch sitting room flirts with a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer’s paintings haunt us with their beauty and mystery—what stories lay behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The dashing officer’s hat is of beaver fur from Canada, while the pieces of silver, mined in Peru, might be used to purchase the Chinese porcelain seen in other Vermeer paintings. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe in the seventeenth century. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were “an inventory of the possible.” Vermeer’s Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire such things was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

Timothy Brook

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