Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Timothy Brooke, professor of history at the University

of British Columbia, and the author of Vermeer's Hat, the 17th century in the dawn of the global

world. Tim, welcome to Econ Talk. It's my pleasure to be here. Your book Vermeer's Hat is a fascinating

look at globalization in the 1600s, particularly the growing ties between Europe and the rest

of the world, and particularly the impact of China on much of the world. It sounds like a very

modern story, doesn't it? It does sound like a modern story, and I think one of the reasons

why I wrote this account of the early 17th century and the way I did was to surprise the reader

to get the reader to realize that the globalization of the world, which is the phase we feel we live

in now, really goes all the way back at least to the 17th century. I wanted to get the reader to

realize that we're not at this uniquely unusual point of time ourselves, that in fact there is a

history and several centuries history to the globalization we're experiencing today. And I think

it goes back to the 1600s. That's when you start to see people and goods and ideas moving around

the world in ways that their ancestors had no idea was possible. Part of the reason for that was

the advances in shipbuilding and navigation, I assume. That was part of the story. One of the great

challenges in feeling on the ocean is not getting lost, as soon as you go outside of land. You hug the

coast, you're fine. Once you've left the coast, you have to establish latitude and longitude. And

longitude was notoriously difficult for mariners until really the end of the 18th century. It was very

easily easy to get lost in the water. But with navigation techniques, larger ships that could

...