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records needed for multiple transactions and sustain the heavy correspondence that trade over
     long distances demands. The third discovery was gunpowder. Without the rapid advances arms manufacturers made in ballistics
     technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European traders abroad would have been hard pressed to overwhelm local
     opposition to unwanted trade arrangements and protect the spoils of commerce. The VOC took advantage of all three innovations
     to build a network of trade that stretched all the way to East Asia. “No empire, no sect, no star,” Bacon asserted, “seems
     to have exerted greater power and influence on human affairs” than these three inventions.
    Bacon, famously unaware that all three discoveries came from China, noted that they were of “obscure and inglorious” origin.
     Had he been told their origin was Chinese, he would not have been surprised. Thanks to Marco Polo’s colorful descriptions
     in his Travels of the Mongol court in the later part of the fourteenth century, China held a powerful place in the popular imagination. Europeans
     thought of it as a place of power and wealth beyond any known scale. This idea led many to believe that the quickest route
     to China must also be the quickest route to their own wealth and power, and to pursue the search for that route. The quest
     to get to China was a relentless force that did much to shape the history of the seventeenth century, not just within Europe
     and China, but in most of the places in between. This is why China lurks behind every story in this book, even those that
     don’t at first glance seem to have anything to do with it. The lure of China’s wealth haunted the seventeenth-century world.
    The explosion of seventeenth-century migration was prefaced by an attraction for China that already had begun to shape European
     choices in the sixteenth century. The sixteenth was a century of discoveries and violent encounters, of windfalls and errors,
     of borders crossed and borders closed, creating a web of connections that spread in all directions. The seventeenth century
     was something different. First encounters were becoming sustained engagements; fortuitous exchanges were being systematized
     into regular trade; the language of gesture was being supplanted by pidgin dialects and genuine communication. Running through
     all these changes was the common factor of mobility. More people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away
     from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history. More people were engaging in transactions with
     people whose languages they did not know and whose cultures they had never experienced. At the same time, more people were
     learning new languages and adjusting to unfamiliar customs. First contacts for the most part were over. The seventeenth was
     a century of second contacts.

    THE LOW COUNTRIES, ca. 1650
    With second contacts, the dynamic of encounter changes. Interactions become more sustained and likelier to be repeated. The
     effects they produce, however, are not simple to predict or understand. At times they induce a thorough transformation of
     everyday practices, an effect that Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz has called “transculturation.” At other times they provoke
     resistance, violence, and a loss of identity. In the seventeenth century, most second contacts generated effects that fall
     between these two extremes: selective adjustment, made through a process of mutual influence. Rather than complete transformation
     or deadly conflict, there was negotiation and borrowing; rather than triumph and loss, give and take; rather than the transformation
     of cultures, their interaction. It was a time when people had to adjust how they acted and thought in order to negotiate the
     cultural differences they encountered, to deflect unanticipated threats and respond cautiously to equally unexpected opportunities.
     It was a time not for