Civilisations (2018) s01e06 Episode Script
First Contact
When civilisations meet one another for the first time, there is always the danger of conflict.
A global era of many first encounters began 500 years ago.
It was the dawn of a new age of discovery.
Some encounters were peaceful.
Others incredibly destructive.
But time and again, these momentous meetings sparked great artistic energy and the clashing and the jostling of cultures impacted both sides.
As a historian, I believe that in art we find profound truths about these encounters.
In the masterpieces of 17th-century Holland .
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in great works from Japan, in the paintings of late Mughal India and other artistic treasures .
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we discover the destruction and creation combined to forge new art and culture .
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in the first age of globalisation.
In the last years of the 19th century, thousands of people came to London to see an intriguing new exhibit.
They came to marvel at the art of an alien culture, produced by a supposedly savage people.
The very existence of these works of art represented a challenge to the dominant ideas of the time.
Ideas that underpinned an empire.
The public were fascinated, but also troubled by what they saw.
What bothered them was that this was the work of an African society and almost everybody in the 19th century believed that Africans lacked the technical skills needed to produce great art and the cultural sophistication needed to appreciate it.
It was, in fact, widely believed that the people of the Dark Continent had no history and no culture and were incapable of generating this thing called civilisation.
These reliefs that so disturbed the Victorians are the Benin Bronzes.
They're now regarded as one of Africa's greatest treasures.
Created from the 16th century onwards in the ancient West African kingdom, they record Benin's great kings, her wealth, her military power and the history that Africans were supposed to lack.
I've been coming to see these works of art my whole life.
I was first brought to see them when I was just a little boy by my family.
I've spent hours and hours over the years standing here looking at them and, as someone born in Africa, feeling a strong sense of connection to them.
But despite all their beauty, they are to me tragic works of art, because they are loaded with a sense of loss.
And that's because today they're not in Nigeria among the people whose ancestors made them, they're here in London, in the British Museum.
The Benin Bronzes came to Britain as the spoils of an act of plunder.
In 1897, British colonial forces attacked Benin City.
It was an act of revenge for the ambush of an earlier British expedition.
They deposed the King, the Oba Ovonramwen, sent him into exile and burned his palace to the ground.
They looted the brass plaques and statues that once decorated the palace walls, took them back to London and sold them off.
Some were put on display in the British Museum.
Yet many of the Victorians who puzzled over the existence of the bronzes had forgotten that they were not the first outsiders to see the art of Benin.
Centuries earlier, Portuguese explorers had encountered the bronzes in their original home on the walls of Benin's Royal Palace.
It stood at the heart of a vast city, ringed by one of the largest earthwork walls in the world.
These early European travellers came not to conquer, but to trade.
Before the prejudices of later centuries, they had no trouble recognising Benin as a powerful, sophisticated civilisation, one that was capable of producing great art.
And it's in the art that we find evidence of these first relationships between West Africans and Europeans .
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evidence that shows the faces of early Portuguese traders, complete with beards and long European noses.
This is art that reveals a very different civilisation to the one the Victorians imagined - not an isolated kingdom, but one shaped by centuries of contact with the wider world.
Today the kingdom of Benin is part of Nigeria.
Yet its ancient culture has not vanished, but adapted and survived its many encounters with others.
The people of Benin still pay homage to an Oba.
Ewuare II is the 39th ruler in a line that stretches back to the 12th century.
Oba.
And the artworks that we call Benin Bronzes, in fact made of brass alloys, are still created by the people of Benin, using the same ancient metal-casting technique.
Mr Ine is part of a long artistic tradition.
He learnt his skills from his father, who learnt them from his father, so this artistic form has been passed down over the centuries, family by family, generation by generation, and today the bronze-casters of Benin, like their predecessors, are members of an exclusive guild, and they still use the same methods to produce their art - the lost wax method - and almost every stage in that process is performed today as it was centuries ago.
Yet despite their ancient heritage, Benin's craftsmen were not the first West Africans to use the technique.
In the 13th century, the people of Ife cast lifelike heads in metal that are thought to represent now long-forgotten rulers.
They achieved such a sophisticated level of realism that Europeans would later suggest the heads were evidence of the lost civilisation of Atlantis.
This was the indigenous artistic tradition inherited by the Benin Empire, who used it to honour their obas.
In the hands of Benin's craftsmen, the style became more abstract, imbued with magical, symbolic power.
Benin's art would continue to evolve after the arrival in the late 1400s of Portuguese traders, the first Europeans to reach West Africa.
Within Benin's art is evidence that the Portuguese were more than just trading partners.
This brass statue, made by Africans for Africans, is of a Portuguese soldier.
He is quite possibly one of the mercenaries who fought in the Oba's army.
A statue like this could well have adorned the Oba's palace.
And one of the greatest of all Benin's art treasures gives us an insight into the way Benin saw the Portuguese.
Made not of metal, but carved ivory, it's believed to show the face of a 16th-century queen mother - Idia.
It's an expression of elegance and power.
But most intriguing is her crown.
It's a row of tiny bearded faces, symbolising the seafaring Portuguese.
They were said to be messengers of Benin's water god Olokun, so their images reinforced the authority of the Queen.
Trade with the Portuguese meant that the kingdom of Benin, like a number of African societies, was drawn into a new Atlantic world.
African traders loaded locally produced goods onto European ships that sailed up African rivers.
They traded in cloth and in pepper, in gold and ivory, and also in slaves, though at this point, in very small numbers.
But Africans also exported the work of African artists, who found new customers in Europe.
The craftsmen of Benin carved elaborate salt cellars from ivory, in the process creating a new Afro-Portuguese style.
With their Christian crosses and distinctive clothes, these figures are unmistakably 16th-century Europeans.
The lid is crowned with a tiny Portuguese sailing ship, topped with a crow's nest.
As a witty flourish, we see a sailor peeping out.
These luxury items were all destined for Portugal's great port city - Lisbon.
By the late 1400s, contact with the world beyond Europe was transforming the way the Portuguese saw themselves .
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as more inquisitive and more outward-looking.
The fortified tower of Belem, built to protect Lisbon harbour, boasted ornate braided details thought by some to be influenced by African carvings, like the ivory salt-cellar ship.
On one corner of the tower is a celebrated trophy of Portuguese globalism.
It's a rhinoceros, modelled on a real animal sent by an Indian prince as a gift to the King of Portugal.
Brought by ship around Africa and paraded through the docks of Lisbon, it was the first rhino seen in Europe since the Romans.
The same animal was famously immortalised by the German artist Albrecht Durer.
He never saw the beast himself, but transformed someone else's sketch into an engraved masterpiece, which he reproduced and sold in thousands of woodcut prints.
This is the image that helped establish Durer as a master of the new medium of mass communication .
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the printing press.
By the 16th century, Lisbon had become perhaps Europe's most cosmopolitan city.
A reality that was captured in a uniquely revealing painting .
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the King's Fountain.
It's believed that the artist who produced this, whose name has been lost, was from the Netherlands, but this is not a picture of Delft or Amsterdam, this is Lisbon.
This is Lisbon in the 16th century, at the very height of Portugal's global trading empire.
It's a part of the city called the king's fountain and the fountain is shown here.
What's striking about this picture is the people.
Lisbon in this painting looks more like a 21st-century capital, because as Portugal's trading empire expanded around the world, people from across that empire came to Lisbon.
Incredibly, it's believed that 10%, one in 10, of Lisbon's population were Africans.
The Africans in this painting are existing at every level of the social strata.
There are the aguaderos, these are water carriers.
They are almost certainly slaves.
But there were white slaves as well as black slaves.
There's a criminal who has been arrested here.
There are the boatmen, who are ferrying people across the river, but there's also figures like this, this is a black knight, a man of the Order of Santiago, on his horse, with his sword and his cloak and all his finery.
And it's a snapshot of a world that we've forgotten about - Lisbon at the centre of a global empire, Lisbon at the centre of the first age of globalisation.
This is art that captures a moment when the balance of military and economic power meant that Europeans and Africans encountered one another on terms of relative equality.
Yet other art plundered from Central America just decades later tells of a very different encounter.
An encounter that would prove to be one of the most cataclysmic events in all human history.
On the eve of Spain's arrival, Central America was dominated by the Aztecs.
They had their own writing system and a sophisticated cyclical calendar.
Their complex beliefs demanded sacrificial victims in vast numbers to appease the gods and ensure the continuation of life.
The Aztecs also honoured their gods and their rulers in exquisite artefacts fashioned from gold.
Gold that would prove an irresistible temptation to the first European arrivals.
On 8 November 1519, one of the most momentous meetings in all of history took place in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
And this meeting between two worlds, the old and the new, came down to a meeting between two men, Hernan Cortes and the Aztec emperor Montezuma.
And these were two men who occupied positions of radically different status in their respective societies.
It's difficult to know what Montezuma, the god emperor, made of Cortes, the ruthless, ambitious conquistador.
Was Cortes the embodiment of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, whose imminent return had been prophesied? Or was he a dangerous enemy to be treated with caution? Either way, Montezuma decided to lavish upon the Spaniard some of the most beautiful artefacts Aztec society could produce.
It's believed that this spectacular object was one of them.
It is known today as the Double-Headed Serpent.
It's a piece of carved wood that's been covered in a mosaic made up of hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces of turquoise, each of them very precisely fitted into place.
And it's believed that it's a representation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who was sometimes shown as a snake covered in the shimmering feathers of the quetzal bird.
What we don't know is why.
Why did Montezuma perhaps give this to Cortes? It could've been as an act of tribute or perhaps Montezuma believed that he could, with this and other gifts, appease the Spanish and save the Aztec Empire.
But the conquistadors weren't interested in the aesthetic value of Montezuma's gifts.
They wanted only gold.
So with horses, weapons and a great deal of help from Montezuma's enemies, they attacked.
Yet the truth is it was the unexpected, devastating power of European diseases that finally broke Aztec resistance and wiped out perhaps as much as 90% of the population.
When Spain displayed the spoils of its conquest back in Europe, it took an artist's eye to really appreciate their beauty - none other than Durer, the engraver of Lisbon's Indian rhino.
He saw the Aztec works and wrote, "All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart "so much as these wonderful works of art.
" But that didn't stop the Spanish from melting down almost every gold object for its commercial value.
In Mexico, the Aztecs who survived faced a new onslaught.
Catholic missionaries came, determined to eradicate Aztec beliefs.
Especially the bloody, despised practice of human sacrifice.
To break the bond between the people and the gods, they set about the wholesale obliteration of the Aztec religion.
Hundreds of temples were destroyed, and on their ruins churches were raised - sometimes they were built from the same stones - and thousands of statues to the Aztec gods were toppled and burnt.
The conversion of hundreds of thousands of Aztec people to Catholicism was surprisingly swift and thorough.
The Spanish unquestionably used force, but crucial, too, were similarities between the faiths.
Aztec ideas about blood sacrifice and resurrection chimed with the story of Christ's crucifixion, enabling the fusion of the two faiths.
And even this encounter, one of the most violent destructions of one civilisation by another, would produce great art.
In a monumental work known today as the Florentine Codex, one Franciscan missionary, Father Bernardino de Sahagun, employed the skills of Aztec artists to help him create a detailed record of their civilisation.
Sahagun believed that in order to convert people, you first had to understand them, their gods, their way of life, even their rituals of sacrifice.
The text is written in both Spanish and the Aztec language Nahuatl.
But it's the images, painted by Aztecs, that most vividly portray a conquered people, immortalising their own culture at the very moment it was being destroyed.
And it wasn't only on the page.
Through the fusion of the two faiths, aspects of Aztec culture survived into the modern world in the form of a festival.
The annual Day of the Dead is actually a synthesis of the Catholic All Saints' Day and rituals inherited from the Aztec religion.
It's a day when families gather together to remember those who have passed away.
Dona Josefina lost her husband Don Abram three months ago.
But until midnight, surrounded by family and friends, she is here to welcome her husband as she did when he was alive.
To guide Don Abram home, Dona Josefina has built an altar, laden with offerings of bread and fruit.
There are layers to represent heaven, earth and the underworld.
And alongside them, the Aztec symbol of death the calavera, the human skull.
I've come here, bringing with me all my western presumptions and I'm imposing my western view of death as something tragic, to be lamented and mourned, onto what's happening here.
That's not at all how these people are regarding this celebration of the passing of one of their number.
It's my problem, not their problem, that I see death as macabre and tragic.
They see it quite differently.
There is a striking irony in the fact that 500 years after Cortes and the conquistadors arrived, the element of Aztec culture that is most alive is their festival to the goddess of death.
There was no society, whether victim or victor, that emerged from the Age of Exploration unchanged.
Spain, too, was transformed.
Vast amounts of silver and gold seized from the New World made her the richest nation in Europe.
The church justified Spain's conquests on the grounds that they helped spread the Christian message.
But while the Inquisition ruthlessly defended the purity of the Catholic faith, the exchange of ideas and influences was unstoppable.
Spain's aggressive exporting of her culture and her faith to other parts of the world didn't render her immune to the inflow of cultural influences from abroad.
Here in Toledo, the spiritual heart of the Spanish church, cultures met and mixed and, in doing so, some of the very greatest European art of all time was created.
It was the work of a visionary, a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time.
He'd been born in Crete as Domenikos Theotokopoulos, but he was known here in Spain as El Greco - the Greek.
El Greco brought to Spain the traditions of Greek Orthodox art as well as the strange distortions of Italian Mannerism.
But his great achievement was combining those influences in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity of the religious culture of 16th-century Toledo.
In 1596, he began work on a dramatic view of the city.
It's starkly lit, beneath a stormy sky, a vision of a holy citadel where God's authority was made manifest through the Spanish church.
Rising up from the skyline is the spire of Toledo Cathedral.
It was for this Cathedral that El Greco painted one of his greatest masterpieces.
El Greco's painting still hangs in the space for which it was created.
This is the sacristy, where the priests put on their robes before performing mass.
So it's fitting that El Greco chose as his subject the disrobing of Christ.
What we see is the moment just before Christ's clothes are ripped from his body, before the crucifixion.
No other artist more vividly captured Catholic Spain's intense fascination with the brutal horror of Christ's sacrifice.
Now, there's no blood in this painting, but we are symbolically reminded of the violence that's to be done to the body of Christ through the deep, intense red of the robe.
It reminds us that the crucifixion was a blood sacrifice.
A strange echo of the human sacrifices that were at the heart of the religion of the people who Spain had conquered, the Aztecs.
El Greco made Christ's blood sacrifice explicit when he painted his battered, distorted body hanging on the cross.
The bloodstains trailing down towards a view not of the Holy Land, but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish empire.
But Spain's conquests in the New World were not the norm in the 16th century.
They were, in a sense, the exception.
When European explorers first reached the shores of more powerful empires, like India and China, they initially found themselves marginal players.
In Japan, they encountered a feudal society too robust to be conquered.
Although the details are vague, it's believed that the very first Europeans to reach Japan arrived by accident.
They were a group of Portuguese merchants on board a Chinese ship that was driven ashore by a storm around the year 1543.
The Japanese were fascinated by these new arrivals, who they regarded as little more than exotic novelties.
But within just a few years, the Portuguese began to arrive in these waters in their own ships, and from the very beginning it was obvious to them that the Japanese were not a people who they could treat the way the Spanish had treated the Aztecs.
Japan was extremely wealthy, she had an enormous population, a highly sophisticated culture and militarily, she was a formidable power.
This was not a country in which Europeans could even dream of being conquistadors, so the Portuguese instead became Japan's trading partners.
Portuguese traders brought new goods and technologies from every corner of their trading empire.
Though Japan believed firmly in the superiority of her own ancient culture, to begin with at least, she opened her doors to the traders and a whole new art form emerged to depict their arrival.
Folding screens like these were one of the innovations of Japanese art in the 16th century.
They're called Nanban screens because Nanban was the Japanese word for Europeans.
And what it means, rather unflatteringly, is southern barbarians.
Southern because the Portuguese always seemed to arrive in Japan from the south, and that's because they were coming up from their trading bases in India and China, and barbarians because the Japanese were not at all impressed by European standards of hygiene or European table manners.
What these screens tend to show are the great black oceangoing ships of the Portuguese empire, loaded with exotic trading goods.
All of these goods are being lowered onto boats and ferried ashore, and then they're being taken on almost a ceremonial procession through the town.
Now, the Japanese artists who produced these screens were very careful to pick out the most exotic and the most valuable products.
Here is a folding Chinese chair of huge value.
There's exotic animals, rare or unknown to the Japanese, being brought ashore in cages.
But just as exotic and just as exciting as any of these goods are the people coming off these Portuguese ships.
Africans, both free and enslaved, but there's also Indians, there's Malays, there's Arabs.
Almost like a mirror image of the Aztec Florentine Codex, these Nanban screens show us how a host nation recorded the arrival of visitors.
Except here it's very firmly on the terms of that host nation.
But there's also a hint here that Japan's perception of the newcomers as relatively harmless was about to change radically.
New arrivals are greeted by Jesuit missionaries, who had come to Japan not to trade, but to save souls.
By 1600, European missionaries had won nearly a quarter of a million local converts.
So when a powerful new dynasty took control of Japan, the Tokugawas, they decided to make a stand against this threat to their culture.
They executed converts, exiled the missionaries and banned the Christian faith.
Their change of policy was undoubtedly influenced by reports from the New World, where Christian missionaries had tried to obliterate the local religions.
But the Tokugawa warlords, the shoguns, went much further.
They sealed Japan off from the outside world, attempting to turn it into a closed society.
Almost all foreigners, not just the missionaries, were ejected, and Japanese people themselves were prevented from travelling abroad.
The shoguns then promoted a sort of Japanese cultural renaissance, one that looked not outwards to other civilisations, but inwards, to Japan's own cultural traditions.
And they used Japan's artistic traditions as a way of tightening their grip on power and creating a new sense of what it meant to be Japanese.
The shoguns promoted Japan's older religions, in particular the Zen school of Buddhism, which emphasised self-discipline.
In Buddhist temples, the samurai, the warrior nobles, now studied refined arts .
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the controlled rituals of the tea ceremony, as well as poetry, calligraphy and the business of serving the shogun state.
It is tempting today to look at Japan's long age of isolation and conclude that this country's distinctive culture must have developed in something of a vacuum, but the idea that the Japanese were ever completely isolated is a myth.
It was official policy that Japan should be a closed country, but the Japanese were never completely cut off from the outside world or from the influences and the ideas of other civilisations.
The Japanese became instead the masters of controlled contact, permitting only modest exchanges with a few favoured nations.
Tiny Dejima island in the middle of Nagasaki harbour was home to Dutch merchants, the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan.
The Dutch were tolerated partly because they were far more interested in trade than religious conversion, but also because they willingly bowed the knee to the Shogun, acknowledging him as their master.
This relationship allowed the Dutch to import European innovations in art and science into mainland Japan.
One popular scientific curiosity would have an unexpected impact upon Japanese art.
An optical device which the Japanese called Dutch glasses was at first considered a frivolous western plaything.
When viewed through its convex lens, specially painted landscapes, using European rules of perspective, would appear more three-dimensional.
Especially when compared with the flat, decorative style of Japan's dominant, state-sanctioned school of art.
One painter of Dutch glass landscapes called Maruyama Okyo shrewdly focused on revered Japanese subjects, like the medieval Hollyhock Festival, infusing them with a new sense of depth.
Soon his reputation grew.
Okyo began to win more serious commissions.
On a pair of temple screens, he painted bamboo with more delicately observed naturalism than anything yet seen in Japanese art.
On one side, buffeted by the wind .
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on the other, in the rain, heavily laden and still.
But it was for his masterpiece that Okyo combined everything he knew from both eastern and western traditions in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful of all Japanese works.
It's so subtle, so minimal a work of art that it almost feels like it isn't there, and everything about it feels ephemeral and frail.
It's painted on paper, not canvas as in the west, and great expanses of it are just white, blank areas that seem almost untouched by the artist, and yet all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know.
It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, and these broken, jagged cracks in the ice disappear into the mist.
The effect is three-dimensional space.
Now, that is European vanishing-point perspective, and yet this, one of Okyo's masterworks, just could not be more Japanese, because it's a philosophical contemplation of two concepts fundamental to Buddhism - imperfection and impermanence.
Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular, and impermanence because, of course, the ice will melt.
And those two concepts are just as fundamental to Japanese art as the classical Greek-Roman ideas of beauty and perfection are to European art, so this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art, but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy and Japanese tastes.
This synthesis of east and west was only possible because of the tiny trading bottleneck between Japan and Holland.
Yet from the Dutch point of view, it was just one of many global trading partnerships.
It gave the tiny Dutch Republic an influence that was way out of proportion with its size.
Dutch merchants grew rich supplying their clients abroad and back home with the goods they wanted, as well as with new and exotic goods they hadn't even known they wanted.
At the very centre of this vast, intercontinental network of trading bases and this web of shipping routes lay the city of Amsterdam.
In the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, Amsterdam was one enormous market - everything and anything was being bought and sold here.
When the French philosopher Descartes arrived in the 1630s, he described it as a city where all of the commodities and all of the curiosities that one could wish for could be bought.
So, whereas the Japanese had tried to block out the wider world, their Dutch trading partners couldn't get enough of it.
In Amsterdam, the Republic's wealthy merchants built their grand, canalside villas and filled them with the fruits of global trade.
Blue and white Chinese pottery.
Japanese lacquerware, shipped from Nagasaki.
Their fine clothes were made of silk from Persia.
Their exquisite tableware, crafted from New World gold and silver .
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or exotic shells and coconuts.
And to serve the Dutch their fine wines, enslaved African boys, who became one of the great fashions of the age among the rich.
Amsterdam was the testing ground for modern capitalism.
Through its stock exchange, the Dutch East India Company became the world's first publicly traded company.
Now anyone could own shares in Holland's global enterprise.
And in this frenzy of moneymaking, Dutch art too was commodified.
The modern art market was born, supplying whatever subjects the new, aspirational merchant class wanted.
And what they wanted in their art was not the pomp of monarchy or the flamboyance of the Catholic faith.
Instead, they wanted to see a reflection of themselves.
Proud republicans, who had worked hard for the new wealth they enjoyed.
As ordinary Dutch citizens went about their ordinary lives, it's difficult to know how connected they felt to their overseas empire.
While thousands of men and women set sail with the Dutch trading companies to seek their fortunes abroad, most never left their native soil.
As far as we know, the artist Jan Vermeer hardly ventured further than the small, Dutch city of Delft.
Vermeer is not an artist known for wide horizons.
Most of his paintings are famously intimate.
They're set within the neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.
What Jan Vermeer specialised in was the art of everyday life.
And his world was an interior world.
What he captured on canvas was simple, fleeting moments.
A young girl laughing when an officer leans towards her.
A woman reading a letter by an open window.
Another woman in the middle of a music lesson.
And each of those scenes is bathed in a delicate light that pours in from a side window.
But that only serves to emphasise the fact that we're in an enclosed room, and that the rest of the world is hidden from sight, that it's somewhere out there.
But if you look a little more closely at the details, at the objects that have been placed on the tables, at the maps that hang on the walls, what you realise is that Vermeer's seemingly interior, domestic space is infused with the globalism of the Dutch golden age.
You see it in the Chinese pottery that the artisans of Delft learned to copy.
And on the rugs from the Orient that were highly regarded.
A hat made from North American beaver fur.
A geographer, wearing a fashionable Japanese robe, pores over his charts.
There's a globe perched on his cupboard.
Though Vermeer never shows us the view out of the window, he constantly hints at the rich, complex universe that lies beyond.
While Vermeer's window offers us glimpses of the wider world, another artist takes us through that window on a journey of discovery.
The name Maria Sibylla Merian is now largely forgotten.
Yet she was one of the greatest biologists of her time.
As a German immigrant to Amsterdam, she benefited from its freedoms, in particular its freedoms for women.
In Amsterdam, she was able to promote her ground-breaking studies of insects and their life cycles, illustrated with exquisite works of art.
At the time, many people believe that insects emerged fully formed, spontaneously, from the Earth.
That somehow they were born out of the mud.
But Maria explained and painted their life cycle.
Their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
She not only explained that process, she showed which plant species each butterfly species was dependent upon.
This book revolutionised the study of insects in Europe.
But it also helped Maria raise the funds to embark upon a journey to study the more exotic creatures that she knew she would find in the tropical regions of the Dutch empire.
Seduced, like so many others, by the Dutch Republic's connections to faraway lands .
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in 1699, Maria Sibylla set sail for South America and the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the tropical Caribbean coast.
Maria Sibylla spent two years exploring Suriname, sketching and painting local plants and animals.
Many of them were previously unknown to Europeans.
Her work encapsulates the spirit of curiosity that helped fuel the scientific revolution.
Just like the Dutch in Japan, the story of the British in India began with their merchants operating very much on the margins .
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obliged to flatter the local princes and the Mughal emperors who ruled then.
But this story would mark a profound shift from the age of discovery to a new, 19th-century age, where Europe's imperial ambitions came to dominate the globe.
That shift from trade to rule was captured in the work of two artists from different sides of the encounter.
Ghulam Ali Khan, resident painter in the royal court of India's Mughal dynasty .
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and Johan Zoffany, who came to India after making his name painting for the British royal court.
For German-born Zoffany, India was an escape and a chance for a fresh start.
In Britain, he'd wrecked his glittering career by offending the royal family with his cavalier approach to a royal commission.
In 1783, he arrived in Kolkata, the main trading post of the British East India Company.
Zoffany's come here to rebuild his career and to make some money.
He's not exactly fallen on hard times, but he's alienated a swathe of London society.
So this is a place where he can make a lot of money.
That's what he's here to do.
He's described by a contemporary of setting out to come to India to roll in gold dust.
Fortunes are being made, everybody in London knows that huge amounts of money are being made here.
And that this is a place where you can start again.
You can rewrite your story.
Within a year of his arrival, Zoffany produced one of the most astonishing insights into the early relationship between the British traders and their Indian clients.
This is a painting that depicts an event that actually took place.
A cockfight organised by Colonel John Mordaunt of the East India Company, in 1784, in the city of Lucknow for his client, the Nawab of Oudh - two men who were almost living metaphors for what was happening in India in the late 18th century.
Colonel John Mordaunt was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat.
He was a man on the make, trying to build his fortune.
The Nawab of Oudh was a playboy.
He'd already signed away much of his authority and some of his wealth to the East India Company.
And Zoffany hints at the direction that he thinks the relationship between the British and the Nawab is heading, by the fact that he has the British cockerel on the verge of killing the Indian bird.
The painting is full of little, subversive details.
There's gambling.
The men are trying to seduce the women.
There is a British redcoat, right on the edge of frame, slinking off into the distance with his Indian mistress.
This is the British and the Indians, enjoying one another's company.
Socialising, interacting together in easy informality.
What there is no hint of whatsoever, in this painting, is the sort of deeply distrustful and highly racialised relationship that was going to develop between the British and the Indians later on in the 19th century.
By 1800, India was a land in transition.
As dissent and poor leadership had eroded the Mughal dynasty's power, the British East India Company had wasted no time in increasing its influence.
On the throne in Delhi sat the blind puppet emperor Shah Alam, described by one poet as merely a chessboard king.
Yet he was heir to a lavish court, and a centuries-old tradition of Mughal art, painted in vivid, jewel-like colours.
To this court came William Fraser, a young, Scottish representative of the East India Company.
Fraser was not himself a painter, but a patron of art.
And though he was surrounded by the decaying remains of a royal city in decline, he was also dazzled by the art, the poetry and, above all, the people of Delhi.
The more Fraser learned about the culture around him, the more he himself changed.
He began to wear Indian clothes.
He grew his beard in an Indian style and he fathered children with Indian women.
He had, in the parlance of the day, gone native.
Fraser was one of several company men who commissioned Indian artists to document the country's rich, complex culture.
Known as company paintings, they depict scenes and characters from every level of Indian society.
It is not quite clear how we should view this art.
Because we often see it through a very British and rather colonial point of view.
The fact that we call these works company paintings gives the impression that it was an entirely new genre that was invented by company men, like William Fraser.
But the real inventors were the Indian artists themselves.
And the greatest of them all was the celebrated Ghulam Ali Khan.
Ghulam Ali Khan was not just a master painter, he was part of a long tradition of Mughal artists.
And he was one of the few who signed his own work.
He was the patriarch of a school of painters.
But he was also the member of a family that, for centuries, had proudly served as painters to the Mughal court.
The impoverished Mughals could no longer afford the services of Ghulam Ali Khan.
So he offered his skills not only to the British, but others too.
He combined Mughal and European painting traditions to depict an astonishing range of subjects.
A portrait of the eminent Colonel James Skinner - a mixed-race, Anglo-Indian offspring of the two cultures.
Commissions from regional rulers, like the Nawab of Jhajjar, who now answered not to the Emperor, but to the British.
And he painted many of India's great architectural treasures, capturing the life of the country at that last moment, just before British rule changed it for ever.
The signs of Britain's shifting relationship with India were already emerging.
A new choice of architecture made it clear that company men were no longer content simply to pursue profit.
When the company's Governor general commissioned his new Kolkata headquarters, it was obvious he saw himself as an empire builder.
Government House was completed in 1803, designed with no regard whatsoever for the spectacular architecture of the Indian traditions.
Instead, its creators turned to the reference books which they had brought with them from their mother country.
These are published plans and architectural drawings of the finest stately homes in Britain.
And what you get from books like this is a picture of Britain at the height of the neoclassical revival - the age when Greek and Roman designs were the height of taste and fashion.
Government House was based on an aristocratic English mansion - Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire.
Its wings, corridors, columns and porticos were transplanted onto the subcontinent.
To build stately homes like this in the British countryside merely said that the families that lived there were people of education and taste and respectability.
To build an enormous, neoclassical palace on Indian soil said something completely different.
What this building was intended to say was that European reason and rationality was superior and had triumphed over what the British increasingly regarded as Oriental superstition and despotism.
This building is political theatre.
It is shock and awe in marble and stucco.
Other British neoclassical buildings soon followed, changing the face of Kolkata.
From church to town hall, bank to Post Office.
These were not just the buildings, they were evidence that one age had passed and another had begun.
The age of European global domination.
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call .
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or go to the address on screen and follow the links for the Open University.
A global era of many first encounters began 500 years ago.
It was the dawn of a new age of discovery.
Some encounters were peaceful.
Others incredibly destructive.
But time and again, these momentous meetings sparked great artistic energy and the clashing and the jostling of cultures impacted both sides.
As a historian, I believe that in art we find profound truths about these encounters.
In the masterpieces of 17th-century Holland .
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in great works from Japan, in the paintings of late Mughal India and other artistic treasures .
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we discover the destruction and creation combined to forge new art and culture .
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in the first age of globalisation.
In the last years of the 19th century, thousands of people came to London to see an intriguing new exhibit.
They came to marvel at the art of an alien culture, produced by a supposedly savage people.
The very existence of these works of art represented a challenge to the dominant ideas of the time.
Ideas that underpinned an empire.
The public were fascinated, but also troubled by what they saw.
What bothered them was that this was the work of an African society and almost everybody in the 19th century believed that Africans lacked the technical skills needed to produce great art and the cultural sophistication needed to appreciate it.
It was, in fact, widely believed that the people of the Dark Continent had no history and no culture and were incapable of generating this thing called civilisation.
These reliefs that so disturbed the Victorians are the Benin Bronzes.
They're now regarded as one of Africa's greatest treasures.
Created from the 16th century onwards in the ancient West African kingdom, they record Benin's great kings, her wealth, her military power and the history that Africans were supposed to lack.
I've been coming to see these works of art my whole life.
I was first brought to see them when I was just a little boy by my family.
I've spent hours and hours over the years standing here looking at them and, as someone born in Africa, feeling a strong sense of connection to them.
But despite all their beauty, they are to me tragic works of art, because they are loaded with a sense of loss.
And that's because today they're not in Nigeria among the people whose ancestors made them, they're here in London, in the British Museum.
The Benin Bronzes came to Britain as the spoils of an act of plunder.
In 1897, British colonial forces attacked Benin City.
It was an act of revenge for the ambush of an earlier British expedition.
They deposed the King, the Oba Ovonramwen, sent him into exile and burned his palace to the ground.
They looted the brass plaques and statues that once decorated the palace walls, took them back to London and sold them off.
Some were put on display in the British Museum.
Yet many of the Victorians who puzzled over the existence of the bronzes had forgotten that they were not the first outsiders to see the art of Benin.
Centuries earlier, Portuguese explorers had encountered the bronzes in their original home on the walls of Benin's Royal Palace.
It stood at the heart of a vast city, ringed by one of the largest earthwork walls in the world.
These early European travellers came not to conquer, but to trade.
Before the prejudices of later centuries, they had no trouble recognising Benin as a powerful, sophisticated civilisation, one that was capable of producing great art.
And it's in the art that we find evidence of these first relationships between West Africans and Europeans .
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evidence that shows the faces of early Portuguese traders, complete with beards and long European noses.
This is art that reveals a very different civilisation to the one the Victorians imagined - not an isolated kingdom, but one shaped by centuries of contact with the wider world.
Today the kingdom of Benin is part of Nigeria.
Yet its ancient culture has not vanished, but adapted and survived its many encounters with others.
The people of Benin still pay homage to an Oba.
Ewuare II is the 39th ruler in a line that stretches back to the 12th century.
Oba.
And the artworks that we call Benin Bronzes, in fact made of brass alloys, are still created by the people of Benin, using the same ancient metal-casting technique.
Mr Ine is part of a long artistic tradition.
He learnt his skills from his father, who learnt them from his father, so this artistic form has been passed down over the centuries, family by family, generation by generation, and today the bronze-casters of Benin, like their predecessors, are members of an exclusive guild, and they still use the same methods to produce their art - the lost wax method - and almost every stage in that process is performed today as it was centuries ago.
Yet despite their ancient heritage, Benin's craftsmen were not the first West Africans to use the technique.
In the 13th century, the people of Ife cast lifelike heads in metal that are thought to represent now long-forgotten rulers.
They achieved such a sophisticated level of realism that Europeans would later suggest the heads were evidence of the lost civilisation of Atlantis.
This was the indigenous artistic tradition inherited by the Benin Empire, who used it to honour their obas.
In the hands of Benin's craftsmen, the style became more abstract, imbued with magical, symbolic power.
Benin's art would continue to evolve after the arrival in the late 1400s of Portuguese traders, the first Europeans to reach West Africa.
Within Benin's art is evidence that the Portuguese were more than just trading partners.
This brass statue, made by Africans for Africans, is of a Portuguese soldier.
He is quite possibly one of the mercenaries who fought in the Oba's army.
A statue like this could well have adorned the Oba's palace.
And one of the greatest of all Benin's art treasures gives us an insight into the way Benin saw the Portuguese.
Made not of metal, but carved ivory, it's believed to show the face of a 16th-century queen mother - Idia.
It's an expression of elegance and power.
But most intriguing is her crown.
It's a row of tiny bearded faces, symbolising the seafaring Portuguese.
They were said to be messengers of Benin's water god Olokun, so their images reinforced the authority of the Queen.
Trade with the Portuguese meant that the kingdom of Benin, like a number of African societies, was drawn into a new Atlantic world.
African traders loaded locally produced goods onto European ships that sailed up African rivers.
They traded in cloth and in pepper, in gold and ivory, and also in slaves, though at this point, in very small numbers.
But Africans also exported the work of African artists, who found new customers in Europe.
The craftsmen of Benin carved elaborate salt cellars from ivory, in the process creating a new Afro-Portuguese style.
With their Christian crosses and distinctive clothes, these figures are unmistakably 16th-century Europeans.
The lid is crowned with a tiny Portuguese sailing ship, topped with a crow's nest.
As a witty flourish, we see a sailor peeping out.
These luxury items were all destined for Portugal's great port city - Lisbon.
By the late 1400s, contact with the world beyond Europe was transforming the way the Portuguese saw themselves .
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as more inquisitive and more outward-looking.
The fortified tower of Belem, built to protect Lisbon harbour, boasted ornate braided details thought by some to be influenced by African carvings, like the ivory salt-cellar ship.
On one corner of the tower is a celebrated trophy of Portuguese globalism.
It's a rhinoceros, modelled on a real animal sent by an Indian prince as a gift to the King of Portugal.
Brought by ship around Africa and paraded through the docks of Lisbon, it was the first rhino seen in Europe since the Romans.
The same animal was famously immortalised by the German artist Albrecht Durer.
He never saw the beast himself, but transformed someone else's sketch into an engraved masterpiece, which he reproduced and sold in thousands of woodcut prints.
This is the image that helped establish Durer as a master of the new medium of mass communication .
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the printing press.
By the 16th century, Lisbon had become perhaps Europe's most cosmopolitan city.
A reality that was captured in a uniquely revealing painting .
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the King's Fountain.
It's believed that the artist who produced this, whose name has been lost, was from the Netherlands, but this is not a picture of Delft or Amsterdam, this is Lisbon.
This is Lisbon in the 16th century, at the very height of Portugal's global trading empire.
It's a part of the city called the king's fountain and the fountain is shown here.
What's striking about this picture is the people.
Lisbon in this painting looks more like a 21st-century capital, because as Portugal's trading empire expanded around the world, people from across that empire came to Lisbon.
Incredibly, it's believed that 10%, one in 10, of Lisbon's population were Africans.
The Africans in this painting are existing at every level of the social strata.
There are the aguaderos, these are water carriers.
They are almost certainly slaves.
But there were white slaves as well as black slaves.
There's a criminal who has been arrested here.
There are the boatmen, who are ferrying people across the river, but there's also figures like this, this is a black knight, a man of the Order of Santiago, on his horse, with his sword and his cloak and all his finery.
And it's a snapshot of a world that we've forgotten about - Lisbon at the centre of a global empire, Lisbon at the centre of the first age of globalisation.
This is art that captures a moment when the balance of military and economic power meant that Europeans and Africans encountered one another on terms of relative equality.
Yet other art plundered from Central America just decades later tells of a very different encounter.
An encounter that would prove to be one of the most cataclysmic events in all human history.
On the eve of Spain's arrival, Central America was dominated by the Aztecs.
They had their own writing system and a sophisticated cyclical calendar.
Their complex beliefs demanded sacrificial victims in vast numbers to appease the gods and ensure the continuation of life.
The Aztecs also honoured their gods and their rulers in exquisite artefacts fashioned from gold.
Gold that would prove an irresistible temptation to the first European arrivals.
On 8 November 1519, one of the most momentous meetings in all of history took place in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
And this meeting between two worlds, the old and the new, came down to a meeting between two men, Hernan Cortes and the Aztec emperor Montezuma.
And these were two men who occupied positions of radically different status in their respective societies.
It's difficult to know what Montezuma, the god emperor, made of Cortes, the ruthless, ambitious conquistador.
Was Cortes the embodiment of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, whose imminent return had been prophesied? Or was he a dangerous enemy to be treated with caution? Either way, Montezuma decided to lavish upon the Spaniard some of the most beautiful artefacts Aztec society could produce.
It's believed that this spectacular object was one of them.
It is known today as the Double-Headed Serpent.
It's a piece of carved wood that's been covered in a mosaic made up of hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces of turquoise, each of them very precisely fitted into place.
And it's believed that it's a representation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who was sometimes shown as a snake covered in the shimmering feathers of the quetzal bird.
What we don't know is why.
Why did Montezuma perhaps give this to Cortes? It could've been as an act of tribute or perhaps Montezuma believed that he could, with this and other gifts, appease the Spanish and save the Aztec Empire.
But the conquistadors weren't interested in the aesthetic value of Montezuma's gifts.
They wanted only gold.
So with horses, weapons and a great deal of help from Montezuma's enemies, they attacked.
Yet the truth is it was the unexpected, devastating power of European diseases that finally broke Aztec resistance and wiped out perhaps as much as 90% of the population.
When Spain displayed the spoils of its conquest back in Europe, it took an artist's eye to really appreciate their beauty - none other than Durer, the engraver of Lisbon's Indian rhino.
He saw the Aztec works and wrote, "All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart "so much as these wonderful works of art.
" But that didn't stop the Spanish from melting down almost every gold object for its commercial value.
In Mexico, the Aztecs who survived faced a new onslaught.
Catholic missionaries came, determined to eradicate Aztec beliefs.
Especially the bloody, despised practice of human sacrifice.
To break the bond between the people and the gods, they set about the wholesale obliteration of the Aztec religion.
Hundreds of temples were destroyed, and on their ruins churches were raised - sometimes they were built from the same stones - and thousands of statues to the Aztec gods were toppled and burnt.
The conversion of hundreds of thousands of Aztec people to Catholicism was surprisingly swift and thorough.
The Spanish unquestionably used force, but crucial, too, were similarities between the faiths.
Aztec ideas about blood sacrifice and resurrection chimed with the story of Christ's crucifixion, enabling the fusion of the two faiths.
And even this encounter, one of the most violent destructions of one civilisation by another, would produce great art.
In a monumental work known today as the Florentine Codex, one Franciscan missionary, Father Bernardino de Sahagun, employed the skills of Aztec artists to help him create a detailed record of their civilisation.
Sahagun believed that in order to convert people, you first had to understand them, their gods, their way of life, even their rituals of sacrifice.
The text is written in both Spanish and the Aztec language Nahuatl.
But it's the images, painted by Aztecs, that most vividly portray a conquered people, immortalising their own culture at the very moment it was being destroyed.
And it wasn't only on the page.
Through the fusion of the two faiths, aspects of Aztec culture survived into the modern world in the form of a festival.
The annual Day of the Dead is actually a synthesis of the Catholic All Saints' Day and rituals inherited from the Aztec religion.
It's a day when families gather together to remember those who have passed away.
Dona Josefina lost her husband Don Abram three months ago.
But until midnight, surrounded by family and friends, she is here to welcome her husband as she did when he was alive.
To guide Don Abram home, Dona Josefina has built an altar, laden with offerings of bread and fruit.
There are layers to represent heaven, earth and the underworld.
And alongside them, the Aztec symbol of death the calavera, the human skull.
I've come here, bringing with me all my western presumptions and I'm imposing my western view of death as something tragic, to be lamented and mourned, onto what's happening here.
That's not at all how these people are regarding this celebration of the passing of one of their number.
It's my problem, not their problem, that I see death as macabre and tragic.
They see it quite differently.
There is a striking irony in the fact that 500 years after Cortes and the conquistadors arrived, the element of Aztec culture that is most alive is their festival to the goddess of death.
There was no society, whether victim or victor, that emerged from the Age of Exploration unchanged.
Spain, too, was transformed.
Vast amounts of silver and gold seized from the New World made her the richest nation in Europe.
The church justified Spain's conquests on the grounds that they helped spread the Christian message.
But while the Inquisition ruthlessly defended the purity of the Catholic faith, the exchange of ideas and influences was unstoppable.
Spain's aggressive exporting of her culture and her faith to other parts of the world didn't render her immune to the inflow of cultural influences from abroad.
Here in Toledo, the spiritual heart of the Spanish church, cultures met and mixed and, in doing so, some of the very greatest European art of all time was created.
It was the work of a visionary, a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time.
He'd been born in Crete as Domenikos Theotokopoulos, but he was known here in Spain as El Greco - the Greek.
El Greco brought to Spain the traditions of Greek Orthodox art as well as the strange distortions of Italian Mannerism.
But his great achievement was combining those influences in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity of the religious culture of 16th-century Toledo.
In 1596, he began work on a dramatic view of the city.
It's starkly lit, beneath a stormy sky, a vision of a holy citadel where God's authority was made manifest through the Spanish church.
Rising up from the skyline is the spire of Toledo Cathedral.
It was for this Cathedral that El Greco painted one of his greatest masterpieces.
El Greco's painting still hangs in the space for which it was created.
This is the sacristy, where the priests put on their robes before performing mass.
So it's fitting that El Greco chose as his subject the disrobing of Christ.
What we see is the moment just before Christ's clothes are ripped from his body, before the crucifixion.
No other artist more vividly captured Catholic Spain's intense fascination with the brutal horror of Christ's sacrifice.
Now, there's no blood in this painting, but we are symbolically reminded of the violence that's to be done to the body of Christ through the deep, intense red of the robe.
It reminds us that the crucifixion was a blood sacrifice.
A strange echo of the human sacrifices that were at the heart of the religion of the people who Spain had conquered, the Aztecs.
El Greco made Christ's blood sacrifice explicit when he painted his battered, distorted body hanging on the cross.
The bloodstains trailing down towards a view not of the Holy Land, but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish empire.
But Spain's conquests in the New World were not the norm in the 16th century.
They were, in a sense, the exception.
When European explorers first reached the shores of more powerful empires, like India and China, they initially found themselves marginal players.
In Japan, they encountered a feudal society too robust to be conquered.
Although the details are vague, it's believed that the very first Europeans to reach Japan arrived by accident.
They were a group of Portuguese merchants on board a Chinese ship that was driven ashore by a storm around the year 1543.
The Japanese were fascinated by these new arrivals, who they regarded as little more than exotic novelties.
But within just a few years, the Portuguese began to arrive in these waters in their own ships, and from the very beginning it was obvious to them that the Japanese were not a people who they could treat the way the Spanish had treated the Aztecs.
Japan was extremely wealthy, she had an enormous population, a highly sophisticated culture and militarily, she was a formidable power.
This was not a country in which Europeans could even dream of being conquistadors, so the Portuguese instead became Japan's trading partners.
Portuguese traders brought new goods and technologies from every corner of their trading empire.
Though Japan believed firmly in the superiority of her own ancient culture, to begin with at least, she opened her doors to the traders and a whole new art form emerged to depict their arrival.
Folding screens like these were one of the innovations of Japanese art in the 16th century.
They're called Nanban screens because Nanban was the Japanese word for Europeans.
And what it means, rather unflatteringly, is southern barbarians.
Southern because the Portuguese always seemed to arrive in Japan from the south, and that's because they were coming up from their trading bases in India and China, and barbarians because the Japanese were not at all impressed by European standards of hygiene or European table manners.
What these screens tend to show are the great black oceangoing ships of the Portuguese empire, loaded with exotic trading goods.
All of these goods are being lowered onto boats and ferried ashore, and then they're being taken on almost a ceremonial procession through the town.
Now, the Japanese artists who produced these screens were very careful to pick out the most exotic and the most valuable products.
Here is a folding Chinese chair of huge value.
There's exotic animals, rare or unknown to the Japanese, being brought ashore in cages.
But just as exotic and just as exciting as any of these goods are the people coming off these Portuguese ships.
Africans, both free and enslaved, but there's also Indians, there's Malays, there's Arabs.
Almost like a mirror image of the Aztec Florentine Codex, these Nanban screens show us how a host nation recorded the arrival of visitors.
Except here it's very firmly on the terms of that host nation.
But there's also a hint here that Japan's perception of the newcomers as relatively harmless was about to change radically.
New arrivals are greeted by Jesuit missionaries, who had come to Japan not to trade, but to save souls.
By 1600, European missionaries had won nearly a quarter of a million local converts.
So when a powerful new dynasty took control of Japan, the Tokugawas, they decided to make a stand against this threat to their culture.
They executed converts, exiled the missionaries and banned the Christian faith.
Their change of policy was undoubtedly influenced by reports from the New World, where Christian missionaries had tried to obliterate the local religions.
But the Tokugawa warlords, the shoguns, went much further.
They sealed Japan off from the outside world, attempting to turn it into a closed society.
Almost all foreigners, not just the missionaries, were ejected, and Japanese people themselves were prevented from travelling abroad.
The shoguns then promoted a sort of Japanese cultural renaissance, one that looked not outwards to other civilisations, but inwards, to Japan's own cultural traditions.
And they used Japan's artistic traditions as a way of tightening their grip on power and creating a new sense of what it meant to be Japanese.
The shoguns promoted Japan's older religions, in particular the Zen school of Buddhism, which emphasised self-discipline.
In Buddhist temples, the samurai, the warrior nobles, now studied refined arts .
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the controlled rituals of the tea ceremony, as well as poetry, calligraphy and the business of serving the shogun state.
It is tempting today to look at Japan's long age of isolation and conclude that this country's distinctive culture must have developed in something of a vacuum, but the idea that the Japanese were ever completely isolated is a myth.
It was official policy that Japan should be a closed country, but the Japanese were never completely cut off from the outside world or from the influences and the ideas of other civilisations.
The Japanese became instead the masters of controlled contact, permitting only modest exchanges with a few favoured nations.
Tiny Dejima island in the middle of Nagasaki harbour was home to Dutch merchants, the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan.
The Dutch were tolerated partly because they were far more interested in trade than religious conversion, but also because they willingly bowed the knee to the Shogun, acknowledging him as their master.
This relationship allowed the Dutch to import European innovations in art and science into mainland Japan.
One popular scientific curiosity would have an unexpected impact upon Japanese art.
An optical device which the Japanese called Dutch glasses was at first considered a frivolous western plaything.
When viewed through its convex lens, specially painted landscapes, using European rules of perspective, would appear more three-dimensional.
Especially when compared with the flat, decorative style of Japan's dominant, state-sanctioned school of art.
One painter of Dutch glass landscapes called Maruyama Okyo shrewdly focused on revered Japanese subjects, like the medieval Hollyhock Festival, infusing them with a new sense of depth.
Soon his reputation grew.
Okyo began to win more serious commissions.
On a pair of temple screens, he painted bamboo with more delicately observed naturalism than anything yet seen in Japanese art.
On one side, buffeted by the wind .
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on the other, in the rain, heavily laden and still.
But it was for his masterpiece that Okyo combined everything he knew from both eastern and western traditions in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful of all Japanese works.
It's so subtle, so minimal a work of art that it almost feels like it isn't there, and everything about it feels ephemeral and frail.
It's painted on paper, not canvas as in the west, and great expanses of it are just white, blank areas that seem almost untouched by the artist, and yet all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know.
It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, and these broken, jagged cracks in the ice disappear into the mist.
The effect is three-dimensional space.
Now, that is European vanishing-point perspective, and yet this, one of Okyo's masterworks, just could not be more Japanese, because it's a philosophical contemplation of two concepts fundamental to Buddhism - imperfection and impermanence.
Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular, and impermanence because, of course, the ice will melt.
And those two concepts are just as fundamental to Japanese art as the classical Greek-Roman ideas of beauty and perfection are to European art, so this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art, but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy and Japanese tastes.
This synthesis of east and west was only possible because of the tiny trading bottleneck between Japan and Holland.
Yet from the Dutch point of view, it was just one of many global trading partnerships.
It gave the tiny Dutch Republic an influence that was way out of proportion with its size.
Dutch merchants grew rich supplying their clients abroad and back home with the goods they wanted, as well as with new and exotic goods they hadn't even known they wanted.
At the very centre of this vast, intercontinental network of trading bases and this web of shipping routes lay the city of Amsterdam.
In the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, Amsterdam was one enormous market - everything and anything was being bought and sold here.
When the French philosopher Descartes arrived in the 1630s, he described it as a city where all of the commodities and all of the curiosities that one could wish for could be bought.
So, whereas the Japanese had tried to block out the wider world, their Dutch trading partners couldn't get enough of it.
In Amsterdam, the Republic's wealthy merchants built their grand, canalside villas and filled them with the fruits of global trade.
Blue and white Chinese pottery.
Japanese lacquerware, shipped from Nagasaki.
Their fine clothes were made of silk from Persia.
Their exquisite tableware, crafted from New World gold and silver .
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or exotic shells and coconuts.
And to serve the Dutch their fine wines, enslaved African boys, who became one of the great fashions of the age among the rich.
Amsterdam was the testing ground for modern capitalism.
Through its stock exchange, the Dutch East India Company became the world's first publicly traded company.
Now anyone could own shares in Holland's global enterprise.
And in this frenzy of moneymaking, Dutch art too was commodified.
The modern art market was born, supplying whatever subjects the new, aspirational merchant class wanted.
And what they wanted in their art was not the pomp of monarchy or the flamboyance of the Catholic faith.
Instead, they wanted to see a reflection of themselves.
Proud republicans, who had worked hard for the new wealth they enjoyed.
As ordinary Dutch citizens went about their ordinary lives, it's difficult to know how connected they felt to their overseas empire.
While thousands of men and women set sail with the Dutch trading companies to seek their fortunes abroad, most never left their native soil.
As far as we know, the artist Jan Vermeer hardly ventured further than the small, Dutch city of Delft.
Vermeer is not an artist known for wide horizons.
Most of his paintings are famously intimate.
They're set within the neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.
What Jan Vermeer specialised in was the art of everyday life.
And his world was an interior world.
What he captured on canvas was simple, fleeting moments.
A young girl laughing when an officer leans towards her.
A woman reading a letter by an open window.
Another woman in the middle of a music lesson.
And each of those scenes is bathed in a delicate light that pours in from a side window.
But that only serves to emphasise the fact that we're in an enclosed room, and that the rest of the world is hidden from sight, that it's somewhere out there.
But if you look a little more closely at the details, at the objects that have been placed on the tables, at the maps that hang on the walls, what you realise is that Vermeer's seemingly interior, domestic space is infused with the globalism of the Dutch golden age.
You see it in the Chinese pottery that the artisans of Delft learned to copy.
And on the rugs from the Orient that were highly regarded.
A hat made from North American beaver fur.
A geographer, wearing a fashionable Japanese robe, pores over his charts.
There's a globe perched on his cupboard.
Though Vermeer never shows us the view out of the window, he constantly hints at the rich, complex universe that lies beyond.
While Vermeer's window offers us glimpses of the wider world, another artist takes us through that window on a journey of discovery.
The name Maria Sibylla Merian is now largely forgotten.
Yet she was one of the greatest biologists of her time.
As a German immigrant to Amsterdam, she benefited from its freedoms, in particular its freedoms for women.
In Amsterdam, she was able to promote her ground-breaking studies of insects and their life cycles, illustrated with exquisite works of art.
At the time, many people believe that insects emerged fully formed, spontaneously, from the Earth.
That somehow they were born out of the mud.
But Maria explained and painted their life cycle.
Their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
She not only explained that process, she showed which plant species each butterfly species was dependent upon.
This book revolutionised the study of insects in Europe.
But it also helped Maria raise the funds to embark upon a journey to study the more exotic creatures that she knew she would find in the tropical regions of the Dutch empire.
Seduced, like so many others, by the Dutch Republic's connections to faraway lands .
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in 1699, Maria Sibylla set sail for South America and the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the tropical Caribbean coast.
Maria Sibylla spent two years exploring Suriname, sketching and painting local plants and animals.
Many of them were previously unknown to Europeans.
Her work encapsulates the spirit of curiosity that helped fuel the scientific revolution.
Just like the Dutch in Japan, the story of the British in India began with their merchants operating very much on the margins .
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obliged to flatter the local princes and the Mughal emperors who ruled then.
But this story would mark a profound shift from the age of discovery to a new, 19th-century age, where Europe's imperial ambitions came to dominate the globe.
That shift from trade to rule was captured in the work of two artists from different sides of the encounter.
Ghulam Ali Khan, resident painter in the royal court of India's Mughal dynasty .
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and Johan Zoffany, who came to India after making his name painting for the British royal court.
For German-born Zoffany, India was an escape and a chance for a fresh start.
In Britain, he'd wrecked his glittering career by offending the royal family with his cavalier approach to a royal commission.
In 1783, he arrived in Kolkata, the main trading post of the British East India Company.
Zoffany's come here to rebuild his career and to make some money.
He's not exactly fallen on hard times, but he's alienated a swathe of London society.
So this is a place where he can make a lot of money.
That's what he's here to do.
He's described by a contemporary of setting out to come to India to roll in gold dust.
Fortunes are being made, everybody in London knows that huge amounts of money are being made here.
And that this is a place where you can start again.
You can rewrite your story.
Within a year of his arrival, Zoffany produced one of the most astonishing insights into the early relationship between the British traders and their Indian clients.
This is a painting that depicts an event that actually took place.
A cockfight organised by Colonel John Mordaunt of the East India Company, in 1784, in the city of Lucknow for his client, the Nawab of Oudh - two men who were almost living metaphors for what was happening in India in the late 18th century.
Colonel John Mordaunt was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat.
He was a man on the make, trying to build his fortune.
The Nawab of Oudh was a playboy.
He'd already signed away much of his authority and some of his wealth to the East India Company.
And Zoffany hints at the direction that he thinks the relationship between the British and the Nawab is heading, by the fact that he has the British cockerel on the verge of killing the Indian bird.
The painting is full of little, subversive details.
There's gambling.
The men are trying to seduce the women.
There is a British redcoat, right on the edge of frame, slinking off into the distance with his Indian mistress.
This is the British and the Indians, enjoying one another's company.
Socialising, interacting together in easy informality.
What there is no hint of whatsoever, in this painting, is the sort of deeply distrustful and highly racialised relationship that was going to develop between the British and the Indians later on in the 19th century.
By 1800, India was a land in transition.
As dissent and poor leadership had eroded the Mughal dynasty's power, the British East India Company had wasted no time in increasing its influence.
On the throne in Delhi sat the blind puppet emperor Shah Alam, described by one poet as merely a chessboard king.
Yet he was heir to a lavish court, and a centuries-old tradition of Mughal art, painted in vivid, jewel-like colours.
To this court came William Fraser, a young, Scottish representative of the East India Company.
Fraser was not himself a painter, but a patron of art.
And though he was surrounded by the decaying remains of a royal city in decline, he was also dazzled by the art, the poetry and, above all, the people of Delhi.
The more Fraser learned about the culture around him, the more he himself changed.
He began to wear Indian clothes.
He grew his beard in an Indian style and he fathered children with Indian women.
He had, in the parlance of the day, gone native.
Fraser was one of several company men who commissioned Indian artists to document the country's rich, complex culture.
Known as company paintings, they depict scenes and characters from every level of Indian society.
It is not quite clear how we should view this art.
Because we often see it through a very British and rather colonial point of view.
The fact that we call these works company paintings gives the impression that it was an entirely new genre that was invented by company men, like William Fraser.
But the real inventors were the Indian artists themselves.
And the greatest of them all was the celebrated Ghulam Ali Khan.
Ghulam Ali Khan was not just a master painter, he was part of a long tradition of Mughal artists.
And he was one of the few who signed his own work.
He was the patriarch of a school of painters.
But he was also the member of a family that, for centuries, had proudly served as painters to the Mughal court.
The impoverished Mughals could no longer afford the services of Ghulam Ali Khan.
So he offered his skills not only to the British, but others too.
He combined Mughal and European painting traditions to depict an astonishing range of subjects.
A portrait of the eminent Colonel James Skinner - a mixed-race, Anglo-Indian offspring of the two cultures.
Commissions from regional rulers, like the Nawab of Jhajjar, who now answered not to the Emperor, but to the British.
And he painted many of India's great architectural treasures, capturing the life of the country at that last moment, just before British rule changed it for ever.
The signs of Britain's shifting relationship with India were already emerging.
A new choice of architecture made it clear that company men were no longer content simply to pursue profit.
When the company's Governor general commissioned his new Kolkata headquarters, it was obvious he saw himself as an empire builder.
Government House was completed in 1803, designed with no regard whatsoever for the spectacular architecture of the Indian traditions.
Instead, its creators turned to the reference books which they had brought with them from their mother country.
These are published plans and architectural drawings of the finest stately homes in Britain.
And what you get from books like this is a picture of Britain at the height of the neoclassical revival - the age when Greek and Roman designs were the height of taste and fashion.
Government House was based on an aristocratic English mansion - Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire.
Its wings, corridors, columns and porticos were transplanted onto the subcontinent.
To build stately homes like this in the British countryside merely said that the families that lived there were people of education and taste and respectability.
To build an enormous, neoclassical palace on Indian soil said something completely different.
What this building was intended to say was that European reason and rationality was superior and had triumphed over what the British increasingly regarded as Oriental superstition and despotism.
This building is political theatre.
It is shock and awe in marble and stucco.
Other British neoclassical buildings soon followed, changing the face of Kolkata.
From church to town hall, bank to Post Office.
These were not just the buildings, they were evidence that one age had passed and another had begun.
The age of European global domination.
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call .
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or go to the address on screen and follow the links for the Open University.