In Vermeer’s Hat, Vermeer depicts Shanghai …show more content…
More people were engaging in transactions with people whose languages they did not know and whose cultures they have 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. With second contacts, the dynamic of encounter changes. Interactions become more sustained and likelier to be repeated. They induce a thorough transformation of everyday practices, an effect that Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz has called "transculturation." 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 …show more content…
Also the captain got his command from a merchant or group of merchants who owned the ship and financed the voyage. And the captain’s power depended first and foremost on a connection to capitalists. Merchants spelled out how the captain was to proceed, when and where he was to sail, and how he was to conduct business as the delegated agent of the merchant. Thirdly, the primary purposes of the sailor’s work were to keep a vigilant watch and to preserve the new human property of his captain and shipowner. Lastly, the enslaved people were classified as prisoners of war, some were convicts, some were born slaves in Africa and had been sold, and some had simply been kidnapped, most of them had come great distances from the interior of the Windward Coast. They were treated brutally with frequent intimidation and terror. Here they would be fed twice a day, their meals made of horse beans, peas, and rice with a little salt meat mixed in. Slave trade, slavery, and the racism they spawned, joined by allies in a broader struggle to end the violence and terror that have always been central to the rise and continuing operation of capitalism. This mobilization would intensify a less-formal kind of brawl between classes, over maritime labor power, between royal officials, magistrates, merchants, captains, and officers on the one side, sailors on the other. Another aspect