Wills Jr. John E. 1688: A Global History

W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. — 352 p.The Shogun of Japan is cracking down on the samurai, and is obsessed with cruelty to dogs. A very young Peter the Great is just about to launch his coup d'état and transform Russia. In France, the Sun King rules over a court of unprecedented splendour and ceremonial formality. A Spanish viceroy is leaving Mexico for home, lauded in a baroque poem by Sor Juana, the greatest female poet of Latin America, a nun who may be the lover of the Viceroy's wife. In the Sonora desert of North America, a Jesuit priest and his tribe of Pima Indian converts are cultivating the land, and are about to discover that the land across the bay is not an island but a part of the same continent. It will be called California. In Manila, meanwhile, there is a pogrom against the non-Christian Chinese. The lieutenant-governor of Jamaica dies. He is Henry Morgan, the most notorious pirate of the age.
John E. Wills's masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice of the haiku poet Basho. Witness the splendor of the Chinese imperial court as the Kangxi emperor publicly mourns the death of his grandmother and shrewdly consolidates his power. Join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca. Walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam and enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labored to produce powdered brazilwood for the dyeworks. Through these stories and many others, Wills paints a detailed picture of how the global connections of power, money, and belief were beginning to lend the world its modern form