`There has been no end of serendipities," writes John Wills, recounting the many happy accidents that accompanied his research for this global history of a single year. His book opens on January 3rd, 1688, as the sun rises over Edo, the great capital city of Japan's hereditary military dictators, and closes early on December 23rd, as James II decides to call it a day and slips away to France, leaving his kingdom to his nephew and son-in-law, William III. In between, Wills takes us on an immensely stimulating journey of discovery around the world: moving from Edo to Manila, to Ambon, Mindanao, and landfall in north-western Australia (where William Dampier is studying the powerful tide races), then on to Beijing (where the Flemish Jesuit, Father Ferdinand Verbeist, to universal mourning, has just died) and to Moscow (where the Scots Catholic general, Patrick Gordon, is homesick); a brief rest, then on to Ayutthaya, capital of Siam (where a Greek adventurer is in charge), to Hyderabad, to the Cape of Good Hope, Kongo, Dahomey, to Sonora (where another Jesuit, Father Kino, prays for rain in the desert), to Mexico city (where Sor Juan Ines de la Cruz is pining for her departed friend/lover?), and so on to the silver mines in Potosi, then on to Belgrade, Algiers, Hamburg, London and to Venice (where Father Coronelli has begun to sell his globes by installment). This is the historian as Phileas Fogg and the world as the Serendipity National Park.
In each location - though given the large number of clerical witnesses, visitation might be more appropriate - Wills displays a happy knack of hitting on the telling story, anecdote or event, the recounting or elucidation of which helps illustrate his central theme of a world on the threshold of modernity. For this book is no mere terrestrial text for time-travellers: Wills is well aware of those overlapping transnational intellectual worlds that will shape the future - the republics of science, of Newton and Leibniz, and of letters, of John Locke and Aphra Behn - and these spheres receive due attention.
By 1688, the "west" was moving inexorably and decisively, if surprisingly, ahead of the "east" in terms of the mobilisation of firepower at sea and on land, and in the application of science. Western curiosity, intrepidity, ruthlessness and greed would prove powerful and complementary impulses in the establishment of western control over the east: 1688 was probably the last year when the "triumph of the west" was in any doubt.
On a different level, it is the stories of the individual witnesses which bring this book to life. In March 1688, the writer Ihara Saikaku published The Japanese Family Storehouse, a sort of eastern Mrs Beeton's Household Management: this was a marked departure from his previous work, The Life of an Amorous Man, in which he detailed his dalliances with some 3,742 women and 725 young men (there is no Mrs Beeton equivalent). We are not told which was the better seller. Around the same time, in Siam, Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek adventurer in the employ of the East India company, set on foot intrigues with the court of Louis XIV to extend French influence in the Indian ocean: the result was predictable. Riding high in April, Phaulkon was shot down in May, or rather he was beheaded on June 4th. Meanwhile, Verbeist's obsequies in Beijing were well under way. He was one of a series of remarkable Jesuits who proved expert at the very delicate art of using science, technology and secular learning in the service of the Chinese imperial court in order to negotiate a space of tacit tolerance for Christian missionary activity in the empire. As befits a historian of China, and the western impact on that empire, Wills is an excellent guide to their mission to the east. He is also alert to the irony that the detailed reports of Verbeist and those of his Jesuit confreres on Chinese ways and the customs of the east formed, in Voltaire's hands, key elements in the Enlightenment's devastating critique of the Jesuits and the Christian religion.
This is by no means the first history of a single year. There have been books on 1914, and 1939, and some 30 years ago, that fine historian, Raymond Postgate, published separate volumes on 1798 and 1848. In these works, Postgate devoted quite an amount of space to Ireland and Irish affairs; but beyond a few lines on the siege of Derry, Ireland does not figure much in Wills's book (and it's not because it's still 1688 here). Perhaps Wills could be persuaded to turn his attention to 1690? What's another year?
Tom Bartlett is professor of modern Irish history at UCD